Scavenger update & the future of Waltz of the Wizard
Good day fellow Wizards!
We are excited to release the Scavenger Hunt update for PC that includes brand new content, performance improvements and revamped effects. The core of it includes a scavenger hunt where you trace clues and use physical movements to unlock more secrets, an in-world gramophone with music, over 40 new items and more!
An overview of key features is below — but first an announcement…
The future of Waltz of the Wizard — Announcement tease
We have been thrilled with the reception to the Extended Edition of Waltz of the Wizard. Over the past year, in addition to regularly updating Waltz and porting it to all major platforms, we’ve been working on new technologies and content prototypes for high degrees of natural interaction in VR. Some of those experiments have helped us understand what isn’t yet possible, while others have proven what is. First and foremost it’s given us an ability to take our VR content to the next level.
Waltz of the Wizard will grow this year
Because of your response and support of the Extended Edition, we’re excited to share that we have big plans this year for Waltz of the Wizard. We are currently working on expansions that will bring Waltz of the Wizard into deeper realms with more advanced levels of magic and believable reality simulation. The expansions will alter the nature of the experience to the better, but Aldin fans will of course find the same atmosphere and dark humor they’ve come to love, as well as the advanced principles of believable reality design we’ve developed over the years. A big goal for us in Waltz of the Wizard going forward is simulation of magical forces and creating a believable virtual reality where magic is real.
We’ll have more to share in the very near future and we encourage all to join our new Discord community.
Aldin Community Discord (with future perks!)
How far we can take things depends on what has always been a key for us: Your support and participation. As part of this we’re announcing a new Discord server for Waltz and Aldin related things. We invite anyone interested in helping us forge the future of magic simulation in VR to join in. We are planning a number of opportunities for our community members going forward, including early access to beta testing and responsive support.
PC remains a key VR platform for Aldin
We believe VR offers exceptional ways to bring computing to a more accessible stage with standalone VR, yet we also believe that PC offers the greatest potential for pioneering designs and engaging content for advanced enthusiasts of the medium. Simulation fidelity matters a lot for believable virtual realities and is particularly relevant to us, since Aldin has always been dedicated to innovation and pushing VR towards believable experience of being in an alternate reality. We’ve just barely started seeing what PC VR is capable of and are super excited to take part in continued innovation for greater presence & immersion.
Scavenger Release Overview
Major optimizations
Overall, we’ve spent heaps of effort taking what we’ve learnt developing for Oculus Quest and brought those improvements to PC. Waltz should now run on a broader range of low-end hardware, and on high-end gaming PC’s at higher fidelity than ever before.
Improved visual effects, particles and real-time lighting
Waltz has received big upgrades to particle effects and real-time lighting, giving the world more believable details and more satisfying effects for magic. In addition to real-time lights for things like explosions, you’ll find new layers of reactive particle effects.
Valve Index 144Hz optimizations
Those who follow us will know that we focus heavily on presence and immersion and an important part of that is high refresh rates and believable reaction times. VR is still pretty far from the timescale of reality, but we’re getting closer! Most Valve Index users can now run Waltz of the Wizard natively at 144hz for a stronger perceptual illusion of reality. This is, of course, in addition to the native support of natural hand interactions with Index controllers.
The new graphical options in the settings menu are simplified for low, medium and high — and the lowest setting should enable 144hz for a big portion of low-end hardware. In our internal testing we have run Waltz natively at 144hz on the highest graphical setting on a GTX970 GPU and i7–4790 CPU. We’d love feedback on this so let us know what you think and what hardware you use to run Waltz at 144hz.
Lower end hardware & laptops
With the optimizations we’ve made Waltz of the Wizard should now be able to run on an even broader range of hardware at higher fidelity. For example, although this remains untested, even recent MacBooks should be able to run Waltz of the Wizard using dual-boot with Windows. We would love to hear if you try it on any type of laptop. While the early days of consumer VR weren’t very laptop friendly, we think the optimizations developers have made in recent years along with simplified setup with things like Oculus Quest and Link are making it a more viable option for a certain group of users.
PlayStation VR
The Scavenger update is also releasing on PSVR including optimizations that let the experience run at 90FPS with increased resolution. The update contains all of the goodies of the scavenger hunt and a number of improvements.
