At a glance
- Meta Quest 3: I picked up a meta quest 3 headset and had a blast with it so far! I have some gripes about the amount of content available for it, but overall see a lot of potential in the device.
- NRV Game Dev Interest Group: I hosted my first meeting for the game dev interest group and was able to meet two cool people: Bob and David. I’d say that the get together was a a success and I look forward to the next event and having more discussions about game development with them.
- Lonnies Fishtank: I finally finished getting the animations and dynamic bones implemented in the game. My next steps are to refine the walking scene with Lost’s new assets.
- Fire Emblem 3 Houses: I have been enjoying playing fire emblem quite a bit! Compared to persona 5, fire emblem has both an interesting story/characters and good tactical turn based (grid) gameplay.
- Home Server: My updated list of new additions to my home server!
Meta Quest 3
After years of wanting a VR headset I finally picked one up! My first impression of the meta quest 3 was amazing! I have never truly had a VR/MR experience before so it felt mind blowing to use the device and try out some of its games for the first time.
That being said, I was a bit underwhelmed by the amount of interesting games available for the device. Whiles the device is cool and I fully see the potential in it, its current offerings are a bit limited without shelling out even more money for short experiences. It would be impressive to reach baldurs gate level games in VR. Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR could have potential, but it seems like reviews indicate that you have to add tons of mods for it to be performant and not buggy. I did however enjoy my time briefly playing paintball in rec room and the bow and arrow (archery) mechanics in the game also were worth some praise as it felt like I was really in control of drawing out the perfect shot. I am looking forward to playing the free included premium game Batman Arkham Shadow at some point.
In general, what I am most looking forward to is creating my own games on the device. I really feels like a semi-spiritual successor to the Wii in that motion control technology has been greatly advanced here compared to other devices like the Nintendo Switch. I’ve always been a fan of these types of controls and am excited to create new games and document my experience developing them with the device. I even think that a VR version of Lonnie’s Fishtank has potential on this device.
NRV Game Dev Interest Group
This past week I also hosted the first meeting for the NRV GDIG. It was great to meet up with some community meme bets also interest in game design. Bob was very insightful given his experience release 3 games on steam, and it was exciting to hear from David who had travelled to various game conference like PAX East (more game demo oriented) and MAGFest (more music and gaming culture oriented).
In our next official meeting we plant to review an indie game that we all decide to play as a group. Alternatively, I may suggest everyone play a game they’ve been interested in and report back to the group an analysis of the game design and lessons that can be learned from it.
Lonnies Fishtank
Finally I finished adding in the new dynamic bones and animations into Lonnie’s Fishtank. Both of these additions are making the game feel quite great now! Per our new roadmap, I’ll start working on updates to the walking scene and using Lost’s new assets.
Home Server
Now Hosting:
- paperless: starting to use it more for document tracking
- OwnTracks: wayyyy better than Traccar for phone tracking and viewing gps traces of my location
- Probably will remove vikunja as it isn’t quite working well with 2 users
- navidrome: self hosted music streaming
- firefly iii: financial management and expense tracking
- book stack: not using it much yet though
- custom daemon to record video from my ring doorbell: it is a work in progress though
- home assistant: right now it’s good for tracking my utility expenses but I need to hook up more sensors around the house to get full use out of it
- Immich: starting to use it more, will be really to fully transition from Google photos once I get a proper Raid setup on the nas. Im looking at using raid-1 for portability and a low profile nas server with mini itx motherboard
- Gitea: probably the most useful self hosted thing Im running
- Reddit INAT summarized: it has been working great sending me biweekly updates from the subreddit to browse at my leisure
- WireGuard: very easy vpn to let me access my home network away from home
- Remark42: I wanted to setup this commenting system for my blog but have to do a bit more hacking to get it working properly as Im having some issues
- Samba: very easy to use file sharing system so I can access my server files from all other drives on the network; I’ve also upgrade my setup to a 1TB SDD; planning to add my other 1TB HDD to the server as well