Voice Attack fixes this. You can simply say the command "Reset HMD" and it'll reset to the direction your headset is facing at that moment.
First Impressions of ED in VR
- Thread starter Old Duck
- Start date
No no, that's not what I'm talking about. The Oculus software itself will lose the environment, forcing you to reset the floor, etc. This is all done outside of Elite (a real pain when it happens in the middle of the game).Voice Attack fixes this. You can simply say the command "Reset HMD" and it'll reset to the direction your headset is facing at that moment.
If by "lose the environment" you mean the orientation/location gets mesed up - that's why there's a keybind for "Reset HMD Orientation", per default mapped to F12.
Edit: Ninja-ed by OP. Ok, that never happened to me in the CV1 or HP reverb.
The more complex answer is that you can, if your VR headset has pass-through cameras that are decent enough to read the keyboard details, but not sure if it's really worth it. Lenovo WMR headset had this option even though quality wasn't great. Pimax 5k+ doesn't and and I just picked up the finger memory over time plus HOTAS binds. At least Elite isn't DCS World
There are apps such as OVRDrop that will allow you to import a customisable virtual panel into your game which you can assign to anything you like - specific app, capture a whole monitor screen etc. However note that to read browser text clearly you'll need a decently high resolution headset. Lenovo was poor for this, Pimax works. I'm sure other new headsets like Rift S, Index will be OK too. This one is a SteamVR app but I guess there are non-Steam ones out there too.
Steam is indeed not needed, my Elite license isn't a Steam account - however I found SteamVR is a very useful tool to configure and run not only Elite VR, but increasingly a stack of other VR games (for a long time I was only interested in Elite). And you don't need to buy a separate Steam copy of the game, you can get a free Steam key from Frontier using your original license.
Edit and the Oculus version, which of course makes sense for the Rift S
@Evang Hope that helps
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That's probably because those use external cameras, correct? The Rift S has built-in cameras that determine its location in 3D space by mapping the environment. I suspect if the picture it sees through the camera changes too much (based on lighting or too many empty pizza boxes appearing since last played), it can get confused and require the environment to be reset. This is very different than the F12 centering feature in ED. Thankfully this is rare, and likely due to my "evolving" environment, but when it does happen, you NEED to have a Rift controller handy.
The last few iterations of the Oculus software has been in the habit of 'forgetting' your play area / floor height (even to the stage of every startup) which I hope gets 'sorted' soon as it gets boring.
The flaky software boundaries aside, the Rift S firmware updates, and improvements in the driver software have all been overall positive (with a few hiccups for Unreal Engine games...)
Finally somebody who knows what I'm talking about!
HP Reverb uses standard WMR 'inside-out' tracking ie two forward facing cameras on the headset. WMR is fine for seated games like Elite or sims, but has problems tracking controllers not in front of you
Old Rifts use their original external tracking system.
Rift S has 5 camera system ('Improved WMR inside out')
HTC + Pimax use external Valve lighthouse tracking
Tbh anything can lose tracking, but hopefully in most cases you can recover it without having to quit game and take headset off. Hopefully
Intriguing. What sort of things can you change in SteamVR that you can't otherwise?
Imho the number one thing is balancing supersampling options (headset software + SVR SS + in-game SS) - to get max quality, with minimal artifacts, at acceptable GPU performance. I don't use Steam Auto, I use my headset software at 2x (which is quadrupling pixel count), plus SVR with a manual override via the config (not possible in UI) to 0.25. Oculus vs HTC vs Pimax SS implementations are different though, so there isn't one universal answer.
Combined with other performance options as described on the link below, I can keep a steady FPS at decently high quality on a current gen GPU while keeping aliasing, shimmering etc to a minimum. It's not gone, but it's the best balance I've managed to achieve.
Until we have very high res native headsets that don't require SS (hoping this is only another 2 months away with the 8KX), we can use SS as a workaround to force improved visual quality, but it comes at a computational cost for the GPU, especially with wide fields of view. However because the pixel-to-pixel implementation varies from headset to Steam to in-game, there is a way (in the opinion of a fair few people) to balance those elements more efficiently than previously considered. I am not an expert in this at all, but I'm enjoying learning more
More details from earlier: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/first-impressions-of-ed-in-vr.532000/post-8239535
This works in Elite, but others doing comparisons in racing sims, for example, don't fare quite as well - depends how much detail you expect at a distance. So your choice of app matters as well.
Another thing that I don't know so much about, but I'm aware of issues, is with Elite and AA in VR. I hear Elite uses deferred rendering and not forward rendering as is typical, and this means AA really doesn't behave the same / work well esp in VR. Typically best to turn AA off and use supersampling to compensate (until that native hi res dream business actually happens hehe
)Cool, thanks for the detailed answer! Now I see this it rings a bell actually. Although you can also set HMD Quality and SS in-game (or via EDProfiler) I do recall reading that Steam VR gave finer granularity control over these settings to get that combination just right?Imho the number one thing is balancing supersampling options (headset software + SVR SS + in-game SS) - to get max quality, with minimal artifacts, at acceptable GPU performance. I don't use Steam Auto, I use my headset software at 2x (which is quadrupling pixel count), plus SVR with a manual override via the config (not possible in UI) to 0.25. Oculus vs HTC vs Pimax SS implementations are different though, so there isn't one universal answer.
