Something wicked this way comes

OMG it's been a month already since my latest post O_O

Sorry folks for making you wait so long. But you know the drill by now. If I disappear for several weeks, it's because I'm working on some new contraption in my secret underground lab, where the Sun never shines and there's no distinction anymore between the real world and the virtual one.

And the longer I disappear, the bigger is the thing I'm working on.

This one is BIG. Like, maybe you thought the FOV optimizations (a.k.a. the free GPU upgrade) were big. Think again. This one is gonna change your experience so much, you might want to restart a full playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 just to see it in this new way. Yes, yet another playthrough ;-)

But enough with the teasing. It still needs a lot of polishing, and though I don't know exactly when, it's my intention to release this in time for Christmas, and to package it with a huge new mod that will really showcase the new tech. So much eye candy, we'll all get virtual diabetes!

In the meantime, I know that many of you have been patiently waiting for fixes to a few games that have been broken by recent updates. Yes, there's always the workaround of downgrading the game and/or the mod version when something breaks, but I like to keep on top of things so that playing a modded game in VR is as hassle-free as possible.

So, the changelog for release 15.0.0 (zip file attached at the bottom of this post) is as follows:

• Star Wars Outlaws: the mod fully supports the latest version of the game, and all the problems introduced by the official update have been fixed.

• Far Cry titles: I fixed a regression where the games would not enter VR at launch, and/or would default to the highest resolution with the menus not easily accessible.

• Uncharted: I fixed a weird issue where the camera would get stuck looking at the character's feet (or if you were playing with inverted Y-axis, high above the character's head), especially when playing at high pixel-per-degree densities. This one took me a long time to root cause. Of all things, it turned out to be a problem with the placement of the game window on the monitor, which made the game erroneously think there was constant vertical mouse input.

• Elden Ring: the third-party mod to enable DLSS was no longer working correctly after the recent changes, both to the game and to my code. Since the third-party mod has been replaced with a new version, ERSS-FG, I decided to update my hooks so they would be compatible with their new release. Please do NOT follow their official instructions to install, not because they're wrong, but because they would lead to a conflict with my own system as we both need to disable the anti-cheat protection (mods don't work online of course).
  What you want to do instead for installation is: 1. unpack their archive into the ELDEN RING\Game folder so that ERSS-FG.dll is on the same level as eldenring.exe; 2. delete their dxgi.dll, which will automatically be replaced by mine when you use my launcher; 3. run the game briefly (you don't need to play, just get to the initial menu) so that an ERSS-FG.toml file is generated inside the ERSS2 subfolder; 4. open this ERSS-FG.toml with a text editor like Notepad and in the first section change ImGuiUseGamepadNav to true, then save the file.
  Note that the ERSS-FG blue configuration overlay will only appear on the desktop and not in the VR view, and that it will not accept keyboard or mouse input (that's why you need to edit the .toml file so that it will be navigable with the gamepad).
  Frame generation as usual won't work in VR. DLSS works though, and adds a few fps which are surely beneficial for an engine as poorly optimized as the Elden Ring one. There, I said it. I don't know what happened to FromSoftware. Their engines used to run so well, then when they made the port to DirectX 12 they messed it up completely. Not in the graphics quality sense: it does look ravishing. But it just doesn't scale when you are pushing for high resolution and frame rate, because for some unfathomable reason they decided to perform and submit all rendering on a single CPU thread, which is exactly the opposite of what Direct3D 12 was designed for.

• Grounded: the game works correctly in single-player with this release, but unfortunately I was unable to fix the multiplayer woes. In MP the VR player will have his world view headlocked, and the non-VR players will be unable to interact with objects. If there is a lot of interest, I might take another stab at fixing it after the big Christmas release :-)

• Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered: this is not technically part of the changelog, but I wanted to update you on my findings. Despite being called a "remaster", the title uses quite different code. It's basically as though HZD had been ported over to the HFW engine. So unfortunately it's not an easy fix to make it work in VR. I might still do it if you're curious to do another playthrough with the new graphics, or for people who never played the original, but it will essentially be like modding a new game with a known engine.

• Miscellaneous: the usual general maintenance needed to keep everything in working order, this time especially intense because of the upcoming new tech (which is the reason for the major version bump to 15).

  That's it for now. Back to my secret underground lair!!