EXPERIMENTAL: Virtual Reality

Ah, my issue has been fixed, many thanks!

 

i like the experience so far and it only gets better in the future

 

Uhh... Bug report? It's saying my headset isn't active.

 

I also tried without going into the steam home menu and it still said my headset wasn't active.

 

Ah, ok. what should I try to solve this then as I've not come across this issue before.

 

The problem was that I didn't have SteamVR set as the default runtime.
AMAZING update, when you first released VR I could hardly play on lowest settings (I don't exactly have a weak pc) and now I'm able to play on ultra and get a solid 45 fps.
On that note, can we please have separate graphics options for VR and standard? Normally I play in standard peasant vision with everything turned up to the max but having to swap back and fourth between the 2 is a little difficult for me as I sometimes forget what I had set and where.
Once again this is a fantastic update and much love to all the devs.

 

I am using Linux and with both wine and the native linux build, I can't activate VR because I am getting errors related to Vulkan extensions being unloaded for the current device. These errors happen in the initVulkan function after the OpenXR instance is created. SteamVR is the default OpenXR runtime.

Wine unloaded extensions:
VK_WINE_openxr_device_extensions
Native Linux unloaded extensions:
VK_KHR_external_memory_fd
VK_KHR_external_semaphore_fd
VK_EXT_debug_marker

Specs:
Distro: Arch Linux
Kernel: 6.6.4-arch1-1
DE: XFCE (X11)
CPU: Ryzen 7 5800x
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti (12gb)
Driver Version: 545.29.06 Proprietary
RAM: 48gb
HMD: Valve Index through SteamVR

 

My hardware: 5800x3d, 3080FE, 32gb ram, meta quest 3. Using Virtual Desktop w/ VDXR because it seems to work the best with beam.

Still pretty much unplayable even on all lowest settings after the update. When I say unplayable I mean that when I sit down with my headset in my cockpit and open a freeroam with the regular starter truck, I don't know if the game will run well and it probably won't. In some locations and cars, it actually runs very smooth on mid-high settings and when it does it's one of the best VR driving experiences out there. But most of the time, like if I spawn in on on Italy crossroads or Small Island, it runs unplayably poorly right out of the gate with stutters and poor tracking and artifacts. It's very inconsistent.

If I do find the rare scenario and car combination that runs well, it is short lived because after switching cars or playing in the menus it always degrades as if there are still vram leaks. Switching cars is definitely the biggest offender for me at least. The only thing worse than navigating all the game's menus in VR is having to restart the game all the time.

This game is absolutely awesome in VR, but I can't really play it until the performance improves. I play this game at hundreds of fps in 2d. Please keep improving the VR!

 

I dont know if anyone got this problem, but the vr mode is really broken, im using a quest 2 and it opens just fine when i turn vr mode my monitor shows everything alright, but when i put the headset on its just pure black, please help i really wanna play vr for the past month and a half and it hasnt been fixed, ive contacted support twice but nothing helps

 

As you're in the experimental stages.... While I was stuck in the virtual room before I figured out the Vulkan issue I was thinking.... "What if the game is played in a virtual room, where the virtual desktop is projected in front of the user and the virtual desktop portal moves around to match my gaze." The main advantage is that the main game engine only needs to calculate for one eye point. Binocular vision only needs to be calculated from the flat virtual screen to the user. For me, the main advantage of VR is a natural ability to look out the window. Having the "world" in 3D doesn't matter much because binocular vision doesn't help with depth perception past 10 M. I also wonder if a limited view port would help people get over VR motion discomfort. (In our future Mixed reality world, the virtual room, could be a reprojected "real room"). Probably a waste of time. Nice work on what is currently available. And good luck on future endeavors.

 

You don't need the game to do that, just use any runtime features for it/big screen/whatever.

 

Help

I did everything for VR (Oculus Quest 2) but it says this on the console and Display. I think I am first person to get this bug.

 

Just wanted to post a followup here that I found a ritual that has been working to get smooth gameplay for me on the above hardware on mid-high settings. At least for Jungle Rock Island, YMMV.

If I load into Jungle Rock freeroam alone in VR (no AI, using the starter truck) the performance is bad and lower settings never fixed it. I was playing with the new render resolution setting and if I set it to the lowest option (25%) the performance was still bad/unchanged even though I could count the pixels on one hand and not read anything in the UI. However, after setting it back to 100%, my performance was magically perfect.

After I changed cars at one point, my performance degraded and so I tried it again: I set the VR render resolution to 25%, deactivated/reactivated VR, then set it back to 100% and deactivated/reactivated VR again and the game was fixed and running great. This kept working until the game stopped letting me activate VR mode for unknown reasons.

Hope this works and helps somebody else. This isn't perfect and I couldn't magically run the game on ultra settings, but mid settings have been working well with this technique. I spent an hour just driving around Jungle Rock offroad trails in the Stambecco in VR and i'm more of a sim racer type. I would love to have hand tracking to flip drivetrain switches inside the car, improvements to the terrain and mud systems (they are already pretty good), and a walkie talkie + multiplayer to tackle some trails with friends. Maybe just get the performance working consistent first, but I can dream.

