Asymmetrical Games with Vive

[Astartes81]

Preamble:
I love the "VR Mode" currently with the Vive. I'm sure I'm in an extremely small minority here, in that I extend my Vive roughly 65' away from my PC to my living room. My living room is about x4 the size of my office where my PC is currently housed, plus it is more condusive to spectate others in VR. Using the SteamLink, I'm able to easily stream what is displayed within the Vive, so that others can watch what the person in VR is seeing/experiencing.

Issue:
There are a handful of games with asymmetrical gameplay as their focus. These include, but are certainly not limited to Blackhat Cooperative, The VR Diner Duo, and Panoptic. In my current setup, these games are not playable unless one player is in the other room sitting directly in front of the PC.

Ideally, I would like the second player (the non-VR player) to be able to have their view on the TV with a controller in-hand, while the VR player is in the same room. The hardware is there, the game is there, but there's clearly no support on the Steam side of things to accomplish this. In VR mode, the TV display is what the HMD is putting out. If I exit steam/big picture and try to view the desktop and somehow view the second display (what the non-VR player should see) it either doesn't display, or is totally unresponsive.

So not only does the second player need to see the secondary display that the game is already putting out, but they need control input through a game controller, keyboard, whatever that may be.

Has anyone put any thought in to this, or do they know of a possible solution? Again, I realize this is a very specific situation.

[slouken]

This is on our TODO list, thanks!

[Rubin110]

I've been scratching my head at this problem for the last 30 minutes incidentally enough as I'm in the same boat as the original poster. I had previously been using the trick of starting In Home Streaming, exiting Big Picture, then starting Steam VR that way to provide some notion of spectator mode and provide asymmetrical play.

I appreciate the more polished spectator mode provided in an update to Steam Link a few months ago, but it seems like there's no way to exit out of it and back to the desktop while streaming for asymmetrical play.

It's god to hear correcting this is on the road map for Valve.

My current workaround is to use something like Window's built in remote desktop, or Google Remote Desktop (which offers a slight bit better frame rate) on a laptop, then plug that into my projector in the living room. It's not great but for something like Blackhat Cooperative it's good enough.

[slouken]

Oh, this is actually implemented for Diner Duo in the current Steam beta client. What other games need to have this added? I can hook it up easily.

This should already work for Diner Duo and Panoptic, and I just set this for Black Hat Cooperative, so it should work soon. You may have to log back into Steam to pick up the change immediately.

[Astartes81]

I've been away for awhile and just saw this thread pick back up. Those are the three that come to mind initially, Diner Duo, Panoptic, and Black Hat Cooperative. Is this a per-app change or will this be a system wide change in the future?

Edit: Does this also mean that the 2nd "PC Player" will be able to have direct input (i.e. with a steam controller, or keyboard) from the SteamLink as well?

[slouken]

Originally posted by coreytn81:

I've been away for awhile and just saw this thread pick back up. Those are the three that come to mind initially, Diner Duo, Panoptic, and Black Hat Cooperative. Is this a per-app change or will this be a system wide change in the future?

Edit: Does this also mean that the 2nd "PC Player" will be able to have direct input (i.e. with a steam controller, or keyboard) from the SteamLink as well?

It's a per-app change, and means that the Steam Link player can control the game as though they were sitting at the computer, interacting with the player in VR.

[Astartes81]

Awesome! In the future, would it be in a developer's best interest to reach out to Valve in order to have this feature right out of the gate? I'm just curious.

[slouken]

Originally posted by coreytn81:

Awesome! In the future, would it be in a developer's best interest to reach out to Valve in order to have this feature right out of the gate? I'm just curious.

Yes, of course. We just added a Steamworks API so the application can control this at runtime as well.

[Rubin110]

slouken: This is awesome to hear. Thank you!

[Rubin110]

I'm at work right now, but believe Fantastic Contraption has its own special spectator mode which allows free camera movement of some sort.

I know that Home Improvisation has a special spectator interacts with the players world mode.

Pretty sure I'm missing about 5 other games in my library, I'll update here when I see them.

It would also be nice if the Steam Link user could simply turn off this feature and jump to the desktop somehow.

[Rubin110]

Heh, there are indeed more games, some I didn't even know about (and am buying now)...

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=Asymmetric&vrsupport=101

[XILR8]

I have the same setup as OP only about 30' away but for the same reasons. I am currently having the same issue just trying to do the room setup, when I did it a year ago this auto VR mode wasn't a thing. Please can we get a "back to desktop" feature! TY!

[Malikk]

Would be really nice to be able to just run the steam link as if I wasn't in vr. Room setup especially is a big pain as is since all my tv displays is a message to remove the headset.

[shoffing]

+1 to this!! I'd like to run Oculus Mirror for streaming to my TV, but there is no option to turn off Steam VR with the Steam Link. I'd like to use Oculus Mirror because the SteamVR viewer isn't centered vertically, but OculusMirror.exe is and it looks much better for spectators. Please add an option to disable Steam Link SteamVR integration!