The Official Blog of Patcoola

June 18th, 2019

Use your Oculus with Steam

Did you know, you can use your Oculus Rift with Steam. When you first try to run SteamVR or a VR game from Steam with your Oculus you will be blocked. This is not because Oculus is anti-competition, it’s because Steam is a different system. Oculus will block any application (app) or game that is not from the Oculus store by default. This is primarily for quality control and safety. The Oculus requires the use of the Oculus software/store to operate. Steam uses a variant of OpenVR. Although Oculus and Steam are different, Oculus can detect and add your SteamVR apps/games to your library for quick access. Enable running apps from an unknown source to use SteamVR.

May 11th, 2019

It’s not about Pong, it’s about what comes from Pong.

Game engines has really spoiled us developers, turning Pong into a 30 minute task. However, that doesn’t mean you have created Pong the right way. Back when Adobe Flash was popular; Flash presented a development environment that lead to many poor development practices. I took a step back and went back to basics. I took a calculated approach to recreating Pong. In fact I believe I did it a bit better. I added the paddle behavior from Brick Breaker and added perspective. Now the doors for many more game mechanics has opened.

April 20th, 2019

Change has came!

I jump into the sky with confidence and pride. The blog’s big redesign took about three weeks and is finally here. The new blog features full responsive design. Updated top pages with new menus and some new headline graphics. Social graph cards have been implemented. Google Ads have been restored with full policy compliance. Best of all, the blog was re-branded to be about myself and to feature my cartoon alter ego. I hope everyone likes it, or not I don’t really care.

February 15th, 2019

Rocksmith Songs jumps ship to its own blog/site today (Feb 15, 2019). The new dedicated search engine allows visitors to easily find and discover music featured with the Rocksmith games. Visitors can search for songs, artists, packs, as well as watch music videos, rifts, and read song lyrics.

https://blogs.tigarus.com/rocksmithsongs/

Development of the new blog was a huge undertaking. Today Rocksmith has 1350 songs, 526 bands, and 326 packs. Almost 5000 pages was created for the new blog. The original database was almost completely redesigned from a simple list to a full relationship structure, and was given a complete audit. 541 artists have had a poster created for their own artist page. Needless to say, the new site was designed for easy of use. I hope everybody likes it.