Star Citizen VR Support - Experimental Release (4.6 Updates)pinned

Hey everyone,

We hope you’ve been enjoying the native Experimental VR support we introduced over during the holidays in Alpha 4.5. The response has been absolutely mind-blowing, and seeing it in your hands and the joy it’s bringing has been incredibly rewarding for the team.

Naturally, there is still a lot of work to do to make it what it’s meant to be. With that in mind, here are the changes we’ve prepared for Alpha 4.6, along with a few additional developer comments from my side:

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Fixed a bunch of crashes, especially when turning VR on. Also added better error descriptions with suggestions for common issues (e.g., uninstalling OpenXR Tools, which does cause issues at the moment).
• Fixed FOG not affecting transparent objects, especially visible on microTech when caught in a snowstorm.
• Fixed CameraViewLookBehind not applying HMD tracking.
• No longer apply the IPD scale to head tracking movements if it's below 1.0f. This caused head movements to slow as you lowered the IPD scale.
• No longer reset the head tracking in any kind of interaction mode in FPS. This fixes the issue where people wouldn't get close enough to a terminal to read it.

New Options

• Selection for FPS ADS offset to the dominant eye.
• Extended Mirror Mode - More on that down below.
• Stereo Cursor Scale, Sensitivity, and Coupling to Head Movement.
• Eye tracking support for the stereo cursor.
• Depth of field toggle.
• MobiGlas Distance.

Stereo Cursor Improvements

• Implemented stereo cursor decoupling from the head motion. This is also the default option now and should feel more natural. Note that the stereo cursor has a range and is anchored to a specific pixel position when it is activated. This can be changed in the settings.

Eye Tracking Support

A small experiment on my part, as I was curious to see how well it would work. I've tried it only with the Pimax Crystal Super, and although it was good enough, it wasn't perfect. Proper calibration is very important.

You can customize the behavior with these 4 cvars:

• r_StereoEyeTrackingSmoothing
• r_StereoEyeTrackingDeadzone
• r_StereoEyeTrackingCalibrationX
• r_StereoEyeTrackingCalibrationY

Mirror Mode Update

• r_StereoScreenOutput renamed to r_StereoMirrorMode
• Added both left & right eye variants for Fill and aspect ratio maintaining
• Added smoothing, zoom and pan functionality. Can be customized via r_StereoMirrorModeZoom, r_StereoMirrorModeSmoothing, r_StereoMirrorModePanX/Y
• The smoothing at the moment is a simple roll stabilization, similar to what Half-Life Alyx does. To do that, the view needs to be zoomed in; otherwise, you will get black borders. Note that the fill modes also zoom in more than they did previously as they try to center the view now. You can always manually use the cvars for any custom setups if you want.

I'm still not super happy with the Mirror Modes, but hopefully that should make it a little bit better for the time being. Ultimately, the best viewing experience is only given with a separate camera. This renders an entirely separate view, which is very expensive. I think we should be able to leverage the RTT system to render a separate camera, with limited capabilities, however. No ETA when this will come.

Theater Mode

• Added theater mode screen curvature support using XR_KHR_composition_layer_cylinder

This is, unfortunately, a very limited supported extension (SteamVR and Pimax don't support it, but Meta does). This was just a temporary test and will be replaced by a custom solution in the future with many more features.

What I would like to see: Ambient lighting, 3D Mode, Different Environments (different skybox depending on where you are in the universe!), and more!

Launcher Update

The Launcher will soon get an update to enable/disable VR! This is needed so that SteamVR doesn't launch automatically anymore for some headsets when VR isn't desired.

This is off by default, so once the launcher update comes, you need to turn on VR explicitly.

What's Next?

The Marker/UI rework is still a work in progress. I can't promise that we will be able to fix it for 4.6, but we are trying!

Many people have already figured out that you can use r_StereoUILensDepth and CV_r_StereoScaleformDepth to fix it. However, that breaks other stuff. Feel free to experiment with it and find something that works for you.



That's it for now! I will catch you in the 'verse (and hopefully in VR!)  

- Silvan