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Comment by foxrider | Hacker News Reader

Boneworks certainly takes the cake as my absolute VR title. It beats even Alyx in terms of gameplay alone. Playtime-wise I spent most hours in Elite Dangerous - flying in an HMD adds so much to the game that its hard to put in words how immersed I feel.

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i'm waiting to try Alyx, cause i think the outlay for the hardware alone will be quite large.

any insight into how compatible Valve's Index will be with non-valve games? i don't really wanna drop $2k-$3k to play a single title and have the VR hardware work poorly with other games or become obsolete in 2 months; the pace of state-of-the-art in VR was so rapid, that i didn't want to spend money on anything until some bug-free plateau was reached.

Valve Index will work with any SteamVR game natively, and with a community-maintained wrapper, will work with many Oculus exclusive titles as well.

The Index controllers can do everything other controllers can do + extra stuff. If you play a game that doesn't have finger tracking, that just means you don't get finger tracking. But the controllers themselves work just fine.

There are some games that might not have a good set of bindings for the index controllers by default (something might be bound to "squeeze the grip" when it should be bound to the trigger, for example), but you just open the settings menu (inside VR), click "custom bindings", and then pick the most upvoted community made set of bindings and it just works. Takes a few seconds.

I bought and index and have been driving it with a 2700x and 1060 6gb. Alyx was hands down one of, if not the best gaming experience I’ve ever had. I think the index controllers really take the experience to another level. Being able to pick up things by grabbing them is awesome. The headphones on the index are amazing too, and really help with immersion.

Support with other games is pretty good. I bought a bunch of games during the summer sale, and haven’t found anything unplayable for me. Not all games have full finger tracking, and not all games have the ability to pick things up like you can in Alyx. Some older games have been updated for Alyx style controls, but many control exactly how they did with the Vive.

I tried VR in Linux first, then tried on windows. Windows has better feature support and performance hands down. If you have a better GPU, you might be fine, but the advantages to booting into windows was worth it to me.

Index will work with anything. And vice versa, any headset can play Alyx well. If you're not up for spending all the money, you can mix and match SteamVR controllers/headsets (e.g. old school Vive with the fancier Knuckles Controllers).

Isn't Oculus stuff DRM:ed to Oculus setups only somehow? Through their appstore maybe? Or have I just eaten the FUD to make me believe that

Pretty much every game worth playing is also available on steam or via some other method. If you REALLY want the Oculus stuff there's always Revive. https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive

Thanks

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