Another stab at NR2003? (using TrackIR)

[derekp]

So a few years ago I stumbled across the NR2003 profile made for VorpX By TheBenCrazy and gave it a try (see here for details https://www.vorpx.com/forums/topic/nascar-racing-2003-season-possible/). It’s impressive what VorpX was able to do with that old game! I got everything working, but unfortunately it only supports 3DOF (rotation only), not 6DOF (rotation and translation), and as I tend to move my head around a lot while racing that didn’t take long to cause VR motion sickness for me (something I’ve never experienced with any other VR game). So because of that I had to give up on the dream of running NR2003 with the full VR experience and settle for Cinema mode.

Now here a few years later, I loaded VorpX again to play Cyberpunk and in the process I noticed there is now a feature to utilize TrackIR support in games that have support for that device built into it. Well NR2003 had support for it as well (see games list here on their site – https://www.trackir.com/games) so I figured it should be an option, however it doesn’t show up.

So the million dollar question for Ralf – would it be possible to create a new official profile for that game that can utilize the game’s TrackIR support to provide full 6DOF tracking in Direct VR mode? The current profile TheBenCrazy built relies on a mod called NRCamHack that allows the headset tracking to emulate mouse movement, but I’m thinking if you can instead use the TrackIR API it should allow 6DOF? At least that’s my hope, but I’m not a game dev so I can’t say for sure. TrackIR site says the game supported for 6DOF with TrackIR so I figured there’s at least a chance.

thanks!

[Ralf]

If the game has TrackIR support, you should be able to easily switch it on yourself in the vorpX ingame menu. vorpX can detect if TrackIR is available in a game and displays according options in the menu in that case.

[derekp]

Ralf wrote:

If the game has TrackIR support, you should be able to easily switch it on yourself in the vorpX ingame menu. vorpX can detect if TrackIR is available in a game and displays according options in the menu in that case.

Hi Ralf, thanks for the reply!

So I checked again, but TrackIR doesn’t show up as an option under the “Head Tracking Settings” menu. It only shows the standard HT options (Head Tracking On/Off, HT Sensitivity, etc.). I was on version 21.3.5 so I tried 24.1.0 just to see if that made a difference, but it didn’t. I do know the VorpX TrackIR feature can work on my system, cause it does show up as an option when I try running the game rFactor, so it’s something about NR2003 that it’s not seeing TrackIR is integrated into the game. I guess one other thing I should mention is that we’re (the community that still plays this 20yr old sim) using this d3d8 to d3d9 wrapper to get it running in dx9, as the game was a dx 8.1 title – https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9. Not sure if that has anything to do with the issues.

If you have the time to look into it, you can acquire the game for free and get it up and running from the directions on this page – https://drnoisepaints.com/index.php/how-tos/installing-nr2003-in-2022/. It’s considered “abandonware” now so there’s no need to buy it (they don’t sell it anymore anyway), and the key everyone uses is a key support used to give out to people who lost their original one. Happy to answer any questions or help with setup if you decide to give it a go. If you could get Full VR working on this sim you’d definitely have the gratitude of a few 1000 people that still play it :LOL:

[Ralf]

Please first double check whether the game really has TrackIR support. If you are 100% sure about that, check whether you maybe have to enable it somewhere in the game options. In some games it’s not on per default. If TrackIR is actually enabled in a game, vorpX does auto-detect it reliably under normal circumstances.

If it still doesn’t work once you are sure TrackIR is both available and actually enabled, the only thing I can possibly imagine is that maybe this specific game implements TrackIR differently than newer games with TrackIR support. Not much could be done in that case unfortunately.

[derekp]

I see, ok I’ll do some research into it and see what I can find. Beyond that one page on the TrackIR site that I found which says it’s supported, I haven’t found anything else with details about it (that page just says the game supports all 6 DOF, but no details on how to enable or install or anything). Since the game was released in 2002, it’s entirely possible Win10 just doesn’t play nicely with the older version of the API it’s using. I’ll see what I can find and get back to you.

[Author]

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