Yesterday evening was the first time I nearly feel asleep in VR, from depression. It wasn’t really the controllers that was the problem, but the trackers on the headset.
Was in VRChat, trying to stack glasses of ice water in the Hangout House world. I cannot stack more than three, where others without WMR.. can stack 5. Attempting to stack, my controllers start to lose tracking. I have to look up higher than I need to (as that’s where the trackers are on the front of the headset), just to get the arms to work right.
It’s so. fucking. frustrating. Even more so, this world is highly unoptimized (yet I’m the only one with issues). I know that upgrading my PC hardware is the only way to make it better, but I can’t do shit ’till next year. I need at least $700-800 (thanks to the price of RAM) to afford something that’ll last me 5+ years.
Plus, there’s still no guarantee my room will support these floor trackers that the Oculus and the Vive have. This, is what depresses me the most. I want guarantees, that no one can give me (as they have no idea what my room looks like).
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Then there’s this thing from SteamVR, called ‘steamtours.exe’. Since the latest update of SteamVR, I’ve been getting very noticeable drops in framerate. Taking off the headset and attempting to investigate the issue (via Task Manager), I see this file eating up 40%-60% of my CPU.
It can be closed out, and doesn’t affect SteamVR that much. The only thing, is I now have to click the top of one of the thumbsticks of my controllers, to show the games I’ve downloaded.
The problem, is it keeps coming up everytime I run SteamVR. There’s a way to close it for good, but its instructions are unclear. One says to opt out of of the ‘SteamVR Home Beta’, and another mentions of a checkbox. Neither of these I’ve been able to find.
But finally, today, I found it after finding comment #4 of this post. The person explains how to do it while in VR, and it works!!
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The next thing I want to discuss, is how the headset fits on my head. For one thing, recently I’ve been getting hair on the lenses (that I can feel irritating my eyes). I believe this to be the hair on my head. Maybe it’s a sign I’m showing my age and going bald. lol
Or it could be a sign that I’m in need of a haircut. I’ve been trying to put my hair back everytime I put the headset on. So far, this seems to be working.
But that’s not all. To me, it doesn’t feel it stays snug on the back of my head (especially on my nose), and I feel I have to occasionally readjust it. Course, I can’t be the only one that has to.
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Now don’t get me wrong, I still love VR. But there’s another factor in play here (which bounces to the first). And that is the number of VR titles.. that are actual games; not VRChat wannabes, VR painting games, simulations, and desktop emulators (and can be played with WMR). I’m actually running out of free games to play.
Where this bounces to the first problem, is minimum system specs that are far beyond my system’s specs. And a new worry, is (what if) I’m finally able to upgrade my computer, and the RX580 is now too old to play VR? Aka, waiting too long to upgrade.. again.
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And that’s all I can think of. I feel there will eventually become a point where I’ll use my VR set less and less (due to boredom). Did manage to find that train game that Dan
played (called Rolling Line), and it supports WMR (so that’s awesome). What’s stopping me is the minimum specs require an Intel I5 or greater (aka, what I was just talking about, with the whole minimum specs thing).
What’s interesting, is it claims on the store page, it can be played without VR. How is that possible?