RobertLong

I spent quite a bit of time making games/social WebXR stuff in Three.js. There is unfortunately a ceiling to what commercial success you can have there. Sure there's all the .io games which see a bunch of kids playing games from their school computers, but as much as I'd like to see it, web games aren't going to be as impressive as native PC/Console games. It's not really technology, mostly just the market isn't there.

The models are pretty decent at building simple Three.js/Phaser games, but if you want to work with Unity/Unreal/Godot you're going to need a MCP or other tool to get them to work with the engine's tooling/context. I just so happen to work on one for Unity https://bezi.com

I will say, while I think the current models are very impressive with generating code for most game mechanics. They are still terrible at spatial awareness. Gemini Pro 3.1 is showing some promise here, the latest Opus/Sonnet models are...ok. But there's still a lot left to be desired. You also still really need to know how to make games both creatively and technically to pull off prompting a game into existence.

So are you going to vibecode your way to the next SimCity / Civ without knowing some game dev? Probably not right now and I think that's for the best. People want games that are creative and unique. But a passionate hobbyist who has never made a game, knows some programming, and has a vision for a great game now has an amazing tool set to build their dream game and that's pretty cool!

This ends up reading files into node.js and then running a command like grep but implemented in JS. I love the concept but isn’t this incredibly slow compared to native cli tools? Building everything in JS on top of just readFile and writeFile interfaces seems pretty limited in what you can do for performance.

I've been staying on iOS 17 and macOS 15 because I just don't see iOS/macOS 26 as an upgrade in any way. This is the first time I haven't been running a beta or getting a day one upgrade for Apple operating systems. I can't imagine moving away from iPhone or a MacBook, however if they want to avoid OS fragmentation and security issues caused by users like me refusing to upgrade, 27 better address these UX and stability issues.

All the AI labs are but Anthropic is the worst. Anyone serious about running Claude in prod is using Bedrock or Vertex. We've been pretty happy with Vertex.

Try updating your Synapse to 1.62 or higher. We added a header to files downloaded from the media repository so they can work on sites using SharedArrayBuffer. Unrelated, but you'll also want to make sure you have a TURN server set up and your media repo upload limit is set to something reasonably high like 100MB.

Ah, yeah what's happened with VRChat is a shame. I don't think we're building the same thing though. We'd like to go far beyond social 3D chat, that may be what it looks like right now, but our aspirations are towards building an open platform for publishing and hosting your own events, experiences, games, and applications. There's a much larger audience for that on desktop.

1. Thanks! I think we can play with the falloff a bit, but yeah I think so too.

2. Agreed, we erred on the side of caution for this release and made a bunch of public rooms since our per-room cap isn't super high while were still doing P2P WebRTC networking. We may dial this back to just one public room per environment.

3. It is! That first box where you select your homeserver can be typed in and you can put your own homeserver in there. Third Room is the first Matrix client using OpenID Connect which will avoid the whole issue entering your password on someone else's site, but we're still not quite at the point where just anyone can add it to their own homeserver. Hopefully very soon!

Yeah, curious why the next two months? We're definitely going to be implementing the VRM avatar format fairly soon, but not VR just yet. There are plenty of unsolved problems on desktop where there's a much larger user base. And we also still have mobile design and optimization to work on. I've worked on AltspaceVR and Mozilla Hubs and as much as I love VR, especially WebXR, it's still a relatively small market. We will support WebXR, but it's not our top priority right now.

Given some of the constraints of the immersive web currently, Matrix can provide some critical pieces of that user experience. Third Room worlds are Matrix rooms hosted across homeservers. You log in with your preferred client. You can now traverse worlds seamlessly without losing your virtual identity. This can even extend to WebXR where currently you can't traverse across origins while in the headset.

Seamless interoperability is what the "metaverse" is all about and we want to work with people who want that as well.

As one of the chairs of the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group and a member of the Metaverse Standards Forum, "metaverse" is a term with a ton of baggage and not one we really like to use internally at Matrix. However, it's also the one people know the most right now :( Multi-user interoperable virtual worlds doesn't quite flow off the tongue and immersive-web or wider-web haven't really caught on outside a developer audience. Maybe cyberspace will make a comeback?

Also, more importantly we don't believe in "a metaverse" in the same way we don't say "an internet". There's only one "metaverse". Open and interoperable should be baked into the definition. Matrix can play one part of it.

Also if you want to dive into more of the engineering bits, I've been sharing a bunch of technical info on our renderer and asset pipeline here:

https://twitter.com/arobertlong/status/1574824795216101376

Hey I'm one of the three devs working on Third Room. Really excited to finally be showing off our hard work!

