Now Playing Bug

[Ben Sneed]

When im playing a vr game after about 5 minutes it will take me to a place with light blue fade backround and have a floating sign saying: Now playing. With a dark blue v with a blue backround. I dont know what it is playing but it makes vr practicly impossible to use

[BOLL]

It's the new loading screen, if it appears mid gameplay it's usually because your system is running at maximum capacity. Did you notice your CPU peaking or anything? Which game did you play?

[Ben Sneed]

I have so far I have had this problem with onward and hotdogs horseshoes and horse grenades. And what would "CPU peaking or anything?" look like?

Originally posted by BOLL:

It's the new loading screen, if it appears mid gameplay it's usually because your system is running at maximum capacity. Did you notice your CPU peaking or anything? Which game did you play?

[BOLL]

Basically if you have 100% CPU load constantly, you can see that in any system monitor, Task Manager comes with Windows (press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, see Performance tab). For myself I've mostly noticed this in games with heavy CPU-based physics interactions like stuff that breaks and tumbles.

It could also be some other application in the background that is taking up resources, but that's for you to find out I guess :)

[Ben Sneed]

I did a match on onward to test it and when it had the now playing...thing these were that cpu stats: 36.1% for onward, 13.1% for the steam client bootstrapper, vr server 10%. Everything else was really 0 or a rare 0.1 and the cpu total was about 80 something. Is there a way to fix it with this information?

Originally posted by BOLL:

Basically if you have 100% CPU load constantly, you can see that in any system monitor, Task Manager comes with Windows (press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, see Performance tab). For myself I've mostly noticed this in games with heavy CPU-based physics interactions like stuff that breaks and tumbles.

It could also be some other application in the background that is taking up resources, but that's for you to find out I guess :)

[rusty_dragon]

I confirm this now playing bug. There are two cases when it happens:

1)Loading of game that already has loading screen. Sometimes game loaded on the monitor, but SteamVR stuck to Now Playing.

2) If game blackens out to SteamVR Now Playing sometimes(and it happens quite often) it doesn't returns to game, while game is doing fine on the monitor. And there is no way to solve it, except retarting game. And it's very annoying because happens often.

[rusty_dragon]

Ow, nive now it happens all the time. I can't play game because of it at all.

Is there any way to disable "Now Playing" menu to show up?

[John平]

I have the exact same issue... I have it with Subnautica, the problem is : I didn't had that bug before... And I checked and I can tell you my CPU is not at 100%... It's under 50% of use when it happen so..The game is stored in a SSD so I doubt it's a loading problem..
Sometime when it load game content it show a similar menu with the subnautica Icon (and it's laggy) but once that empty "Now Playing" message is showed then I can't get my game back... I need to alt-F4 it and relaunch it...
Yesterday I played the game for 4 hours without any trouble and today if I'm lucky I can play for 5 min(already tried to reboot and all)... I didn't had that problem a mounth ago...

GTX1080
i5-6600
16GB (DDR4)
Standard SSD

[Orfevs]

Same issue, Subnautica. "Now playing" just keeps on going.
When previous lag spikes appeared, I fell back to the Steam VR room for a slight moment. That was acceptable, because I went right back into the game even if it remained in lag mode. Pausing the game and waiting out was the usual way. Now it doesn't return, and while the screen is showing a working game, the HMD remains in "now playing" mode.

So I ask: do I need a whole screen telling me what game I am now playing?

HTC Vive
GTX 970
i7 @4Ghz
16Gb DDR3
Raptor installed. Don't want to chew up my SSD to updates..

[oisin]

Same thing showing up when playing pavlov. Not a system resource issue. I'd love to know what slack jawed genius thought this screen was a good idea

[drclawscat]

I started getting this glitch on some recent update. Happens frequently in most games but goes away after a second. Really annoying. Raw Data in the Skybound level is the worst and I can't finish it since the game won't come back. Tried adjusting super sampling rates, reprojection options, etc, but it still occurs. Took off my gfx card overclock but didn't help.

6600k @ 4.5Ghz
STRIX 1080 GTX OC @1950
16gb DDR4
2x 1TB SSD
HTC VIVE

[Xoltri]

So I did extensive testing with this tonight and I think I've determined that the issue only happens in the SteamVR Beta version. As you describe the issue is that the game will drop back to the loading environment randomly, and in some cases I have had it never come back to the game (for example, in Budget Cuts Demo).

The bug can be easily replicated in RacketNX. When you first load the game and are in the menu area, if you waggle the controller between the various options you can get it to drop out to the 'Now Playing' screen fairly consistently. However with the non beta SteamVR I could not replicate the issue.

Here's some data when it does happen: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4OJrjRwkZroUUIySU9WV3RXcDg

You can see on the spreadsheet on frame 26294 the data goes wonky. This is when it dropped back to the now playing screen.

For reference, I have a Strix 1070, i5 6600k, 16gb Ram. I also have two SSD's on this machine and have experienced the issue running games off of both of them. This issue is new - never experienced it before recently.

[drclawscat]

Thanks for the info, this it's really helpful. I'll try running the same test with the beta removed and see if things are fixed!

[jashan]

Unfortunately, Valve apparently has updated the SteamVR default branch today, without fixing that issue before. So now, you cannot opt-out of beta to workaround the issue.

So far, I actually only saw players using Oculus Rift running into this issue (I'm talking about: framedrops causing the "waiting screen" to appear but SteamVR not returning - so the game is still running just fine, often without any more dropped frames but SteamVR does not show the game anymore and never, or only after a very long time, returns).

[WilderBeetroot]

That makes sense then. I got my headset yesterday and it was working perfectly and now today every game gets this now playing bug. Any other ways to fix this now that rolling back doesn't work?

[jashan]

I hope that someone from Valve will get back to us ... I'll also send them an email pointing to this thread (and the others about the issue).