[FIXED] Oculus mode within SteamVR dash not possible

[Daws]

Well, I love the tension that this little gem transmit, very good title.
I've a Rift, and many VIVE friends so I usually prefer to buy my title on Steam.
So I'm always using SteamVR dash to launch games, but I found that Dreadhalls do not have the option to use the Oculus mode from StemVR (it's ok in desktop client) so it uses OpenVR with wrong touch mapping.

Is there a way to fix it?

EDIT: Fixed by the option in the beta branch, maded by the developer. Excellent support!

[White Door Games]

Hi Daws.

Thanks for your feedback. The reason for this issue is because of how Steam VR and the Oculus runtime interact with each other: when you enter the Steam VR dash, Steam VR is taking exclusive control over the Oculus runtime, and so no other Oculus native game can be run until it releases this exclusive control.

That is why in order to launch an Oculus game you must first exit Steam VR (so that it frees the Oculus runtime to run other apps), and why there's no option to launch native Oculus apps from within. When you enter Steam VR, you're already committing to only run games over OpenVR.

Should this restriction change in the future, I'll make sure to take advantage of that so that this is no longer an issue, but this is largely out of the developers' hands.

[Daws]

Hi, thanks for reply.

Honestly I've to disagree, there's tons of steamvr games that use touch controller even when launched within steamvr dash, like RecRoom, Ultrawings, Pavlov, Onward, Project cars 2, and many more.
They perfectly use tumb stick and touch funcitions of the Oculus.
I guess you can do that with the Steam VR SDK.
You can have a look at a wiki list here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/wiki/steamgameswithnativesupport

Moreover to launch DreadHalls within SteamVR I use its desktop view to run a batch with:

steam://launch/589200/OtherVr

so it launch DreadHalls, perfectly using Oculus SDK.
It will be wellcome if was possible directly in the menu.


Regards.

[White Door Games]

I cannot speak for other games, but my understanding is that many games offer only a Steam VR compatible option, and while they also run on Oculus hardware and show the proper controllers, they are doing so under the Steam VR compatibility layer.

Rather than doing that, I decided to offer a native Oculus version of the game instead, so that it could run directly on the Oculus runtime and take advantage of Oculus specific features such as Timewarp, and don't suffer any performance hit from running under the compatibility layer.

(Edit: Also, some games support both native implementations from the same launch option, deciding which runtime to run on the fly. But due to Dreadhalls' having been originally developed without that option in mind, I judged the launch options to be the best and safest approach to allow players to choose the version of the game they wanted to run).

However, the option to launch the game in Oculus native mode is not available from within Steam VR. To clarify: I'm not removing this option from the menu myself. The Steam VR dash interface only shows the game's "Steam VR" launch options, and automatically hides the other ones.

In any case, I'll take a look again at this and go over the launch options documentation in case there was any change on this since I first released the game.

[Daws]

Thanks for your clarification, you show professionalism and attention to customers!

Just want to point that some games that use Oculus will not give you an option within SteamVR, but auto detect the headset and launch the proper version, you can tell seeing the Oculus white dash showup before starting the game.
A free app like Bigscreen act like this.

Anyway thanks for looking into it.

[White Door Games]

So, after looking more in depth into this, I'm now pretty sure I'm doing things the way Valve wants us to do it. While you can indeed launch Oculus native games from within the Steam VR dashboard, and it works as expected (and many games take advantage of this), it looks like Valve doesn't want us to do that, and that's why they automatically remove non-Steam VR launch options from the dashboard. (I assume this is because you lose access to the Steam VR dash while the Oculus game is running)

Because of that, and because I don't want to rely on undefined behavior, I'm afraid I won't be changing the existing launch options.

That said, I've added an additional launch option to run the game in Oculus mode, that should work from the Steam VR dash. This option will only be available in the "beta" branch, because I can't guarantee it to work in the long term future.

To opt-in:

• Right click Dreadhalls on the library list, select "Properties"
  
• Go to the "Betas" tab
  
• Select "beta - Public testing branch" from the dropdown
  
• Press the "Close" button
  
• Close and restart the Steam client to refresh the launch options

The new launch option will be the last one: "Launch Dredhalls (Oculus / Experimental) in Steam VR mode" (what a mouthful!)

It's not a perfect solution, and I'll keep an eye out for future updates on this, but I hope this fix will suffice for now!

[Daws]

Thanks for your attention.
I'll try asap, and reply back to you.

Probably another simple solution, whould be to have a launch option relative to the exe.
Many Unity games use "-vrmode oculus" arguments. So an user can manually add this arguments to the steam launch option in the game property, and whatever you launch it, it will be oculus native, IMHO.

Anyway your solution is more efficent.

[Daws]

Tryed the beta branch, works flawlessy!

Excellent customers support!
This attitude is not common, and very rare from developers.
Hats off to White Door Games developers!

Thanks, really appreciated!

[Daws]

Unfortunately it seems that the "experimental Oculus" option is gone now.
I wonder if steam auto hide this option by porpuse, if so it's a bit short-sighted, as Oculus is the major VR system used by Steam users..

Anyway thanks for the try, it's appreciated.

[White Door Games]

Hi Daws. That's strange, I just checked it and it still works for me.

Please make sure you are still on the "beta" branch, since I've noticed sometimes Steam can change you back to the main branch on its own. Also, after switching branches, you need to restart the Steam client for the launch options to refresh.
(Other than that, I'm not sure what might be the reason you don't see the option anymore).

[Daws]

Woops, you're right, after a rebbot I get the option. I don't know what was wrong, anyway thanks again gor your help.