Are you afraid of spiders? (Patreon)

Hey fellas! I have been silent for a while, but in the upcoming days I'm going to positively flood your inbox with posts, to the point that you will probably think "man, I wish he would just shut up already".

Well, if my health permits. I have come down with something that feels suspiciously like COVID. These days it's become really hard to tell it apart from a normal bout of the flu, and even tests are inconclusive, especially in the beginning, but I have been feeling some shortness of breath, which for me is a first, so that makes me wonder.

Anyway, we all know that R.E.A.L. life is messy, so let's head on over to the virtual land, which as you'll see in the livestream from Eurogamer that's starting in about four hours... is pretty messy too, with insect goo splattering all over the place ;-)

EDIT: I'm not sure why the embedded placeholder above is showing the wrong thumbnail (an old Red Matter video), but if you click on it, it should change to the correct countdown ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, the seemingly never-ending work that I undertook during the last few months, in order to make a quality leap on the Alternate Eye Rendering tech that my mods employ, is finally starting to come together. It's not quite ready for public release yet, and in fact you'll see that the preview version of the Grounded mod that I gave to Sir Ian Higton, Knight of the Order of VR Streamers, does not have the new tech yet. Also, I'm not publishing the Grounded mod until next week.

But again, unless I need to be hospitalized (definitely hope that won't be the case), the schedule for this year's end, and for 2023, will be pretty crazy.

AER v2 is in its infancy and still needs a lot of TLC, which means that at least for the moment every game will require some custom tuning to really shine, so I'm thinking that I will roll out the new tech incrementally, alternating old titles and new ones. The first game to ship will probably be FF7R, since it was the one I chose for the teaser video, and also it runs beautifully without a single hitch on my system. Before Dec 31 there will also be the public release for Grounded that hopefully you'll be able to see in the stream above in a few hours, and... yes, of course dear old Spidey, who finally swings the way I want in perfect, ghostless 3D with the new tech.

I know that you're full of questions, so today or tomorrow I'll be writing a technical post explaining why AER v2 is so important, what I already achieved, and how I hope to evolve it from January onwards.

However, let's first have some fun with spiders! And ants, and ladybugs and towering blades of grass! And did I mention giant, horrible SPIDERS!!

I will be in the chat :-)

I'm sure that Ian will cover the following in the livestream, but just in case: the mod has been developed for the PC Game Pass version of the game. It should also work on the Steam version as usual, but this time the Game Pass build is what everybody's got. And if you don't have a subscription, good news: you can get a one-month trial for $1, which means that you'll be able to play online and offline for 30 days basically for free.

Being co-op and not competitive, the game has no anti-cheat protection, so it should be perfectly safe to play online without the risk of getting banned.