The kids aren't alright

Update 5: Release 9.0.3 delivers some extra goods!

• Grounded: fixed an issue where the HUD would be wrongly projected onto the world (thus becoming unreadable) when your character had any piece of armor equipped;
• Grounded: fixed a similar issue where the HUD would be wrongly projected onto the world (thus becoming too large and spilling off the headset screen) in the Steam version of the game;
• All games: added a workaround that should solve the issue where one or both eyes would have a black image when using "Legacy AER" or "Mono" while connected with Virtual Desktop (kudos to Guy Godin!)

Update 4: Release 9.0.2, fresh out of the oven and attached at the end of the post, should solve all compatibility problems with the Steam version of Grounded. If you just want to sample the game, the PC Game Pass version is way cheaper though: $1 instead of $40!
For people who have crashes with this new release: please make sure that your NVIDIA drivers are updated to the latest build (527.56).

Update 3: Upon further analysis, it turns out that it's only the legacy modes (AER and Mono) which are broken with Virtual Desktop. Specifically, in "Legacy AER" the HUD is visible but both eye textures come up as black, while in "Mono" only the left eye is black. I'm in contact with Guy Godin and we're investigating the issue. Luckily instead, the new "1/2 rate" and "1/3 rate" work perfectly with VD on the Quest 2. I'm still waiting for any success reports with VD on the Pico 4.

Update 2: Virtual Desktop is officially confirmed NOT to work correctly with this release. I apologize, it was stupid of me not to check beforehand. I'll get in touch with Guy Godin, although I don't think that a fix will be available before the holidays. In the meantime the workaround is to use Air Link with the Quest 2 (just tested again personally, it works perfectly in all modes), while for the Pico 4 I suggest you try out Pico's own streaming app. I can't test that myself because I don't have a Pico 4 available, but I'll let you know if any success reports come in.

Update 1: If you have any issues to report, please always remember to include your full system specs: CPU, GPU, RAM/VRAM, which headset and VR runtime you're using (e.g., Reverb G1 with the latest OpenXR preview), and if at all possible upload your RealVR64.log file to pastebin.com. Without that information, there is no way I can act upon your bug report!

Hey friends, how are these final days of 2022 treating you?

It appears that a lot of us are coming down with something, like a weird sort of hybrid COVID/flu infection that existing tests do not seem to detect reliably. I'm still recovering from it myself.

Also, the news from "Official VR" land is as bleak as can be. A post about a new release is probably not the right place to discuss this, but I just can't let it go by without a comment.

John Carmack has dropped the mic and left the house. The full text of his adieu message can be read in many places on the Web, here for example.

One billion each month. That's the amount of money Meta is flushing down the corporate drain, with basically nothing to show for it.

For those of you who don't know JC, he's nothing short of an unstoppable machine. The man with the strongest work ethic I've ever seen. Making him quit a project that's dear to him is about as easy as making a T-800 give up following you. And yet they managed to wear him out. WTF WTF WTF.

Release 9.0.0 (now updated to 9.0.3)

Since there are few days left in 2022, and no major issues were reported about the AER v2 beta, I decided to pack the two announced releases into one. So, 9.0.3 supports:

• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade with the new AER v2 technology;
• Grounded (and all the other Patreon games) with the legacy AER tech.
• Release 9.0.3 has several important improvements: everybody who is on 9.0.x should upgrade.

Quick Setup instructions for FF7R

Installation is quite simple; just one more step than usual because the game defaults to using DX12, but that brings stuttering and frame pacing issues for most people (even in 2D), so for this title in VR I only support DX11.

