It has been a while since we’ve reported on updates on BigScreen since its release almost a year ago, but that does not mean the team at BigScreen Inc have not been busy. The social app, available for free on Oculus Home and Steam allows a desktop to be viewed as a giant screens in a virtual environment, allowing you to work, play videogames or watch videos on Netflix, YouTube or Twitch has been given a ‘huge’ new update as revealed on Reddit by one of BigScreen‘s developers Darshan Shankar.
Shankar, though noting that the update does not add any new features to BigScreen, does confirm a number of significant performance changes some of which had been “silently causing major performance issues” that had been plaguing users – and particularly those who used the Oculus Rift in combination with the app. The update is a stepping stone towards a summertime release of version 1.0, confirmed by Shankar, which seemingly spells the end of it’s period in Beta. 1.0 will be “will be bug-free, high performance, and full of great features”, Shankar assures.
The patch notes are as follows:
- Major performance bug fixes.
- Fixed a memory leak inixed crashes in Multiplayer view caused by that memory leak.
- Fixed bug where BigScreen wouldn’t exit cleanly by the memory leak.
This resulted in the need to force kill the app via Task Manager. - Fixed Asynchronous Spacewarp / reprojection issue.
ASW always-on caused virtual screen to appear to “tear” and visually glitch, and it cost even more CPU to interpolate the frames (temporary) patch for horrible performance caused by the BigScreen virtual keyboard. - Fixed several items that caused crashes.
- Removed some inefficient code elements.
Additional targets for the development team were also identified in the post, which confirms overhauling multiplayer streaming to provide flawless and optimised HD viewing and well as improvements to the audio.
VRFocus will bring you new of when these updates drop and any further news on the version 1.0 release of BigScreen as the developers release it.