Hammering and chiseling

This is a between-mods release, with several important fixes and improvements.

I recommend everybody to upgrade, no matter which conversions you are currently playing. As usual, if you find any problems please let us know!

Release 12.3.1 changelog

• Hogwarts Legacy: This release fully restores VR functionality that had been broken by the game latest official update. Additionally, the R.E.A.L. mod now supports all forms of upsampling implemented by the game (except of course for frame generation which is essentially incompatible with VR). DLSS should no longer cause problems, even with the sharpness set to non-zero values. Also, take a look at NIS, the new spatial upsampling technique by NVIDIA. It doesn't rely on previous frames, unlike TAA or DLSS, so it works perfectly with AER v2 and has almost zero ghosting!

• NVIDIA Streamline: Starting from this release, it should no longer be necessary to delete or rename files like "sl.interposer.dll" in order to prevent crashes or freezes with the R.E.A.L. mod. Please report back if that works for you or not, as the crashes were system-dependent and as such quite difficult to diagnose.

• Phantom Ctrl key presses: This has been a longstanding issue for some of you. The technique I use to render games in VR at high frame rates, and without requiring NASA supercomputers, is incompatible with traditional ASW (Asynchronous Space Warp, also known as motion reprojection in the WMR world). Actually, with AER v2 I now perform my own ASW frame interpolation within the mod. Unfortunately though, Oculus/Meta never offered a reliable way to disable their ASW programmatically. Even the Oculus Debug Tool sometimes fails to work. The only sure-fire way to prevent the Oculus runtime from activating ASW is by typing Ctrl+Numpad1 on the keyboard while the game is active.
  For convenience, the R.E.A.L. mod used to do that periodically for you; however, for unknown reasons, on some systems the synthesized keystrokes would leak through to the game, typically causing funny reactions like making your character crouch (as Ctrl in most games is bound to the crouch command).
  Since this release, the code that monitors the Oculus runtime is smarter and will only send the synthesized input when it is needed, which normally will be just once at game startup, so you should no longer experience phantom key presses during gameplay :-)

• Better filtering of eye and HUD textures: On some VR runtimes, especially using OpenXR and when running games at resolutions quite higher than the headset's, the VR image generated by the mod could become badly aliased, sometimes to the point of making the HUD text unreadable. From now on I'll generate my own mipmap chains instead of relying on the runtime to do that automatically (which Oculus always did since the very beginning, but newer runtimes sometimes would be too lazy to implement) and image quality should always be on par to that offered by Oculus/Meta backends.
  Of course, with my mods I always give complete freedom to the user, so in case the new filtering doesn't work properly on your system or you don't like it for any reason, you can roll back to the old behavior by unchecking the boxes "Use mipmaps for eye textures" and "Use mipmaps for HUD" in the main page of the mod overlay.

• OpenXR Toolkit: Recently I contacted mbucchia, the author of the well-known OpenXR Toolkit, to see if my mods could be made compatible with it. Unfortunately that is not possible as the Toolkit has reached end-of-life and will no longer be supported or improved. So, I added code to the R.E.A.L. mod that will prevent the Toolkit from being injected into the game, which means that you'll no longer have to manually disable the OpenXR Toolkit in order to avoid the shaky image that comes from the interaction of the two frameworks.
  The good news is that VDXR (mbucchia's implementation of OpenXR for Virtual Desktop) is still being actively worked on and supported, so I hope that with his help I'll be able to make my mods compatible. Stay tuned!

• No more jittery scopes and shaky HUD!!! Last but definitely not least: still thanks to mbucchia (from whom I stole the idea) I finally have a good solution to stabilize both scoped weapons and the shaky HUD, two problems that were particularly evident on high-latency headsets like the Meta Quest 3. If you ever tried to shoot a scoped rifle using a Quest with my mods, I guarantee that you will be blown away by how well this incredibly simple technique works. It's really a game changer.
  Again, all credit for the idea goes to mbucchia []-D
  To see this in action, go to the "Reduce shaking" slider in the main R.E.A.L. VR overlay tab. A setting of 0 (the default for now) will give you the old behavior, while moving the slider all the way to 1 will give you a super-stable HUD, at the cost of some black banding at the extreme left and right of your field of view when you turn your head quickly. For headsets like the Quest that have super twitchy tracking, I recommend a setting of about 0.5 - 0.8. The "Minimize shaking when zoomed" checkbox, enabled by default, will make the mod automatically use a value of 1 (maximum stabilization) every time the VR image is zoomed in, for example while using scopes or binoculars.

Thanks for reading through another long post, I really hope that you'll enjoy the new stuff!!!