• Make sure that the game was run flat (i.e., not in VR) at least once, so that it could create your user profile.
• Unzip the archive attached at the bottom of this post into the folder where "ff7remake_.exe" is (mind the underscore). On a standard Steam installation the folder will be at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE\End\Binaries\Win64". When you extract the zip, be careful to preserve the folder structure. In other words, don't move anything around manually, don't flatten the folders, and don't put the mod into its own subfolder: RealConfig.bat must end up at the same level as ff7remake_.exe. If this is not the first time you install the mod for the game you will be asked whether to overwrite existing files, in which case you should answer yes to all.
• Run RealConfig, which will automatically select graphics settings known to work correctly in VR and finish installing/configuring the mod for you. NOTE: if you omit this step or ignore any errors that the batch file reports back to you, the mod won't work correctly, even if you are just upgrading from a previous release.
• Finally, and for this title only: you need to add "-dx11" (without the quotes) to the launch options for the game. If you have the Steam version, right-click on the game name in your Steam library and select "Properties"; then from the GENERAL tab put -dx11 into the LAUNCH OPTIONS box. If you have the Epic version instead, the menu you need cannot be reached from the library; you have to click on the icon for your account in the top-right corner of the Epic Games Launcher, choose Settings, scroll way down until you find the section for the game, click to open the branch, tick the "Additional Command Line Arguments" and put -dx11 into the text box.

Quick Setup instructions for Grounded

The mod has been developed for the PC Game Pass version of the game. It should also work on the Steam version as usual, but this time the Game Pass build is what everybody's got. And if you don't have a subscription, good news: you can get a one-month trial for $1, which means that you'll be able to play online and offline for 30 days basically for free!

Being co-op and not competitive, the game has no anti-cheat protection, so it should be perfectly fine to play online without the risk of getting banned.

Also, this is a kid-safe game, although as you can see from the video above the spiders are quite terrifying! If you want to get a feel for the game before you try, start from about 20 minutes in to skip an initial part where Ian had some trouble getting the stream to run smoothly.

The setup steps are the same as with my previous mods; if you're a returning user, you'll only need to be careful to extract the mod into the correct folder.

• Make sure that the game was run flat (i.e., not in VR) at least once, so that it could create your user profile.
• Unzip the archive attached at the bottom of this post into the folder where "Maine-WinGDK-Shipping.exe" or "Maine-Win64-Shipping.exe" is. On a standard Game Pass installation the folder will be at "C:\XboxGames\Grounded\Content\Maine\Binaries\WinGDK". When you extract the zip, be careful to preserve the folder structure. In other words, don't move anything around manually, don't flatten the folders, and don't put the mod into its own subfolder: RealConfig.bat must end up at the same level as Maine-WinGDK-Shipping.exe. If you are returning to this post to update to a new release you might be asked whether to overwrite existing files, in which case you should answer yes to all.
• Run RealConfig, which will automatically select graphics settings known to work correctly in VR and finish installing/configuring the mod for you. NOTE: if you omit this step or ignore any errors that the batch file reports back to you, the mod won't work correctly, even if you are just upgrading from a previous release.
• Note that there is another folder, three levels up, which contains an executable called gamelaunchhelper.exe. That is not the main executable, it's only the launcher (you can see it's less than 1 MB in size). The folder you want is the one with a path ending in "Binaries\WinGDK", with an executable of about 92 MB.

Distant, large objects in the game are intentionally drawn out of focus. This is a design choice. If it bothers you and you want everything to look sharp, you need to add the following two lines to your "%LocalAppData%\Maine\Saved\Config\WinGDK\Engine.ini" file:

[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0

while the game is not running. Note that most guides on the Web get this wrong: just adding the second line, or adding it to the "GameUserSettings.ini" file instead, or setting the in-game option to Low, won't have the intended effect.

The mod is compatible with the Christmas update ("A Holiday Treat") that came out for the game just a few days ago, i.e., build 1.1.2.3978 Rel.

Important: due to the way aiming works in Grounded, the HUD will always be headlocked. Basically every interaction that you have with the world, from punching ants in the face to picking up plants, happens at the center dot location, so it's essential that the HUD (and thus the dot) always stay aligned with your gaze. Depending on your headset, that might make border info on the HUD hard to read, so I took over the Start button on the gamepad and bound it to the "Free HUD for 5 seconds" command. When you need to look at something in the periphery of your HUD, just briefly press Start on the gamepad and the user interface will disengage from your head for five seconds, floating in space and allowing you to read the relevant information. The normal functions that the game assigns to the Start button (opening the title menu for instance) can still be accessed by long-pressing Start for about one second.

