XWA Upgrade

Wiiplay123 wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 22, 2020 9:51 pm

I've recorded a video of the issue, showing me moving the mouse in the hangar to show that the camera does move with the mouse when mouselook is enabled but not with the VR headset.

Tracking is currently disabled while in the hangar. I know, it's a bit annoying, but we probably need another hook for that.

Have you tried disabling mouse look? You're not supposed to enable mouse look at all. The tracker should just take control by itself. I checked your config files and they look fine to me. Do you have any steps to reproduce the problem?

@fesiri: Thanks for your comments! Some people have reported performance issues. How's the peformance on your side? Did you have to tweak anything or did things work right after installing the packages?

BlueMax,
Good news with my testing that I wanted to let you guys know about, before I get on with my day.

If you remember, I was having an issue that was preventing me from reverting back to playing the game on a nomal PC screen while using the bluemax mods.
After making the changes you suggested in the files, I was able to launch the game, but it would have a blank screen. (I could hear the concourse in the background)..
I was able to resolve it, by right clicking on the desktop launch icon, and "running it as administrator"
This launched the game in a state where everything seem to be working, including the Blue max mods. so on my Win 10 PC, this seems to be a permisions issue that is resolved by running it as admin! Others should try this as well if you have a blank screen.

So at this point, I think I'm going to make a backup of the game, and use that copy to modify the settings for the VR, that way I can switch between a VR and a non VR version of the game and not worry about having the non VR version stop working.

Keep up the good work Blue Max and team!

So, a permissions issue? Well, I would've never guessed that. But I'm glad you did! Thanks for sharing with the community

blue_max wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 21, 2020 7:22 am

Anyway, here's a preview of what's coming soon. In this version, there should be no distortion, but if there is, feel free to let me know!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bad4uezpdydj9 ... 0.zip?dl=0

Hi BlueMax,

that's really awesome: POV now fits perfectly, distortitions/elongations are gone, and I now have full Pimax 5K+ VR-view!!
Well, I think I now start noticing some little performance drops - but I still have to tweak aroung with the resolution. At the moment, I start with 1920x1200.


Really ... I'm speechless: A true Star Wars fighter simulation game in VR!!!

I think I'll restart a complete new pilot from the scratch now - more than 15 years later Just have to configure everything on my joystick...
(Unfortunately it will get quite warm/hot the upcoming days - I wonder how long I can bear heat and sweat under that HMD )

Thank you very very much


PS - I forgot:
The crosshair now is quite large. Is there any way to reduce its size somewhere?

blue_max wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 23, 2020 1:46 am

Tracking is currently disabled while in the hangar. I know, it's a bit annoying, but we probably need another hook for that.

Have you tried disabling mouse look? You're not supposed to enable mouse look at all. The tracker should just take control by itself. I checked your config files and they look fine to me. Do you have any steps to reproduce the problem?

I've tried it both ways (enabled and disabled), and it still doesn't work.

Can't really see any steps to reproduce other than "it doesn't work", I've even tried using a completely fresh install of X-Wing Alliance from the CDs with no XWA Hacker modifications and installing the ultimate craft pack and the effects pack over it.

I'm on Windows 7 64-bit, with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Would either of those cause an issue? I know that some VR applications only run on Windows 10, but I'm assuming since the HUD is tracking fine that it wouldn't be a problem.

@HanSolo77: I'm glad it's working for you! I'm aware of the problems with the crosshairs (looks big, gets distorted when you look to the sides). I'm working on fixing that, but it's a bit more complicated than I expected.

Wiiplay123 wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 23, 2020 9:10 pm

I'm on Windows 7 64-bit, with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Would either of those cause an issue? I know that some VR applications only run on Windows 10, but I'm assuming since the HUD is tracking fine that it wouldn't be a problem.

Yeah, if the tracking is working, then I would expect SteamVR to work without problems. Have you tried running the game as Administrator? Don't use the launcher, just right-click on XWingAlliance.exe and select "Run as Admin" (or something like that). I believe someone else was reporting that they had some permission issues.

Also, silly question, but have you checked if SteamVR works fine with other applications?

blue_max wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 23, 2020 10:49 pm

Yeah, if the tracking is working, then I would expect SteamVR to work without problems. Have you tried running the game as Administrator? Don't use the launcher, just right-click on XWingAlliance.exe and select "Run as Admin" (or something like that). I believe someone else was reporting that they had some permission issues.

Also, silly question, but have you checked if SteamVR works fine with other applications?

Just tried it with Run as Administrator, didn't change anything. SteamVR works fine with every other application I've tried.

https://youtu.be/Q_V7OUte0go

Here's a video of how it shows up on the monitor as I'm playing.

Wiiplay123 wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 23, 2020 11:15 pm

https://youtu.be/Q_V7OUte0go

Here's a video of how it shows up on the monitor as I'm playing.