 

First of all, I can't express enough appreciation for the decision to support VR - I play it basically every day despite the rough edges! The thread here is pretty long, so pardon if these issues are repeat reports:

1. the water surfaces rotate vertically as I rotate my head horizontally (and actually they rotate the opposite way for each eye). this is very disorienting and I would argue the biggest issue with VR once you get it working
2. walking mode in VR has some issues I've noticed while test driving the career mode (loving it so far btw):
   1. I can't use the mouse to look around like I can when not in VR (presumably because I should be able to turn my body, but I'm sitting in my rig) so instead I have to use the look left / right bindings to turn in increments of 45 degrees
   2. I also can't quite figure out how to interact with anything via the mouse (again, presumably because I'm using VR controllers, but I'm not since I'm sitting in my rig)

Again, thanks a ton for all the fun. Y'all are doing great - keep up the amazing work!

 

I can confirm this is now fixed on v0.31, at least for me. I can play BeamNG in VR on the Ultra preset without any crashes.

 

I have some weird bugs in VR.



System: 7800x3d, 4090, 32gigs ram.
Reverb G2 headset, OpenXr Toolkit

Bug 1: VR GUI is "weird". I can use it, but something strains the eyes, like the gui is displaying on each eye too far apart (feels like my eyes have to do the opposite of cross eyed to see them properly) I have tried playing with its depth and size, cant make the menus comfortable. Closing one eye is my workaround when having to look at gui items like speedometer, differential lock, etc.

Bug 2: The output window has lean axis inverted. So if i look out of the car to the left to see my wheel when crawling, then go to view my recording of the output window - In the recording I am leaning to the right and looking straight into my seat. The orientation of headset is correct, but the headset is moved in the opposite direction in space. Up down seems correct, and back/front too. But left/right is inverted.
What is really weird about this is that everything worked perfectly in the headset. It is like the camera of the output window is bugged.
For output window i have it set to "between eyes (slow)". I recorded a video that is meaningless because of the wrong leans, take a look at the 1:00:00 mark in this video: At the last bit where I am climbing the narrow ramp. At that section I am constantly looking out of the left side of the car, looking at the left front wheel. But the output window has rendered me looking inside the car and at the floor!

 

If you hate the twinkling anti-aliasing from the trees, foliage, and fences, edit the map with F11 and delete all the trees and fences then save the map. This seriously improves the visuals because the trees, power lines, and fences always looks really staircase-y and not smooth at all no matter what graphics settings I did.

I'm using the Quest 2 @ 72hz 4128 x 2096 resolution. Wireless Airlink. 3080ti system. (Real driving sim with accurately positioned pedals, 6-speed shifter, & wheel)

I was previously only playing on Gridmap V2 since performance was the best for me and it had a lot of neat and fun features to use, and other maps I was getting some hiccups and the sparkling antialiasing from trees was pissing me off honestly and I ended up going back to gridmap v2, but even gridmap has some antialiasing issues with the grey lines on the ground and in the horizon. BUT THEN I booted up "Industrial", and used F11 to delete all the trees, fences, powerlines, and the water. (Water is bugging and renders differently in each eye and induces a headache instantly, so delete water in the editor).

I cannot express this enough, beam.ng in VR mode is the most realistic driving simulator EVER as long as you have a smooth and stable framerate with no jumps, and a crisp image with no sparkling antialiasing and disable all forms of supersampling that cause artifacting and latency.

 

Guys if you use Quest 3 with Virtual Desktop and an app on Steam called "Reality Mixer", you can make your irl steering wheel and shifter visible while inside your car. This is FINALLY a killer-app use for the Quest 3 MR, as being able to see your hands on the wheel in your bottom peripheral vision genuinely helps you keep track of the steering wheel rotation a little better. It also allows me to see all the buttons on the middle of my wheel, no more fumbling to hit the button to reset physics.

Here's what it looks like to me:


In Layman's terms, the Reality Mixer app runs in the background of Beam.ng and it spawns in solid color boxes in-game to act as a greenscreen effect, and then Virtual Desktop has a built-in feature that lets you select a specific color and turn it into a window of passthrough mode.
In my case, I picked a hot pink color rgb 255,0,145, but I haven't tried other colors yet. I followed this tutorial on youtube where they set up mixed reality for flight simulators, but its the same concept for Beam.ng. You must purchase Reality Mixer and Virtual Desktop, no way around that.

This is honestly the only valid use case of the Quest 3 MR function. This setup + the accurate physics of Beam.ng makes me feel like I'm in a 75 million dollar military simulator from 20 years ago. LOL I imagine the military has even better stuff nowadays in 2023, but seriously this setup is extremely capable, but I'm mostly gonna be drifting around Industrial