As somebody who doesn't care too much about games/HW/etc (I just like it.. when it's cheap and when it works, and when it doesn't require too much of pampering; break any of those, and off I go to rather to some good book, meal or forest walk)... I find funny how deep some of you go on this.
Amynue: whoever is f##ked because new tech is 2Q late should feel extremely f##ked, and we can cheer on that, because pricks feeling f##ked is generally good thing. They are born for that reason... I think. Seriously: I would be much more afraid of the consumer version being rushed and low quality than waiting another year for it. Your tone is similar to the thing which partly drove me away from game dev biz.. gamers want it all, now, and even then they bitch about it. Ideally over pirated version, as a pure bonus to the insult receiver.
And that guy telling the VR is the "thing" thanks to Oculus, he's right. Get before the kickstarter event, erase Oculus, and Vive would be at least 10% worse product in every aspect, in price probably 100% worse, whatever it will be. Oculus was pushing on the edge, and publicly, so it for sure gave lot of inspiration to the internal valve/sony/... VR teams. The VR is not a new thing, the head sets were available for a decade. Oculus was first to give a hope that this time they will finally "work" for almost everyone. And that has still to be proven by CV1 sales...
From consumer point of view Rift can't be dead. It was not even released yet. It's nice the insiders are already on the next thing and stuff, but don't think consumers will follow that fast. Just put both (rift vs vive) boxes on the shelf in market, and most of the customers will take the cheaper one, most of the rest will go by "gut feeling" or reviews from their fav website, and like 1-5% of people will actually check and understand the technical side and decide by that.
About DirectX API ... as a device developer you should work your ass off to support as much tech/platforms as possible. IMO... I don't get it why they don't open document the low driver stuff, and let the community to build the drivers and libs. Actually that's happening with vive and openVR, valve got it right. DirectX-only way is dead already, because windows is not any more dominant. Half of CPUs sold today work slave under different OS (mostly the ugly android, which I genuinely hate, because I'm programming for it
). If the Oculus doesn't have enough manpower to keep both DX9 and DX11 API working, it's their problem, they are narrowing their market impact. They are sort of lucky that DX11 will cover most of the games right now (but not LFS), but I think the future is sort of bleak, if they keep insisting on this and don't move fast enough. Locking your HW to single API *is* artificial restriction.
Finally, I just hope Scawen doesn't read this babbling in this thread, and works on new version of LFS instead.