Bigscreen Beta News

Hey all!

Bigscreen’s environments are getting a major refresh. Today’s update improves visual fidelity & immersion while simultaneously improving performance.

The Home Theater, Grand Theater, and Big Campfire have new dynamic lighting from the screen that looks hyper realistic, similar to our Big Cinema environment from 2017’s “Cinema Update”. This is a significant improvement to the visual fidelity and immersion of our larger theater environments.

Note how the colorful light from the screen shines on the environment, and how the environment goes dark if the screen is dark. People have been asking for this feature for a long time, and we’re excited to launch it.


Our primary focus in this update was performance. For example, we have reduced CPU render time of the Home Theater environment by more than 10X.

This performance pass was necessary in order to port Bigscreen to mobile VR devices like the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go. In case you missed last week’s announcement, we have started Alpha Testing on mobile VR headsets. You can sign up here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMAOWhBM01g

Hey everyone!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with MGM Studios to show STARGATE ORIGINS in Bigscreen. This week, people can watch the first 2 episodes of Stargate Origins, bonus content, and trailers, for free in Bigscreen with your friends.

Showtimes begin every 30 minutes starting at 6PM Eastern on Thursday March 8, until 3AM Eastern on Sunday March 11.

When we hosted TOP GUN 3D in December, which was only available in the United States, many of you asked us to do movie nights in more international countries. We listened to you, and tried very hard to secure international movie distribution deals.

This event is free and will be available to people in the United States & territories, United Kingdom & territories, Canada, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand.

No ticket or sign-up is required. To attend this event, grab your VR headset and download Bigscreen.

Watch our trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06mSHnljfJc

Hey all, pushed a minor bugfix update live just now. Should fix a few things reported recently:

- Seeing the Bigscreen logo instead of the stream in a multiplayer room
- Not seeing dynamic lighting in the cinema from a stream in a multiplayer room
- Other small bugs that happened occasionally and required rejoin

We've been teasing this update for quite some time, and it's FINALLY HERE!



We've added a couple huge environments, including the "Big Campfire" and the "Big Balcony". The Big Campfire is similar to our smaller, more intimate campfire but with a huge amphitheater style seating arrangement in a valley between mountains. Look for some easter eggs :)



For the past 3 years, Bigscreen used to only allow up to 4 people in a room. Today, we added a special type of room called "Big Rooms" which lets 12 people hangout in a single space. Only the host/admin can stream their desktop in a Big Room, and will need to have a good internet connection (10Mbps upload or better)

• First: we re-built most of our environments to make the 3D artwork perform
• much better*. Way fewer combined draw calls, polys, fewer transparencies, and the net result is a big reduction in the GPU cost
• Second: previously, multiplayer rooms would require 5-15% more CPU for each person that joined your room. In a 4-person room, you might easily hit 100% CPU. Today, each new person that joins your room costs ~0% more CPU (magic!). This means a huge 30X reduction in CPU usage in multiplayer.

Join 2000 members on the Bigscreen Community chat server on Discord. It's a great way to provide feedback, bug reports, and chat with devs.

If you love us, leave us a review on Steam! If you have any problems or bugs, please email us or post on our Steam forums

p.s. in the next 2 weeks, we have some big news to share about more movie nights and Bigscreen on mobile VR headsets 👀

Hey all,

We released an update yesterday (Version 0.26.0) that has significant improvements to CPU usage and streaming performance. This is especially noticeable in Big Rooms. We plan to publicly launch Big Rooms later this week.

Please give this latest update a spin! Let us know if the Big Rooms streaming performance is good.

We've got a really exciting update planned for next week 🌲🔥