How to play Dirt Rally via Windows Mixed Reality (WMR)

[Vortesz]

1. To be able to play Dirt Rally in real VR with your WMR headset you have to use a software called "Revive"

   
   which was originally made for Vive players to give them access to Occulus Rift titles. But it also works for WMR headsets.
   You can download it here: https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive/releases
   After downloading, start it and follow the install instructions. It will basically include itself into SteamVR.
   
   
2. The second step would be, that you download and install the software from Occulus rift aswell. After installing and starting it, create an account. BUT DON'T do the Rift Setup, that the software wants you to do after you made your account. Just skip that part.
   There is also a nice Youtube tutorial about how to get revive going, done by "MixedRealityTV".
   
   
   

   Now to the part concerning DirtRally in particular:

   
   
3. At First you have to go into the steam options and deactivate the Theatre mode for Dirt Rally.
   
   
4. Then you have to start the occulus program, which has to just be running in the background, followed by SteamVR.
   The Windows MR software aswell as Revive should start automaticaly together with SteamVR. If that is not the case, start them one by one.
   
   After that:
   
   
5. Rightklick on the Revive icon in your taskbar on the right side. (It might be hidden by the little arrow up)
   
   A few options should appear. Click on "patch". A file browser opens.
   Now you browse to where your Dirt Rally folder is located and select the file "drt.exe"
   in my case it can be found here: D:\Steam\steamapps\common\DiRT Rally\drt.exe
   Now patch that file with revive. (This has to be done only the first time you start dirt non occulus VR)
   
   
6. Last step:
   !From your desktop! start Dirt Rally as if it was not a VR game. Not from within VR!
   A warning might pop up, that says sth. about dirt running in desktopmode and that it could affect performance. Agree to start anyway.

The game should now start and your wmr headset should be in the game's own "theatre mode".
If it doesn't work right away, try rebooting the Computer first. That helped, when I configured my second PC for it.
The standard Key to center your View in this game is "Strg". Might be helpful to know.
The first thing you see is a sign to choose some kind of comfort mode. I got rid of that by klicking inside the windowed game on the computer screen and pushing any button after that.

From now on to start dirt rally in VR you only have to have the WMR portal running and klick on Dirt Rally in your steam library. Everything else happens automatically.

Real cockpit VR only starts, when you "enter the vehicle" all of the menu is shown on a virtual screen.

Enjoy !!! But be warned ... you'll never want to play it in pancake mode again. VR is the way it is meant to be played.

ps: the virtual steering wheel in game only turns the way your real wheel does, if you disable the hands and arms shown onscreen in the dirt rally menu.

[Hannibal]

Originally posted by Vortesz:

1. To be able to play Dirt Rally in real VR with your WMR headset you have to use a software called "Revive"

   
   which was originally made for Vive players to give them access to Occulus Rift titles. But it also works for WMR headsets.
   You can download it here: https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive/releases
   After downloading, start it and follow the install instructions. It will basically include itself into SteamVR.
   
   
2. The second step would be, that you download and install the software from Occulus rift aswell. After installing and starting it, create an account. BUT DON'T do the Rift Setup, that the software wants you to do after you made your account. Just skip that part.
   There is also a nice Youtube tutorial about how to get revive going done by "MixedRealityTV".
   
   
   

   Now to the part concerning DirtRally in particular:

   
   
3. At First you have to go into the steam options and deactivate the Theatre mode for Dirt Rally.
   
   
4. Then you have to start the occulus program, which has to just be running in the background, followed by SteamVR.
   The Windows MR software aswell as Revive should start automaticaly together with SteamVR. If that is not the case, start them one by one.
   
   After that:
   
   
5. Rightklick on the Revive icon in your taskbar on the right side. (It might be hidden by the little arrow up)
   
   A few options should appear. Click on "patch". A file browser opens.
   Now you browse to where your Dirt Rally folder is located and select the file "drt.exe"
   in my case it can be found here: D:\Steam\steamapps\common\DiRT Rally\drt.exe
   Now patch revive with that file. (This has to be done only the first time you start dirt non occulus VR)
   
   
6. Last step:
   !From your desktop! start Dirt Rally as if it was not a VR game. Not from within VR!
   A warning might pop up, that says sth. about dirt running in desktopmode and that it could affect performance. Agree to start anyway.

The game should now start and already and your wmr headset should be in the game's own "theatre mode".
The standard Key to center your View in this game is "Strg". Might be helpful to know.
The first thing you see is a sign to choose some kind of comfort mode. I got rid of that by hitting the space bar. After that it is business as usual.

Real cockpit VR only starts, when you "enter the vehicle" all of the menu is shown on a virtual screen.

Enjoy !!! But be warned ... you'll never want to play it in pancake mode again. VR is the way it is meant to be played.

ps: the virtual steering wheel in game only turns the way your real wheel does, if you disable the hands and arms shown onscreen in the dirt rally menu.

I've got most of the way through, but when I installed Revive, it doesn't show up in my systems tray and I can't right click and patch. Any ideas?

[Vortesz]

Originally posted by Hannibal:

I've got most of the way through, but when I installed Revive, it doesn't show up in my systems tray and I can't right click and patch. Any ideas?

Yes, there is a way to make it show up. Either it shows up, when you start SteamVR automatically or else
you can go to the folder you installed Revive to and start the 'ReviveOverlay.exe' manually.

