“Identity politics” always seems to mean “I am upset that different people exist.”
This is a nothing option in a video game. Nobody’s rubbing your nose in it. It doesn’t affect you, at all, but it’s a neat little extra for other people. Do you give a shit about other people? Or does the mere possibility of anyone distinct from you, the protagonist of reality, fill you with emotions you can’t handle? There’s no third option, here. It’s a checkbox for how NPCs choose voice lines, in exactly the same way they’ve done for decades. It’s just separate now.
But of course one glance at your profile shows you’re an unapologetic bigot, and what you mean by “gEnDeR iDeOlOgY” is exactly what every other diet Nazi means by it: you hate queer people, and you want it to be their fault.
Network effect creates barriers to new competitors, regardless of quality. Either for the upstarts or the leaders. See: Twitter. Once some choice is the default, anything else faces an uphill battle.
Moderation exists to identify and exclude people who are being absolute cocks.
You don’t need any grand philosophical statement about values. You don’t need to defend the paradox of tolerance against absolutist demands for unrestricted expression. It’s perfectly fine to say: you were doing some diet Nazi shit, that’s awful, fuck off.
Headsets in the thousand-dollar range are plenty good and still not selling. Take the hint. Push costs down. Cut out everything that is not strictly necessary. Less Switch, more Game Boy.
6DOF inside-out tracking is required, but you can get that from one camera and an orientation sensor. Is it easy? Nope. Is it tractable for any of the companies already making headsets? Yes, obviously. People want pick-up-and-go immersion. Lighthouses were infrastructure and Cardboard was not immersive. Proper tracking in 3D space has to Just Work.
Latency is intolerable. Visual quality, scene detail, shader complexity - these are nice back-of-the-box boasts. Instant response time is do-or-die. Some monocular 640x480 toy with rock-solid 1ms latency would feel more real than any ultrawide 4K pancake monstrosity that’s struggling to maintain 10ms.
Two innovations could make this painless.
One, complex lenses are a hack around flat lighting. Get rid of the LCD backlight and use one LED. This simplifies the ray diagram to be nearly trivial. Only the point light source needs to be far from the eye. The panel and its single lens can be right in your face. Or - each lens can be segmented. The pyramid shape of a distant point source gets smaller, and everything gets thinner. At some point the collection of tiny projectors looks like a lightfield, which is what we should pursue anyway.
Two, intermediate representation can guarantee high performance, even if the computer chokes. It is obviously trivial to throw a million colored dots at a screen. Dice up a finished frame into floating paint squares, and an absolute potato can still rotate, scale, and reproject that point-cloud, hundreds of times per second. But flat frames are meant for flat screens. Any movement at all reveals gaps behind everything. So: send point-cloud data, directly. Do “depth peeling.” Don’t do backface culling. Toss the headset a version of the scene that looks okay from anywhere inside a one-meter cube. If that takes longer for the computer to render and transmit… so what? The headset’s dinky chipset can show it more often than your godlike PC, because it’s just doing PS2-era rendering with microsecond-old head-tracking. The game could crash and you’d still be wandering through a frozen moment at 100, 200, 500 Hz.
Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.
This machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.
So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinked throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.
Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.
Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for this bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.
Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.
And screw anyone going ‘but then how money?!’ while it infects billion-dollar business models. There’s no amount of money you can pay, where greedy suits won’t imagine taking your money and selling your eyeballs.