Another heads up regarding SteamVR/Windows Mixed Reality update/deprecation

Globusdiablo

Globusdiablo
After a short hiatus I booted up Legacy for some sweet VR spacyness, but sadly VR seemed completely broken. Nothing worked. After a bit of fiddling I discovered that SteamVR had released an update that had rendered VR broken.

A complete uninstall/reinstall of SteamVR/Windows Mixed Reality was necessitated for VR to work as intended again. After a few hours it's still a bit borked, but seems to be acting more or less like it should now, with the odd glitch.

As The Lawful has mentioned here:

Bump ahead for WMR headsets...

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features O7, 🙃
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

Microsoft is dropping SteamVR and Windows Mixed Reality support in the not so distant future. This latest SteamVR "update" does indeed seem to indicate that support is already slowly shutting down.

I'll be crying my salty tears when my Reverb becomes obsolete. Elite: Dangerous in VR has by far been the best gaming experience I've ever had.
 

VR andysonofbob

VR andysonofbob
:(

Yeah, that really does suck. Your favourite toy is slowly being taken away from you. I was like that with the demise of nVidia's brilliant 3D Vision. However, as most know, the 3DV modding community was hugely influencial regarding Palmer Luckey developing the consumer VR we have today. So there is that I guess?

What HMD do you think you will replace it with? There must be others available that are non-WMR that tickle your fancy?
 

Helmut Grokenberger

Helmut Grokenberger
A few notes on my experience with OpenComposite: The idea and concept of skipping the additional translation layers is great - there used to be a great graphic on the OpenXR Toolkit website explaining it, but that page has disappered, and I didn't save the image.

Some people have reported great success and improved performance, my personal experience was only meh. I've had a big issue with jutter and stuttering on foot that I could never solve across multiple versions of OpenComposite over months, so it's been unusable for me.

Also, when comparing performance, be sure to compare apples to apples - the resolution scaling does not conform to the SteamVR scaling despite the claim in the documentation. With the same render resolution, my frame rates with OpenComposite seemed a bit better, but not drastically so. The advantage of OpenComposite is of course being able to use OpenXR toolkit for stuff like foveated rendering and upscaling. Apparently the development of OpenXR toolkit was stopped, though.

Big contra in my book: OpenComposite still has no proper versioning system. The libraries you can download are built automatically, and the OCC software downloads them from god knows where, and they don't offer old versions for download. So if an update breaks something for you and you didn't backup, you're basically screwed. I think not having some kind of version archive is bad practice.

EDHM works well by now with OpenComposite, but the setup is a little more involved, and launching the game involves the extra step of running the loader before the game. But it works.
 

Globusdiablo

Globusdiablo
kevinjones30 said:
Tried to jump back into Legacy for some VR space fun, but SteamVR's surprise update threw everything out of whack. Had to do the uninstall/reinstall dance for SteamVR and Windows Mixed Reality to fix it. Still a bit glitchy, and now I hear Microsoft might ditch SteamVR and Windows Mixed Reality. Elite: Dangerous in VR is my all-time fave, and the idea of losing it hurts!
Click to expand...
My Reverb and Legacy is working flawlessly again, so I'm confident that I'll be playing in this config for at least a few years to come. :)
 

jojon

J
Hmm, It hadn't occurred to me to wonder how mbuccia might be affected by Microsoft's killing WMR... I hope he is still somewhere he wants to be, but the matter is re-actualised, of how sacrily many things hinge on one or two skilled enthusiasts not growing bored...

I hadn't heard of OpenComposite being out of development. Are we talking: "dead" dead, or are we talking: "got all it needs, for now"?
 

Helmut Grokenberger

Helmut Grokenberger
OpenComposite and OpenXR Toolkit are two different things. OpenComposite is still up and running. The development of OpenXR Toolkit has stopped, as per here. I think the development of WMR had become stale long before that though.
 

jojon

J
So, reading mbuccia's dear John letter, it is good that he reclaims his time, and reassuring that he still keeps an occasional spoon in the odd pot.

Let's hope one of these days we finally get to see the OpenXR workgroup over at Kronos getting over what ever internal differences and hesitations they may have (yeah, I know... not only many wills, but actual rivals on the market...), and take some decisive steps toward progress and standardisation in unison.

-One can not expect volunteers like Mathieu to break their backs filling in shortcomings, nor application developers to "hardcode" for each and every fleeting proprietary solution out there; And things like dynamic foveated rendering, and the manners in which to make things work with wider FOV, are things that are well overdue to be write-once-run-everywhere-'ed, if there is ever going to be any progress -- especially if we still want toady's applications to run tomorrow.

A lot of the stuff that OpenXR Toolkit does, is stuff that really should be part of the VR runtime basics, IMO; Heck, I've been kvetching since Oculus development kit days, that all VR applications should be mastered as-best-able for HDR, and the runtime take care of any required tonemapping as part of the standard pipeline, for the capabilities of currently connected HMD, and user preferences. :p

Well, already known concepts have been demonstrated working -- let's see whether anybody with influence can be convinced to make them "law" -- I would love to see Elite Dangerous getting quad-view rendering. :7
 
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