- This topic has 12 replies, 8 voices, and was last updated Mar 10, 2023 2:12pm by
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Just a head-up that the next beta will be out towards the end of the week.
After some of you made me aware that not every monitor gets detected as off by Windows automatically, I had to come up with something better in terms of switching between the physical and virtual monitor. After all the virtual monitor is intended to make things easier, having to physically disconnect a monitor, turning it off in the Windows settings manually, or fumbling around with the quirks an invisible secondary screen implies very clearly is not.
So I pretty much spent the last four weeks honing a mechanism that let’s you super easily switch between the virtual and physical display on the fly via software. Also the desktop viewer and the virtual display are a true power couple now. Provided your headset is able to detect whether it is in use or not (most are), for example the desktop viewer can switch between the virtual and the physical display automatically when you put the headset on or take it off. Won’t get easier than that.
Having a super high res monitor that runs at exact the same refresh rate as your headset makes desktop capturing a much, much more desirable option for playing games in VR than it was ever before. And even if you don’t really want to use the desktop viewer itself much, you still should use it as a launchpad for hooking into games. Firing up the desktop viewer automatically gives you all the benefits of the virtual display without having to care about anything else.
Switching monitors via software sounded simple enough and was in general. But as usual the devil was in the details. Changing the display configuration is not to be taken lightly, so an unhealthy amount of time had to be spent ensuring that under (hopefully) no circumstances – not even in case of a hard system crash – you could end up with a broken display config. Not exacly fun sinking about 100 hours into stuff that noone will ever notice, but better than you potentially being greeted with a black screen after a system crash, or a messed up multi-monitor configuration, or even just displaced desktop icons for that matter – something Windows loves to do when switching displays.
On a more interesting note from a user’s perspective: during the process the desktop viewer learned a few new tricks, reflecting the greater importance it will have from now on. E.g. it can now display UAC prompts (the thing Windows displays whenever an app needs admin rights), super useful for older games that may require admin rights, as well as for doing general work with the desktop viewer.
Release of the new beta will probably be on Friday. Time for some fun stuff until then, most importantly a buch of new gestures some of you had suggested.
I’m very excited about this. Wanted to be able to turn off my monitor, while playing in vorpX, for a long time now. And looking forward to the new Desktop Viewer as well – in the past i’ve had trouble playing SBS content judder free in most viewers, maybe this one will be smooth…
Just to double check, Ralf: You wrote earlier that the AUTO-SWITCH detection of WMR when wearing the HMD should be DISABLED, so to avoid WMR messing with M+KB when using vorpX. Will the auto-detection for switching monitors still work with my Reverb G2 when WMR’s option is disabled?
Haven’t tried my G2 headset yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’m fairly certain that it will work just fine. Would be a surprise if it didn’t.
A little addendum: I actually had the idea with the auto switching based on headset activity just yesterday while typing my post above, but was confident enough that it would work fine to still write it down as it had already been done. Today I actually did it first thing in the morning and all I can say is:
It’s freaking awesome! (sorry for the self praise).
You launch the desktop viewer, put on the headset and without having to do anything at all you have a display capable of running all the resolutions vorpX may want at the refresh rate of your headset. It just works. This is such a major leap in user friendliness for less tech savvy users that I could club myself over the head for not having the idea at least five years ago. No more fumbling around with custom resolutions ever. Not to mention AMD users, who couldn’t even really do that to the ideal exent.
On a side note: big thanks to everyone who made me aware that the ‘switch off monitor’ method doesn’t always work. While that was already quite nice in principle, in addition to the techical problems with older/less feature rich monitors it also had the obvious drawback of having to know about it, which often enough is the biggest hurdle when it comes to grasping the full potential of vorpX, no matter how many hints and messages are displayed for particular features. So this is sooooo much better. Was worth every second of time poured into creating the prerequisites for this final step over the last weeks. And then some.
You’ll love it. Promise.
I’m currently playing The Witcher 3 with the regular version, so i won’t be updating in the next weeks…
But i wanted to say how much i appreciate your work on this awesome piece of software. Kudos!
Just heads-up that there will be the “usual” delay of a few days. Someday I’ll learn not to be too optimistic when it comes to release date announcements. Or maybe not. :)
During testing yesterday I discovered a GPU memory leak when switching displays while the desktop viewer is running. Since this happens quite frequently when the display is switched automatically by putting on/taking off the headset I’d like to spend a bit more time on hunting this down before I resort to restarting the viewer each time a display change occurs. On the upside the search for the pesky little sucker of a bug already lead to a few optimizations in terms of general GPU memory usage, which are quite useful for those who want to run super high resolutions. Under extreme conditions (8K) up to a whopping 2GB more space for games.
Probably not.
The memory leak has been fixed, but meanwhile I discovered even more edge cases that have to be taken care of in regard to the virtual display auto switching. Changing the display configuration so that nothing is displayed on the actual monitor – without an option to simply pull a plug in case of emergency – is such a delicate matter that I have to be reasonably sure there is no way to mess things up permanently even if something unexpected happens. For example this very moment I’m working on proper cleanup if someone sends their PC into standby from the desktop viewer while only the virtual display is connected. Lots and lots of potentially dangerous edge cases like that have to be considered.
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