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Comment by hanswannop | Hacker News Reader

Lead Developer here, for those curious there is a great video on the inner workings of the project’s volumetric video here. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FjbngDVdL6s

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That's really cool to test new grounds with this game. It's only appropriate since it was one of the first CD-ROM hits, one of the first real-world examples of 3d studio (DOS) usage, and of course amazing video compression by Graeme Devine.

Could you share more about your experience with AVV and how involved Arcturus was in the development process?

And this might be out of scope, but while their Holo tooling scales VV to commodity hardware, did it also reduce overhead in your capture to asset pipeline?

This is one of those silent pivotal advancements, and I can only imagine how cool it must have been for you.

The AVV technology and Holomesh are developed by Arcturus. During the technology’s development there was close collaboration between Vertigo Games Rotterdam (who initiated the project with Trilobyte and handled the creative aspects - design, art, music and video production), Arcturus and my employer Exkee, where we handled the technical/code side of things. Vertigo could speak more to the capture and production side of things. On the tech side Arcturus were wonderful to work with. We couldn’t have done it without them, and I am excited to see where things go next.

Really excited to play this, the made for VR puzzles look great! I hope that VR creates a bit of a renaissance for adventure games, they just fit so perfectly with the immersive nature of VR and interactive puzzles are so satisfying to do with your "hands". Did you invent any novel mechanics for the puzzles?

Thanks, and agreed! VR is great for adventure games! There are a broad range of puzzles and I certainly don’t want to spoil anything. There was an ambition to give a uncommon level of physical responsiveness between your hands and the world. This presented a great technical challenge, and I’m proud of work the team has done there.

Have you addressed the Slime Go issue, where having a faster processor makes the game practically unwinnable?

I tried replaying the original using dosbox and everything was fine until that. I spent over an hour trying to beat it and ultimately had to use a program specifically written to beat that game to beat it, whereas when I was a kid playing it on our old family computer I beat it easily on the first go.

Can confirm, there is no Slime Go issue here :) If you are looking to play the original, the 25th Anniversary edition also avoids this problem and is available on PC, Switch and iOS.

As someone who played the "The Room" series, including the VR title, this looks really interesting to me. Could you maybe share if the game features any jumpscares?

A concrete answer on this would be too far into the spoiler zone. In my personal opinion the overall tone is very faithful to the original, and I think a broad range of players should be able to enjoy it.

Wow, this looks amazing. I am super excited to play it. I have a pretty beefy PC. Is there any benefit in playing it on steam and streaming to my quest, or is the quest native as high quality?

I’m happy to say that I have trouble recommending one version over another. We’ve optimised the experience for each one. Your PC in all likelyhood has more raw horsepower, which we do use in various ways. But the Quest version comes with its own advantages in terms of autonomy and ease of use, the Quest 3 especially is a great piece of hardware that I’m excited for more people to get their hands on.

Of course standalone is easier. But if you have a quest 3, would you get the best experience with streaming the PC version? Or are the graphics kinda the same?

I have a quest 3 and 4090. I prefer playing on the quest itself however if the PC version looks better I'd use that. Hence the question (though I'm not the person who asked first)

There are a couple answers in this interview with the game’s director, Paul van der Meer, and art director, Jeroen Backx that might help you make up your mind on this.

https://www.heypoorplayer.com/2023/10/11/the-7th-guest-vr-an...

Thanks - that makes it clear that the PC definition is definitive. Ill get that and stream to my quest :)

Thanks that's clear! I'll get the PC version. After all I'm lucky to have a 4090. I think I would prefer the more atmospheric realistic look.

Is this fully faithful to the original in terms of puzzles? From what I remember the puzzles are pretty outdated, but it’s been a while since I’ve played it.

There is an almost entirely new set of puzzles, built from the ground up for VR, with many nods to the original.

Ah that’s great to hear!!! I unfortunately don’t have access to VR but that’s going to be at the top of my list when I do.

Hoi Hans, nice to meet you here... Interesting... I have not looked into depth, but this uses newly recorded material?

Note: The page at the moment does not load...

Thanks for letting me know, this is being escalated. For now the launch trailer can be seen here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jsuDYswhtaE

Yes, all newly recorded material! As noted by Keyframe below, the video quality and compression tech was very impressive 30 years ago, we wanted to try to deliver something equally new in 2023.

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