I am not exactly sure, but I think that's how you get the system tray icon. It's been a while since I've done this myself. Let me know if it worked out.

[Hannibal]

Originally posted by Vortesz:

Originally posted by Hannibal:

I've got most of the way through, but when I installed Revive, it doesn't show up in my systems tray and I can't right click and patch. Any ideas?

Yes, there is a way to make it show up. Either it shows up, when you start SteamVR automatically or else
you can go to the folder you installed Revive to and start the 'ReviveOverlay.exe' manually.

Yeah I can pull up the Revive Overlay which shows me 4 Oculus apps, but theres no option to Locate a file or Patch a file. It looks like this and I can't right click to get any options https://imgur.com/a/y9KGMC3

[Vortesz]

So I had a look. The Revive Dashboard in the system tray shows up automatically, after I start:
1. Mixed Reality Portal
2. SteamVR

It should look something like this:

https://imgur.com/a/ufQVojs

Originally posted by Hannibal:

Originally posted by Vortesz:

Yes, there is a way to make it show up. Either it shows up, when you start SteamVR automatically or else
you can go to the folder you installed Revive to and start the 'ReviveOverlay.exe' manually.

Yeah I can pull up the Revive Overlay which shows me 4 Oculus apps, but theres no option to Locate a file or Patch a file. It looks like this and I can't right click to get any options https://imgur.com/a/y9KGMC3

So I had a look. The Revive Dashboard in the system tray shows up automatically, after I start:
1. Mixed Reality Portal
2. SteamVR

It should look something like this:

https://imgur.com/a/ufQVojs

[Hannibal]

Wow thanks! I got it work, but there is so much input lag I couldn't even do 30 seconds of a stage.

[Vortesz]

Originally posted by Hannibal:

Wow thanks! I got it work, but there is so much input lag I couldn't even do 30 seconds of a stage.

Nice to hear that it finally worked.
Well I don't know about that input lag. I have got none. Neither on my laptop, nor on my desktop PC. But on my last desktop PC setup it crashed quite often. A BIOS update fixed that.

Maybe managing the game's physics aswell as VR is too much for your PC. :/
If so, I would guess the Prossesor would be the bottleneck.

For comparison:
My laptop:
Intel I7 7700HQ 2,8Ghz
My Desktop:
AMD Ryzen 1800x 3,6Ghz
Both Systems with:
16GB DDR4
NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB

Everything works fluently and without input lag on both systems.

[Hannibal]

i5 4690k
NVidia GTX 970
16gb RAM

iRacing and American Truck sim I can run no problem. I had a Rift and it would run Dirt Rally without issues on the same system. It must be something within Revive.

[Vortesz]

Originally posted by Hannibal:

i5 4690k
NVidia GTX 970
16gb RAM

iRacing and American Truck sim I can run no problem. I had a Rift and it would run Dirt Rally without issues on the same system. It must be something within Revive.

hm, hard to tell ... like I said. I have got no issues. But if it basically runs in VR on your system the slight advancement in resolution should not make such a big difference.
Sorry I can't help you at this point since it just worked fine on my PCs.
Driver issues maybe ? I don't know. :(

I was only sharing the path It took me, with a lot of trial and error, to get Dirt Rally to work on WMR in the first place.

I found out, that actually I only have to start the "Mixed Reality Portal" and then start Dirt Rally from steam, and it launches in VR mode automatically, after I did all the things mentioned in this post. That is the last hint I can give you.

update:
I have got performance issues now aswell. Inside the car my real head movement and movement ingame aren't synchronized .... Like this it is no fun. It is causing headaches and screws up your times.
Something must have updated and made everything worse ...

[PawelK]

Ahh, just went through all the instructions including waiting like 20 minutes for Oculus software to download and install - great instructions by the way, thanks! And I am getting lack of sync of head movements in cockpit, the game is almost unusable. If you find a solution, can you please post it here?

[Vortesz]

Originally posted by PawelK:

Ahh, just went through all the instructions including waiting like 20 minutes for Oculus software to download and install - great instructions by the way, thanks! And I am getting lack of sync of head movements in cockpit, the game is almost unusable. If you find a solution, can you please post it here?

Thx, well, yesterday I updated my BIOS to the newest version and there was a revive update. Now it works fine again.

[PawelK]

Originally posted by Vortesz:

Thx, well, yesterday I updated my BIOS to the newest version and there was a revive update. Now it works fine again.

Do you mean Revive 1.6.1 - this version is listed as the newest and it's 13 days old. And that's what I installed yesterday. Or do you have access to a newer version?

[Vortesz]

That is very well possible, I haven't been home a lot lately, so my pc was off for maybe two weeks. But I think it was that Bios update, that helped.

[PawelK]

Thanks. My BIOS is not the newest but there are no updates for my mobo. I noticed I did not have the GPU driver updated, so I updated but it did not help. I guess I need to keep looking for a solution and fiddling with the settings. The game looks amazing in VR, if not for that visual stutter when I turn my head.

[sunToxx]

Thanks for the tutorial! Unfortunately I run into two problems. The first one isnt a big deal, head tracking is a bit skippy. Doenst matter though, as you dont move the head very much.

The other problem is realy bad though. Running Dirt Rally with revive on WMR (Acer) gives me a bluescreen within the first couple minutes of gameplay. Never getting bluescreens normaly. Not even when playing Dirt Rally without VR. Any ideas?

[Duke]

Jst a big thank you! I now have a great racing VR experience!
WMR lenovo explorer