Combined with other performance options as described on the link below, I can keep a steady FPS at decently high quality on a current gen GPU while keeping aliasing, shimmering etc to a minimum. It's not gone, but it's the best balance I've managed to achieve.
Until we have very high res native headsets that don't require SS (hoping this is only another 2 months away with the 8KX), we can use SS as a workaround to force improved visual quality, but it comes at a computational cost for the GPU, especially with wide fields of view. However because the pixel-to-pixel implementation varies from headset to Steam to in-game, there is a way (in the opinion of a fair few people) to balance those elements more efficiently than previously considered. I am not an expert in this at all, but I'm enjoying learning more
More details from earlier: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/first-impressions-of-ed-in-vr.532000/post-8239535
This works in Elite, but others doing comparisons in racing sims, for example, don't fare quite as well - depends how much detail you expect at a distance. So your choice of app matters as well.
Another thing that I don't know so much about, but I'm aware of issues, is with Elite and AA in VR. I hear Elite uses deferred rendering and not forward rendering as is typical, and this means AA really doesn't behave the same / work well esp in VR. Typically best to turn AA off and use supersampling to compensate (until that native hi res dream business actually happens hehe
I know people used to say that there was a bit of a performance overhead running SteamVR unnecessarily when you have an Oculus ... do you happen to know if that's been fixed?
A-ha! I only noticed this upon returning to the game this year. But yes, happens to me too.
No worries at all I hope it helps! I'm still learning a lot myself from people who know way more about this than I do.
One of the things with better PiTool / SVR balance is that it now gives me enough GPU / CPU headroom, which I didn't really have before, to allow for in-game HMD 1.25 - this in turn sharpens things but also improves on techniques like Fixed Forward Rendering (PiTool + RTX card can enable and reduce quality outside of your vision, reducing overhead further).
GPU is number one naturally, but both can have an impact esp on primarily single core apps like DCSW. Steam can give you additional granularity yes, and more so via the config instead of the UI. Hence me fixing the SS value at 0.25. Any other value with PT x2 would lead to less accurate pixel mapping, and therefore more alias / shimmer etc. Relying purely on a high SS value to improve quality is a brute force method that will tax your GPU to the maximum.
Re in-game values, my understanding is that that while you can also use Elite's in-game SS and technically get a benefit, it's less efficient for VR. So personally, I stick to an in-game HMD bump only for VR, and in-game SS for monitors. Via EDProfiler in my case.
I assume there must be some additional overhead to running any 3rd party platform, regardless of efficiency. All pros and cons, it will depend if the Oculus settings alone give enough of a satisfactory boost with pixel-to-pixel mapping while keeping the hit low. Can't comment on that one myself, I only have Lone Echo via the store and it's not actually running on Oculus hardware so I'm still using PiTool + SVR settings for it.
I always do things like turn off PiHome, SVR Home etc to not run any unnecessary VR utilities chewing up resource without a benefit. And I only run FPSVR when I actually need to check the FPS, otherwise monitoring is introducing its own latency
Glad I don't run WMR Home any more, that was a hog afaik No worries at all I hope it helps! I'm still learning a lot myself from people who know way more about this than I do.
One of the things with better PiTool / SVR balance is that it now gives me enough GPU / CPU headroom, which I didn't really have before, to allow for in-game HMD 1.25 - this in turn sharpens things but also improves on techniques like Fixed Forward Rendering (PiTool + RTX card can enable and reduce quality outside of your vision, reducing overhead further).
GPU is number one naturally, but both can have an impact esp on primarily single core apps like DCSW. Steam can give you additional granularity yes, and more so via the config instead of the UI. Hence me fixing the SS value at 0.25. Any other value with PT x2 would lead to less accurate pixel mapping, and therefore more alias / shimmer etc. Relying purely on a high SS value to improve quality is a brute force method that will tax your GPU to the maximum.
Re in-game values, my understanding is that that while you can also use Elite's in-game SS and technically get a benefit, it's less efficient for VR. So personally, I stick to an in-game HMD bump only for VR, and in-game SS for monitors. Via EDProfiler in my case.
I assume there must be some additional overhead to running any 3rd party platform, regardless of efficiency. All pros and cons, it will depend if the Oculus settings alone give enough of a satisfactory boost with pixel-to-pixel mapping while keeping the hit low. Can't comment on that one myself, I only have Lone Echo via the store and it's not actually running on Oculus hardware so I'm still using PiTool + SVR settings for it.
I always do things like turn off PiHome, SVR Home etc to not run any unnecessary VR utilities chewing up resource without a benefit. And I only run FPSVR when I actually need to check the FPS, otherwise monitoring is introducing its own latency
I don't know what you're saying, but it sounds yummy.
Now I'm hungry!
I don't know what you're saying, but it sounds yummy.
Now I'm hungry!
Hehe totally right, I think it's time for dinner
And apologies if this all sounds like nonsense, VR is not very plug'n'play on the high end. It's relatively easy to just get up and running with WMR, Index etc but once you have a combo of high res and high FOV (ie a sh*tload of pixels), it's necessary to extract every ounce of horsepower possible
Or wait for that 4080 Ti...