Technical Overview?

[yonkiman]

I want to say right off that vorpX is an amazing accomplishment. I’ve got the basic view working in Fallout New Vegas (the game I bought vorpX for) and it is fan-freaking-tastic. Overlays, Pip-Boy, Weapons, etc. are still a mess, and I’m trying to get them dialed in (that’s what prompted this post).

I may have missed something, but I’ve looked through all the FAQs and I don’t see a clear overview of how vorpX works and what the different settings do. There’s lots of “try <this thing> if you have <this problem> with <this game>”, but ideally I’d like to have a better understand of what’s going on so it will be easier for me to figure out my own problems without spamming the forum.

For example: It seems like a “Direct VR Scan” is a really good thing to do. Why? What does that set-up/enable? Why does it always fail when I try to do it with Fallout New Vegas? Is there something I can do to make it more likely to work?

Is there any way to view the contents of a Game Profile? When I export one, it’s a binary so I can’t see or compare settings.

Essential Hints (READ THIS!) says “If available for a game, use vorpX’s Direct VR feature to automatically set the FOV to the correct value.” How do I know if Direct VR is automatically setting FOV or if I need to set it in my game?

Game resolution should be 4:3 or 5:4, and there are some good instructions on how to create custom resolutions, but I also saw that vorpX may override the resolution chosen. How do I know if it did? If it did, why did it?

I’m sure I’ll figure some of this out over time by osmosis and trial and error, but I’d appreciate having a better understanding of the Big Picture so I can flail less and start shitting my pants from being attacked by life-size Deathclaws more.

Cheers!

[Ralf]

First: for Fallout New Vegas you literally don’t have to do anything apart from running the Direct VR scan when you enter the game. That’s one of the games that pretty much have all the bells and whistles that are possible. The HUD overlay can be scaled further in the vorpX menu if the default scaling is not what you prefer. For the Pipboy use EdgePeek mode (mouse wheel/right thumbstick/right VR controller grip button click). That is the best method by far to using the PipBoy.

Direct VR is a collection of technically very different features that all have the goal of making automated changes for better VR. That includes automatically adjusting the resolution, optimizing the camera FOV, providing the best possible head tracking or applying tweaks that are useful for VR. The Direct VR scanner for example can provide FOV adjustment and perfect 1:1 head tracking by directly accessing a game’s memory.

What DirectVR features are available for a game (if any) is shown on the Direct VR page of the vorpX ingame menu.

All you need to know about custom resolutions is explained in the “Custom Resolutions” section of the help. It contains a list of resolutions to add and step-by-step instructions how to add them. For FO:NV that is not required, but for many other games adding custom resolutions helps Direct VR to automatically choose the best possible resolution for a game by making resolutions available that normally aren’t.

[Tiggerdyret]

Try making direct scan without a controller plugged in and make sure to not touch the mouse while scanning. Some games often fail at scanning when you are near walls. Try to go to an open area.

[yonkiman]

Thanks for the quick replies! I just got my Rift and vorpX so I’m still very new to this.

I was able to get Direct VR Scan to work when I launched a vanilla version of FNV, so I’m making progress. Modded version launches and runs fine except it fails Position when I do a Scan. Getting away from the walls didn’t seem to help, but for now I’ll just try to get the unmodded game working right.

Along those lines, I have a few questions:

1) vorpX added iSize lines in falloutprefs.ini to change screen resolution from 1920×1440 to 1703×1362. That’s not an Nvidia resolution on my PC – do I need to make a custom resolution for it? Is 1703×1362 a reasonable resolution? You don’t normally see odd numbers for horizontal resolution.

2) What other fallout.ini / falloutprefs.ini values does vorpX change? I’m often tweaking those files so it would be good to know what’s getting overridden.

3) Do I need to do a Direct VR Scan every time I start the game, or does it remember once a scan completes successfully?

4) What does “partially cached” mean?

5) Since Direct VR Scan works for unmodded FNV, is there a way to somehow apply that setting to my modded FNV?

6) My PipBoy is still enormous. I’m pretty sure I could change that with fPipboy1stPersonFOV, but every time I launch the game vorpX changes fPipboy1stPersonFOV back to 47. Is there a way for me to change the FOV?

Thanks again

[Ralf]

You don’t have to care about the resolution aside from choosing a preferred quality. You can be sure that vorpX chooses a resolution that works well. I hope it’s undesrstandable that I can’t explain every single detail that vorpX does. If you want to revert the changes made by vorpX, you can restore the prior state in the vorpX config app with a single click (‘Restore Game Settings’ page).

Partially cached in case of FalloutNV means that the DirectVR FOV does not have to be scanned every time since it is cached. DirectVR head tracking requires scanning after entering the game.