Thanks for posting that. At least I can try and see if I can repro that behavior on my end to get more clues. One thing, though: can you check that you only have one Hook_CockpitLook.dll in your installation directory? Search for name variants (essentially, anything that has "CockpitLook" in the name). If you see multiple DLLs with slightly different names then just keep the most recent one. If you can, send me your Hook_Cockpitlook.dll and I'll test it here too.

blue_max wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 23, 2020 11:23 pm

Wiiplay123 wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 23, 2020 11:15 pm

https://youtu.be/Q_V7OUte0go

Here's a video of how it shows up on the monitor as I'm playing.

Thanks for posting that. At least I can try and see if I can repro that behavior on my end to get more clues. One thing, though: can you check that you only have one Hook_CockpitLook.dll in your installation directory? Search for name variants (essentially, anything that has "CockpitLook" in the name). If you see multiple DLLs with slightly different names then just keep the most recent one. If you can, send me your Hook_Cockpitlook.dll and I'll test it here too.

I checked and there's only one Hook_CockpitLook.dll. I switched to my emergency Windows 10 64-bit install that I keep for programs that insist that I use Windows 10, and the tracking worked fine but the view was REALLY distorted. I installed that June 20th ddraw.dll that you posted earlier, and now it looks AMAZING! Now the question is why it works on Windows 10 but not Windows 7.

Small issue (maybe not small to fix )

The Aspect ratio is bad on monitor now.

The concourse should never change aspect (1.333), however while viewing in VR, the monitor is "squished" Then during flight I found out that the 3D_Apsect_ratio is not read. If this is auto-generated now (simple =(width/height)) then that would be fine except that its still wrong...
VR is stretched horizontally, while monitor is stretched vertically Theoretically, unless someone has PreserveAspect disabled, all aspects should be a =(width/height) or dot-for-dot.

Trev

Wiiplay123 wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 24, 2020 4:03 am

I checked and there's only one Hook_CockpitLook.dll. I switched to my emergency Windows 10 64-bit install that I keep for programs that insist that I use Windows 10, and the tracking worked fine but the view was REALLY distorted. I installed that June 20th ddraw.dll that you posted earlier, and now it looks AMAZING! Now the question is why it works on Windows 10 but not Windows 7.

So the problem was resolved by switching over to Windows 10? It's the same binaries?

@Trevor: Thanks for reporting this. Actually I just fixed the aspect ratio for SteamVR's mirror window, but I haven't published the fix yet. The 3D aspect ratio is no longer needed since the reconstruction is metric and the aspect ratio is already encoded in the projection cameras that SteamVR provides. There's a few other settings that are no longer needed for similar reasons, so VRParams.cfg is actually getting a bit shorter

blue_max wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 24, 2020 6:16 pm

So the problem was resolved by switching over to Windows 10? It's the same binaries?

Yeah, I used the exact same XWA folder with no changes.
Same DLLs, same hardware, just on Windows 10. Took me like 10 minutes just to get Windows 10 to recognize my joystick.

Is there any way to unlock more than 24/30 FPS for VR?

I played the first two Azzameen missions yesterday in VR, but regardless of the resolution (1728x1200 in comparison to 640x480), it sticks max. @25-28/29 FPS, and I also get drops down to 15 FPS i.e. when entering hyperspace.

Justagais old 60 FPS hook doesn't work with the latest dinput.dll / version of XWAUP, and renaming the hook_time.dll didn't affect the FPS neither.

Playing XWA in VR is really great and awesome - but those low FPS are really very very close to the bearable limit in VR


EDIT (4:30 pm):
Ok, according to a hint I got I reduced my SS in SteamVR (150% > 74%, suggested default from SteamVR). Now, the FPS partially go up to 40-45, the unlocker itself seems to work fine
Nevertheless, the more ships are in a mission, the more the FPS drop. In mission 6 of the prologue, it goes down to 20 FPS again for a short while, when the Imperial Fleet arrives.
Changing the ingame resolution between 640x480, 1024x768 and 1728x1200 doesn't seem to have any noticeable impact on the performance.

But once again, after having played for another hour now: Really really breathtaking I hope I will get used to it not at least because of the controls - I just noticed once again how complex XWA was/is in terms of control, so even mapping all 12 joystick buttons still is far from being perfect

MAN! I've been away from XWA for too long...look at what you guys have done!

Running good for me on Oculus CV1, but I have one issue (which may not be an issue). When I move my head I get alot of "jitters"...as in it's not smooth movement. Is this just a normal side effect of getting VR to work on something that was never designed for it? FPS seems to be good for me, though...if I don't move my head too much it's pretty smooth. Only when looking around do I get this "shakiness". Again, I'm probably just used to modern sims that are designed for VR.

Thanks for the hard work, gentlemen.

Is there a way to install this without the Craft Pack? Framerate in a 1v1 is butter smooth with all of the Blue effects disabled, but as soon as ships starting pouring in, there's a serious fps tank, i'm wondering if the running without the replacements might make for a better experience.

I'm trying to find the root cause of the performance impact with SteamVR. Watching the traces with GPUView, it's clear that with SteamVR the CPU is blocked during GPU present, contrary to NonVR and DirectSBS modes.