To clear things up a bit. Our tiny team isn't taking away from the development going on with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem. In fact, we're helping build out a bunch of really important pieces. When I started I helped build out Element Call and our full mesh VoIP stack that's now being built into Element natively. Our team has also been helping with Hydrogen's VoIP implementation and OpenID Connect authentication. As we progress further we'll be able to help in scaling up VoIP performance with our cascading SFU architecture.

We've been working on this project since February and we're pretty excited with the progress so far! We believe Matrix has the opportunity to play a critical role in this emerging space and can do so without distracting from its core mission of enabling open, decentralized messaging for everyone.

Yup, MSC3401 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3401

We're also working on the Third Room project which has virtual worlds with 3D positional audio built on top of the same tech as Element Call. It's still very early, but the project is up here: https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom

Pretty excited for this to finally be shipping! After years of fighting with WebGL performance and lack of features it'll be nice to move beyond features available on most platforms for around 15 years. Looking forward to being able to use these APIs directly from WASM in the future.

What KVM are you using that has gsync and 144Hz support? I couldn't find one last time I looked. I'm running an Alienware 3418DW and have video switching through the monitor and a separate USB 3.0 switch.

I hope someone roots it. I'm offering a $5k bounty https://twitter.com/arobertlong/status/1316177057085177857

Wow, definitely post more info on this if you can. I had no idea about this. I want to take the class, but can't shell out $3000 for a side project.

Yeah, you've basically done all the hard work. I just ordered a batch of these to see if I can get it working. I've been wanting to hack on this since they came out. Thanks for the inspiration!

Correct, it's only going to give you a signal "upon incident light from an IR source once the threshold level for light intensity has been exceeded"[0].

What you are getting in this chip is all of the work Valve and Triad have done in improving the accuracy of that envelope signal. Essentially, the accuracy in the timing of that signal == the accuracy of the position. There's a really good talk from Steam Dev Days[1] (that I was fortunate enough to attend) that gives a good overview of all the work that has gone into SteamVR tracking.

[0] https://www.triadsemi.com/download/16617/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3wKLZHH_dM

This is awesome!

Curious what your thoughts are on this vs one of the official SteamVR tracking modules[1] which use the TS3633[2]? For $10 this is an awesome hack for off the shelf components. However, for $70 + Shipping you can pick up 10 of the tracking modules which filter out noise and do accurate envelope calculation.

[1] https://www.triadsemi.com/product/ts3633-cm1/

[2] https://www.triadsemi.com/product/ts3633/

I really thought this was going to be my favorite yet evil puzzle game Blackbox. http://blackboxpuzzles.com/

Web developer from Layer here, glad you enjoyed it! It was the perfect fit and typer made it simple to implement. Thank you to the LayerVault team!

dang I'm aware of that. I'll make sure we make that more clear to anyone we share the link to. I love this community and the quality of all the posts. Sorry for the trouble.

I'm glad the downvote system exists but, what happens if it's the only entry for a command?

# Cleans malware from system sudo rm -rf /

        bro thanks 4    to upvote (1)
        bro ...no 4     to downvote (9)

I agree this would be awesome. Google hangouts has a collaborative editor app but, getting everyone set up is a hassle. This app is much easier.

So, where can I get some graphite oxide? This looks easier than 3D printing.

My brother and his team are a bunch of 16-17 year olds who found each other on a forum a couple years back. Over the past couple months they have built this game from scratch with their own engine and graphics. A few are in the US and a few in the UK and many have never met aside from Skype calls.

It's really exciting to see what these guys are doing and I wish them the best of luck!

I currently use PHP and ZendFramework at a startup that I'm working at right now. However, I definitely think the workflow could use some work and that combined with my aspirations to be a well rounded web developer has led me towards other web frameworks.

I currently love the startup atmosphere and don't plan to ever work for a large corporation. Do you think that there is any place for Play Framework in the startup scene?

For example if myself and a couple excellent Java programmers from my school tried to apply to an incubator, would we be taken seriously or written off immediately just because we picked Java for our language of choice?

I've been trying to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the past 6 months. I've gone through tryruby.com, rails for zombies, watched many of the RailsCasts, and built a couple apps on my own to learn the language, but I still consider myself a novice.

Sure I can implement many gems into my application and just hack together other peoples work, but I really am gaining no knowledge of the Ruby behind all these gems and have no clue what the best practices for Rails are.

Online materials for Ruby and Rails are always made for different versions of the languages/frameworks and that can make things very complicated at times for someone just starting out.

So what do you recommend to REALLY learn Ruby and Rails?