Lone Echo (replay)

What is Lone Echo?

Lone Echo is a PC VR space adventure game with quality on par with Halflife Alyx. Created by Ready At Dawn back in 2017 and published by Oculus Studios, it sees you as a robot (Echo Unit) assisting your captain.

As you might expect, something goes wrong and it is your job to find out what.

The amount of detail in this game is something else, even rivalling HL Alyx. What with random items floating about in zero-G you can interact with to sub story subtle clues if you choose to follow them.

Floating about in space should make me sick, but some how the jet propulsion just works and I can grab just about any surface to stop myself. There was one exception, there is a scuba diver jet pack thing you can use to quickly move between large areas. Using that made me sick, but it was completely optional and the other transports did not make me sick. These were fixed route.

I can not get across how nice this game looks and plays. There are lots of optional hidden items to be found and amazing backdrops and just interesting architecture. I spent a long time just staring at stuff and exploring :D

The game is broken up into two distinct phases, the exploration phase and the other phase. I am not going to go into details, but the second phase is much more intense and you will die often.

I am sure you could speed run the entire thing, but to me the best experience is to linger, explore and experiment. For instance there is a strange controller floating about in one of the compartments and if you take your time to try it out you find it controls a mini remote controlled ship.

Everything just feels nice and solid and so many things are interactive. Not to mention detailed. There were so many tiny details that just makes it so exciting to find something new.

Replay?

I had played Lone Echo on the Quest years ago, but it was a on my 2016 VR laptop and was not a good experience. Frame drops, low graphics settings, yet the game was so much fun and so compelling I always wanted to revisit it.

The setup

I had a Windows 10 licence that came with my 2019 PC, but I had quickly cloned the drive and replaced it with Gentoo. There doesn't appear to be any way to play Rift games on Linux so ... time to reconnect the old hard drive. Sadly it is an old spinning rust hard drive and very noisy, but it does work ...

Installed Meta software, got confirmation that my USB port was version 3 and the cable was also USB 3 and validated then ...

The failure

Whatever I did, the headset would not show the game/app, just a black screen with three dots, but the sound of the game would come through the headset. Conversely, the game would show in a window on Windows and would show the headset camera tracking and controllers accurately.

So the connection with the cable is working. The software is connecting to headset. The headset is being picked up and used by the VR games.

Wifi is not an option

I have an Ethernet wired connection to my PC as the wifi is so bad in the office. This means that using the wireless air-link option is not any good. Not to mention, it is Ethernet-over-mains, not that I have seen any speed or bandwidth problems with that.

OK Wifi is an option

I had bought the third party app Virtual Desktop day one when I got the Quest and had only needed it a few times. Now I was able to set it up and then take the headset downstairs to where the Wifi router is and now I can play Lone Echo !!

What was weird was that I had a drawn the virtual play area in the office and as I walked out of the room and then down the stairs with the headset on I could see it the whole time. That was when I looked back and eventually up. It was very disconcerting how accurately I could see the play area drawn one floor up and on the other side of the house through the ceiling!

The Game

I do not want to spoil any of the surprises and take away from the hours of floating about :D

Just make sure to touch and grab hold of the NPCs to get some interesting reactions ;)

But just look at these screen shots!

the view out here is breath taking

just admiring the details in the hand and arm models. It is too old to do hand-tracking but the controllers detect a surprising amount of variety.

admiring my legs and the view

oops! might need to fix myself up a bit

reaching out

this thing is Huge with a capital H

going back inside, it's cold out here!

Red alert! has something gone wrong and now I need to investigate?

It's not perfect

One thing Lone Echo does badly is saving progress. If you complete obvious story arc tasks then it saves no problem, but if you are just trying to find the hidden bonuses then you have just * hope * it saves your progress. The workaround is to deliberately ignore story tasks and then collect items, then complete the story arc just to get it to save. This can be a pain when the story segments are long and complicated.

Apparently, when saving there is a notification in game, but I have never seen it.

Wait, there is another

Lone Echo II ...

Gentoo normally behaves well and I do too, but sometimes ...

Standard emerge sync lists the packages I should update. On that list is net-libs/webkit-gtk and I know it is one of the most time consuming compilation tasks, apart from Firefox.

Kick off the install and come back hours later to find it failed ... bit strange and there is no obvious error, it just failed :(

I quick( long ) bit of Googling and I can see numerous people have had issues for many years and just about all the fixes are memory and CPU resource related.

Long story short, I force emerged it with reduced resources and it worked!!

The long story long, it took 7 hours 5 minutes and 18 seconds rather than the usual 1h30 :(

Settings that the emerge install command uses normally

time 1h30m

MAKEOPTS="-j6 -l0" emerge -av net-libs/webkit-gtk

and the reduced CPU core and thread count

MAKEOPTS="-j4 -l2" emerge -av net-libs/webkit-gtk

I could probably fine tune the parameters, but each test run is going to take 1h30+ so maybe I will just live with it for the moment.

Does feel really strange that the issue is the same for so many years and Linux is normally really good at coping with resource starvation. I remember being able to run a Linux system with no free disk space and even though it was slow I could run enough commands to recover. On Windows that is a GAME OVER scenario :D

If you are interested this the command to get the time the emerge took.

qlop --color -Html | grep -Eo ">>>.+(minute|hour).+"
>>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 7 hours, 5 minutes, 18 seconds