For the Pipboy please switch to EdgePeek mode like described above. The purpose of EdgePeek is to help with menus that are hard to see/navigate otherwise. It’s also more comfortable since it let’s you look around instead of having the Pipboy screen glued to your face.

[yonkiman]

Ralf, I totally understand that you can’t explain everything it does – I’m still just trying to understand the big picture.

So my current understanding is that the way the FNV Pipboy is supposed to work in vorpX (with vanilla game and default vorpX settings) is that when the pipboy pops up, it will be larger than your viewing area, and the player then uses EdgePeek to shrink it down to a more manageable size. Is that correct?

And the overlay (the data displayed on the pipboy) is no longer “connected to” the rendering of your left arm & pipboy. If this is as good as it gets, I can live with it (as I said earlier, it’s already a miracle how well this works in normal play), but if there’s a way to render the pipboy and its display as one coordinated, visible, not-too-big object, I’d like to at least try that option as well.

[prinyo]

yonkiman wrote:

5) Since Direct VR Scan works for unmodded FNV, is there a way to somehow apply that setting to my modded FNV?

You will need to disable mods and test in order to find out the mod that is incompatible. For the Bethesda games the usual suspects are mods that change anything about the camera or the player character. So any camera mod or a first person mod can be the problem.

[Tiggerdyret]

Get the game running with DirectVR without mods and then add mods a few at a time and isolate the mod that is making trouble. Another idea would be to make a DirectVR scan and toggle back between manual and DirectVR and tweak it little by little to make it look and feel like DirectVR without having to do the scan. This would make it possible to run the mods that makes your scan fail. I’m assuming you are using the mods from my old NV Vorpx guide. Whether you need these mods now that everything has been streamlined is another story!
I remember a cool side effect of positional tracking was that your head wasn’t attached to your guns, so you actually had to look down the sights to aim. Just out of curiosity does it still work like that after the DirectVR scan?

[yonkiman]

Just getting back to this – thanks for all the suggestions. I’m going to close this thread and start asking more targeted questions in Technical Support.

[Wintermane]

Ahhh baloney! It does NOT work out of the box. It’s not even VR 3D, its 2D in cinema mode! My normal FONV works fine both standalone and through ModOrganizer. I’m using 17.3.2. I’ve tried every other profile in the cloud, and those don’t work either (not that there is a lot of them). As the original poster mentioned, the profiles are all binary files, so there is no “tweaking”, you make a change in the game, save it, exit, export it. The help is practicaly non-existant as far as documentation and what each setting might possibly do. The Skyrim game works (ish… lots of black flickering), Deus Ex HR works sort of, can’t adjust the vertical centering, just the horizontal. Dishonored has an inverted picture flickering in the upper left corner of the left eye (taking up 1/4 of the viewing area). Still haven’t been able to even launch Fallout 3 GOTY! It just sits in the task manager after vorpx “attaches” itself to it. I have a HTC Vive with Fallout 4 VR, and it works fine (Alienware system 16 gigs of ram with Radeon RX 580 and latest drivers). In other words, it’s not the system, it’s the software. I expected to have to tweak some settings, but they are not even close for FONV! The DirectVR mode doesn’t work either, in fact it makes things worse (in just about every game). So far I’m not impressed in the slightest.

[Ralf]

There is no need to tweak any vorpX settings for Fallout 3/NV. Please don’t use cloud profiles for games like Fallout 3/NV if you are just starting with vorpX. If a profile already exists in the local database, there usually is no need to use a cloud profile. With default settings these games have full Geometry 3D (the scene is rendered twice exactly like native VR apps) and also do not open in cinema mode. Direct VR provides a perfectly calculated field of view and perfect, low latency 1:1 head tracking without you having to adjust any settings at all in these games.

Might make sense to do a factory reset before you proceed. You can do that in the config app (trouble shooting page). Both the vorpX ingame menu and the config app have tooltips for most settings that briefly explain what a setting does. Do not tweak too much though, it’s very easy to do more harm than good as a beginner.

If you have trouble with vorpX attaching to games or the Direct VR scan running successfully, please check for potential injection conflicts with other programs on your PC, that is by far the most likely cause for such an issue. Typical candidates are first and foremost overzealous virus scanners, also any GPU/CPU utility, video recording/streaming software, messengers and generally everything that can display notifications in games.

Last, but not least: if you have modded your games, please try a fresh, completely unaltered install to make sure that no mods interfere. Then add your mods back one by one. Some mods (e.g. graphics mods like ENB) have a high potential of causing conflicts with vorpX since they hook into the rendering pipeline the same way that vorpX does. Others, e.g. camera mods or memory optimizing mods, may interfere with Direct VR head tracking and/or FOV adjustment.

[Author]

Posts