Oculus Rift second window (useful for twitchers & youtubers)

Eddie Symons

Producer
Frontier
Hey,

As anyone who came down to EGX will have noticed, we have a debug feature in the game for mirroring the output to a second screen when you're playing on Oculus Rift. This is really useful for us when demoing the game to people (thanks to Pablo for implementing it) and a few people asked about when that feature will be available.

Well, it'll be with you in Beta 2, and if I remember correctly, might actually be out there in Beta 1 already!

I should point out that this is very much a debug feature, it's not very user friendly, there's a chance you could degrade your experience by tinkering with the options, etc, etc. So if you are seeing judder or framerate drops please be sure to remove this option before sending a ticket, as if it's caused by this debug feature we aren't likely to fix it (not right now at least). If you can't get the second window displaying just right for how you want to use it, then I'm not guaranteeing we'll do anything about it. Having said all that though, I think it might still be useful for any of you creating your own Rift gameplay videos, so I'll share how to enable it here...

Basically, it's just a few lines you add in to your AppConfig.xml file (which you can find in the same folder as the Elite Dangerous exe...). Just paste this chunk of text into the <*AppConfig> section, run the game, and the second window should pop up.

<*StereoExtraDisplay>
<*Enabled>true<*/Enabled>
<*Monitor>0<*/Monitor>
<*Width>720<*/Width>
<*Height>810<*/Height>
<*VSync>false<*/VSync>
<*BehaviourIfStereoRenderDisabled>HideWindow<*/BehaviourIfStereoRenderDisabled>
<*/StereoExtraDisplay>

Make sure to remove the *s! -drkaii


One little bug I've noticed with it, is that the second screen will steal focus when it first appears, so you need to switch focus back to the game again to get input, but other than that, it was working fine for me and the ambassadors at EGX for the last few days.

If you want to tweak the options here then they are mostly straightforward. Monitor is the id for the monitor you want the window to appear on, width and height is the resolution, and vsync should always be set to false (otherwise it can cause some juddering).

Once again though, this is a development debug feature, so it's not officially supported, may be removed without notice in the future, etc, etc. But if you find it useful then go ahead and use it!

Cheers,

Eddie
 
I'm not sure I can express in words how excited I am for ED final release and buying a finished Oculus Rift.

I know I have a bit of a wait... but ohmygodwhoopecitewhahoooobbq, I can hardly wait.
 
I wondered how you did this at EGX - it looked good to see the window without the usual lens distortion associated with Rift videos.

Thanks very much for posting this! :)
 
I can confirm that it works on 1.06 just as Eddie describes it above, and exactly as it worked on Beta 2 at EGX.
 
I can confirm that it works on 1.06 just as Eddie describes it above, and exactly as it worked on Beta 2 at EGX.

Just tried it and it does work - but weirdly enough OBS still shows the dual Rift view when I select the window as the game capture.

I tried Window Capture too, but didn't work for me either. Would capture the window but only if on top and wouldn't stretch it to the OBS window.
 
Just tried it and it does work - but weirdly enough OBS still shows the dual Rift view when I select the window as the game capture.

I tried Window Capture too, but didn't work for me either. Would capture the window but only if on top and wouldn't stretch it to the OBS window.

I have had trouble capturing the window with MSI Afterburner and ShadowPlay. Basically I get no output at all.
 
Having trouble finding AppConfig.xml.

Am I in the right place?

TdW80yi.jpg
 
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