State of Linux VR / New SDK

[FictionX]

Has support for SteamVR stopped? I'm not sure if I'm reading the forum correctly, but it looks like the last post from Programmer Joe was Oct. 1th?

VR doesn't work correctly for me in Linux. VR mode shows the picture vertically (I know that's how the screen is - but it used to switch to the correct horizontal mode automatically), and HL2 doesn't show up on the rift. It also has no positional tracking, which has been available with the (albeit "experimental") SDK since October.


Have Valve given up on Oculus/VR?

[DirtyCamper]

Getting the rift to work at all with the DK2 sdk is a pain. The DK1 sdk works fine.
But somewhere it seams valve added something which makes all rift things not work anymore :-(. I get the feeling they are doing DK2 stuff while the DK2 stuff is not up to par.

[FictionX]

Yeah.. I kind of understand them not bothering to mess with the current SDK's, since they seem to have all kinds of issues (namely "judder") - and as mentioned, the Linux SDK is still marked as experimental.

I just wish they would let people know what to expect. Claiming to support something and then not really doing it is never good, and I'm afraid It'll hurt VR by having people write it off as something that could be fun, but isn't really working properly.

Oculus is doing sort of the same thing as Valve is now doing by not really communicating with users, and not addressing the issues that people are facing with the Rift.

[johnny2k]

Got my DK2 last night and was able to get the SDK 0.4.4-beta compiled. The oculus can be configured as is explained in the documentation. Steam big picture/VR works just fine. HL 2 can be configured to enable VR mode but when I launch the game all I get is some stuttering audio for a few seconds and a black screen. The audio eventually becomes normal but nothing I did would produce game video. There are a few more things I found that I can try later tonight but I'm guessing we won't have proper VR support in HL 2 until the Oculus Runtime for Linux is released.

Other software worked very well except for the judder effect. JanusVR and the Oculus desk demo were both decent.

I also discovered a Linux specific Oculus sub-reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus_linux/
If I am able to get something working I'll post again.

[DirtyCamper]

Actually the runtime support for linux exists already. It was not needed prior to the 0.4 series sdk. And linux support for the new SDK exists since 0.4.3, and works for me since 0.4.4 .
oculusd is started from my xsessionrc.

On the 0.4.4 SDK in the ConfigUtil I get a stroboscopic effect, but the rendering is instant. It looked much better (except for the stroboscope) than testing it on a windows computer with an nvidia card... :-).

Anyway: HL2 used to work perfectly.

[johnny2k]

I was able to get HL2 working finally. The instructions I followed were old and required opting into a beta version for VR support. After disabling opting out of the beta mode and launching from big picture mode it worked really well.

[Cheeseness]

johnny2k: Does Big Picture's VR mode still behave correctly for you? Do you manually rotate your Rift in your display drivers' settings (the 0.4.4 SDK readme says that this is not recommended, and it prevents the ConfigUtil's demo from launching)?

I'm able to get VR mode working in Big Picture once, but after closing it, I have to restart my machine before it'll recognise the device again. Does this match your experiences?