EXPERIMENTAL: Virtual Reality

Suggestion for VR controls:
Instead of using controllers it’d be great to have the ability to look at nearby intractable objects. For example, players could look at their door hinge and if it’s close enough and centered (maybe highlights), they can click their bound select button to interact. It’s difficult to feel around for a controller with a headset on and I don’t toggle items enough in-game to justify battery usage.
I usually exit VR, reach for my keyboard, and select objects as a result.

Slightly different topic:
The mouse cursor matches up for the UI im VR but doesn’t alighn with object selections in Beam. Trying to click a switch with a mouse is very difficult as you typically have to aim in the cursor in a different area.

 

I hope that in the next update there will be an option to enable the OpenXR Toolkit

 

Question for devs: Are you doing your own head position projections at each sim time step? Or do you rely entirely on the HMD driver?

 

Yes. It came up in a discussion with a dev of one of the big flight sims. He claimed he had been tasked with implementing position predictions into their code and that it would improve frame rate because of how the sim was interacting with XR. He explained that the XR driver is also waiting for the sim to provide head position information. It wasn't entirely clear then and I don't get why that would be the case. Was just curious.

I ask because I'm running Monado (thank you for putting in the calls for the Vk posix sync primitives, by the way). The head tracking algorithm for my HMD is still very much in development and has some glitchy and jumpy behavior. Beam seems to be a much more smooth experience than the flight sim I use and I was hunting for reasons why that might be. Other than the above question, I can only think of sim FPS as a reason why.

 

Most likely won't happen as OpenXR Toolkit does not support Vulkan.

From their wiki page:
"OpenXR Toolkit does not support Vulkan applications, regardless of graphics cards."

 

Thanks, I didn't know about that.
I'm left with changing the FOV Multiplier in Oculus Tray Tool. Setting it to 0.6;0.6 gives a nice FPS boost in VR, but that black border is terrible.

 

this has probably been mentioned at some point but i don't really want to scroll through 30 pages to check, I'm using an original HTC vive with steamvr and when i follow all the steps, launch the game in vulkan, load into a map, press ctrl+num0 etc it opens the dialogue about the instability, i acknowledge that and it does nothing, if i try to enable vr through the menu it simply says to check that the headset is connected properly, I've tried a bunch of times and it still won't work

 

Hi,

I just wanted to follow up on issues with VR on Linux, using Valve Index, SteamVR 2.5.5.

AFAIU, in the past there was a hack introduced to allow OpenXR to be loaded under proton, and it was noted that "the correct bugfix appears to be ... implemented for v0.32, which is to load the vulkan extension" (see also this comment). So the hack should not be required anymore. However, with v0.32.1 of the game and proton8 or proton9, I still get the described issue, see attached beamng.log.

With the Linux-native version things get a bit further, but the game freezes and I've to kill it, see attached beamnglinux.log. I can provide a coredump, not sure if it's safe to post it here, though. It seems to be stuck in `libvulkan_radeon.so`, so might actually point to mesa... (Can't be more precise atm since I can't get SteamVR to open with mesa compiled with debug...) Also, since I'm on unsupported distro (gentoo), I would understand if you would ignore this message.

Thank you for the great game!

 

VK_WINE_openxr_device_extensions is not part of the spec. It seems to be some kind of contract between wineopenxr and winevulkan.
If start eg ACC (via proton) in VR mode, I see VK_WINE_openxr_device_extensions in "Enabled device extensions" (a listing from dxvk). Not sure how this is getting there ^^
Anyways, I agree, nothing you can do for now. Maybe I'm able to figure out how this is supposed to work ...

 

Jea, deleting the check w/o understanding what's going on is not good I also think that I might have an idea how this issue can be solved on proton (or rather wineopenxr) side. I'll report back when I have s.t.

EDIT: I have created a Proton ticket with a proposed fix (#7737), let's see what the experts think.

 

Maybe at some point in walking mode you can map walking movement to joysticks that way you can walk around in VR mode without having to use the keyboard. Just an idea.

 

Hey anybody else having problems after the latest update with shadows? If I have shadows turned on at all then the game crashes to desktop before I can even load into the map and switch on VR. If I use the non vulkan renderer then shadows on will work fine but under vulkan if I have any of the shadow options turned on it just crashes.