The HUD will also automatically disengage when you are navigating the game menus or the mod overlay, interacting with the resource analyzer, reading reports, etc.

As usual, the mod is best played with a gamepad in first person. Third person also kinda works, but to preserve the dot alignment I had to make the camera move automatically according to where you're looking, which is not very intuitive or fun. The usual behavior of the third person camera with my mods (having the rotation linked to your head and decoupled from the orbital motion that remains controlled by the right stick) is probably not possible with the interaction model that Grounded uses.

Another known issue is that the camera might feel a bit clunky during cutscenes. Luckily they are few and far between in Grounded, so that shouldn't be much of a problem!

Notes for AER v2

Please refer to my previous "Gaming in VR at 60 fps" post for a thorough introduction and conceptual discussion. Here I'll just give you some final operational notes.

The new rendering modes are "1/2 rate" and "1/3 rate", and they are available only for Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. Additional modes, and supported games of course, will come in the future.

"Legacy AER" and "Mono" are still selectable manually and they should behave identically to previous versions. (The old "R.E.A.L." mode, enabling full frame rate, is in the process of being evolved into an adaptive technique. I am not done with it though, so as a temporary exception to my general rule I don't recommend installing this specific version of the mod for Dark Souls: Remastered as you would be limited to 90 fps instead of 180.)

The render mode can be changed on the fly, so you can make live comparisons between the old and the new tech. Make sure you save your game before doing that though. Normally it should be safe, but at least once using SteamVR I had a game freeze when toggling from Legacy AER to 1/3 rate.

If you're in doubt what to select, or feel there is juddery movement or bad tracking, do read my earlier post at https://www.patreon.com/posts/76076877, especially the final section "The new paradigm ("give your GPU some breathing room") and what to expect".

As is always the case with frame-interpolation techniques, AER v2 is not 100% free from artifacts. Only so much can be done in post-processing, and there is just no perfect substitute for actually having the GPU render each and every frame. That said, I have been testing it for several days now, in many different areas of the game, and my personal opinion is that I would never go back []-D

A nice added bonus: with the new render modes I'm performing all the special reprojections needed for AER myself, so runtimes and headsets that used to be problematic (like the Pico 4) should now work automagically without issues! Eagerly waiting your feedback on that since it's not something that I could test extensively. Canted-displays HMDs like Pimax will probably still need Parallel Projections enabled for the moment.

I already mentioned this in earlier posts, but let me repeat it here for transparency: the frame interpolation only works with NVIDIA cards right now. I'm still looking for an AMD developer liaison who can help me with this, so if any of you happen to know one please put us in contact! I would love to extend full support to AMD cards, even though they only represent about 10% of the installed base. Even with the current version though, AMD users should be able to use the new modes to get the additional benefits, like the sharpening filter and the extended compatibility with headsets/runtimes that don't support conventional AER correctly. The lateral-motion ghosting will still be there however.

Sharpness

To combat blur, the ever-lurking enemy of all good things VR, this release comes with deeply integrated sharpening, meaning that all filtering operations and internal reprojections have been updated to preserve and enhance detail as much as possible.

The filter controls can be found in the main "R.E.A.L. VR" tab of the mod overlay, under the "Advanced" section. My recommendation for FF7R is to leave the sliders at their initial values, which are 0 for Emphasis and 1 for Deblur. If you're using a Quest 2, which already defaults to having a sharpening filter enabled in the video encoding chain, perhaps you'll want to dial Deblur back to 0.5 or even all the way down to 0, to avoid oversharpening that could make the shimmering halos around characters too visible and annoying.

On the contrary, if you feel that the HMD image is still too blurry for your taste (that can happen especially if you have an older GPU that forces you to select a low resolution for the game), you might want to increase the Emphasis value a bit.

The rationale for the two sliders is: Deblur will try to remove the blurriness in the image, mostly caused by today's omnipresent TAA, while at the same time avoiding to make sharp edges too jaggy. Emphasis instead will apply a more aggressive filter to the whole image, which can revive dull renderings but will also tend to make the picture more noisy.

As always, please let me know what you think and how this works for you! The happiest of holidays to everybody!!!