You can try VRmode=DirectSBS and Tracking=SteamVR to get an idea of the potential performance if/when the CPU/GPU blocking issue is solved.

Also, I believe the new text renderer is using a lot of CPU time, from statistical profiling.

From my tests, some advice to improve performance:
- Update all hooks
- Disable vsync (ddraw.cfg)
- Processoraffinity=0
- Disable the newText and Radar renderers (ddraw.cfg)
- Reduce the steamVR render resolution (supersampling) (steamVR settings). This will benefit more less powerful GPUs. Doesn't make a difference for me with an RTX2080 GPU.

@sncollie: Yes, there's some jittering. This is because I hijacked the variables that control cockpit shake to implement positional tracking, so each frame, XWA will try to zero these variables out and SteamVR will overwrite them again. I don't have any alternatives at the moment, but I'll fix that as soon as something better comes up.

@Schoober: You can run the VR mod without the craft upgrade packs, that shouldn't be a problem. You won't get the cool new cockpits but it should still be playable.

There are some performance problems that m0rgg and I are trying to solve in SteamVR. But even if that gets solved, the game itself has some limitations as it still computes all the geometry in the CPU. You can check this by running Jeremy's ddraw and checking how the framerate drops when the screen becomes busy. At the moment, there isn't a good fix for these issues, but we'll continue to look for improvements.

Booting into Windows 10 to test X-Wing Alliance broke the bluetooth connection to the base stations in Windows 7 again. Really wish they had a way to manually put the base stations in standby without bluetooth or unplugging.

Wonderful work! I can’t believe it took me this long to find this VR mod. I have been fiddling for hours and have it all set up pretty well for FOV, barrel correction, etc... except for one problem I can’t seem to fix after trying multiple times from scratch. I’m getting consistent slight double images / blurry vision when in the cockpit and horrible double images in the menus and concourse. The cockpit is almost ok on the instruments but pretty noticeable on further away objects. The best way I can measure it is a single star in the star field looks like 2 stars with about a gap between where 3 stars would fit. The menus are so bad I need to close one eye, the double menus overlap about 50% of each other.

I’m using a Valve Index on SteamVR. I just can’t seem to find any setting that alters this whatsoever. I’ve been looking through the forums and have seen post_projection_size mentioned as something that might cause this problem but I can’t find it. I’m hoping that I missed something simple. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
PinkEye

PinkEye wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 29, 2020 12:59 am

I’m getting consistent slight double images / blurry vision when in the cockpit and horrible double images in the menus and concourse. The cockpit is almost ok on the instruments but pretty noticeable on further away objects. The best way I can measure it is a single star in the star field looks like 2 stars with about a gap between where 3 stars would fit. The menus are so bad I need to close one eye, the double menus overlap about 50% of each other.

Sounds like the IPD is set too high. Is that setting available to you?

PinkEye wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 29, 2020 12:59 am

Wonderful work! I can’t believe it took me this long to find this VR mod. I have been fiddling for hours and have it all set up pretty well for FOV, barrel correction, etc... except for one problem I can’t seem to fix after trying multiple times from scratch. I’m getting consistent slight double images / blurry vision

Please stop using the VR mod right away. You should not experience double images or blurry vision at all. This happens if you're trying to run the DirectSBS mode with SteamVR or if, somehow, SteamVR is not sending the proper camera data. I'm also a bit perplexed that you had to do manual barrel correction -- SteamVR doesn't need that because it applies the correction internally. These are hints that you may be trying to run the SBS mode in SteamVR. The post_projection_size parameter that you mention was removed because it didn't actually fix anything and caused more trouble.

You can also try what keiran is mentioning to see if that helps.

Send me (or post) your VRParams.cfg and CockpitLook.cfg files and I'll take a look. The proper way to set this up is by using the installer for 1.1.3.2, selecting SteamVR and then copying the following files on top of that:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bad4uezpdydj9 ... 0.zip?dl=0

Wiiplay123 wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:21 pm

Booting into Windows 10 to test X-Wing Alliance broke the bluetooth connection to the base stations in Windows 7 again. Really wish they had a way to manually put the base stations in standby without bluetooth or unplugging.

windows 7 doesn't work well with most vr applications these days... if I were you I'd stick to using windows 10 for vr and if you want to use 7, then use that for everything else

thank you blue_max! All I needed was version 1.1.3.2 and it all works perfectly now.

blue_max wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 21, 2020 7:22 am

Anyway, here's a preview of what's coming soon. In this version, there should be no distortion, but if there is, feel free to let me know!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bad4uezpdydj9 ... 0.zip?dl=0

It worked great before streaming to the Quest over Wifi with ALVR but this fixed the Pimax 8k view. The upcoming crosshair fix will make it perfect.

Amazing work!

Is there any adjustment to make the crosshair center line up on the same spot in each eye without loosing stereo?

KydDynoMyte wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 03, 2020 6:52 am

Is there any adjustment to make the crosshair center line up on the same spot in each eye without loosing stereo?

Yes, set the HUD to 65535 in VR Params

Trev