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wbsk
Up and Coming
March 29, 2016

Irritations with 1.3 for development

Now every time I run one of my rift programs on the DKII it's starting up your oculus experience/store app, opening a window etc.  This also causes my dual monitors to flicker on/off when it starts up - this didn't used to happen.  Which also means I have the sound running from the VR experience/home app continuously which is VERY annoying when developing and iterating on things from visual studio.

As developers we need to iterate fast on changes, have our desktop windows setup and ordered how we want them, and any annoyances like that add up to frustrate.

Also in general feedback from the consumer/user experience end as well I have noticed the lack of immediacy is frustrating with a lot of apps with boring introduction and logo sequences that waste my time - a frustration that is magnified in VR.

Please fix these things soon.

Otherwise congratulations on an initial launch that was overall well done and is a good start for all.  Interestingly 'Luckys Tale' camera is the first game to give me major motion sickness, and I have been running around without a problem in our own FPS test games and also game demos like Windlands!

8 replies

lazygunn
Participant
March 29, 2016
In short, how can we stop the app loading automatically?
jmXVR
New Participant
March 29, 2016
For the sound issue you can open up the windows sound mixer (right click the speaker icon on the taskbar) and mute the oculus app.   It took me a good hour today before I realized that noise was from the Oculus app running automatically.
jherico
Inspiring
March 30, 2016

lazygunn said:

In short, how can we stop the app loading automatically?


Don't use the OVR initialization until you're ready to render into the headset and have VR focus.  If you need to know whether the HMD is present so you can have menu options added or enabled, use `ovr_Detect`, which doesn't trigger the Oculus Home window.  Bear in mind though that `ovr_Detect` can't distinguish between the 1.3 runtime and earlier versions.
Brad Davis - Developer for High Fidelity Co-author of Oculus Rift in Action
wbskAuthor
Up and Coming
March 30, 2016
But what if we don't want Oculus Home to be consuming resources that our games could be using?  The OculusVR.exe process takes up 661MB according to the task manager.

I want to be able to launch games directly as a developer AND consumer without going through Oculus home.  I want to be able to ALT-ENTER or similar to switch into and out of VR mode for my programs without any interference or startup of Oculus home.

Together with having to edit a setting so we can run VR programs that are not from the Oculus store the whole setup is not very PC friendly or considerate to how we use PC's.

If I add another screen to my PC I don't have to be forced through such hoops.  I don't see why this should be any different.
Scawen
Up and Coming
March 30, 2016
Yes, it's obvious that Oculus Home should not start when you run an external program (Unknown Sources).  Let the user start Oculus Home at will.  Attract them to Oculus Home by making it interesting, instead of forcing them into it every time.
Live for Speed - www.lfs.net
wbskAuthor
Up and Coming
March 31, 2016
Also Oculus home launches on startup if my rift is plugged in.  As much as I like much of what Oculus is doing, assuming that the Rift is the centre of our world at all times isn't the right way forward.  At least have an option in the settings to turn that off.

Hopefully these are all teething troubles for an otherwise interesting product.
wbskAuthor
Up and Coming
March 31, 2016
I am actually finding I am spending more time in VR due to the behaviour of Oculus Home and the healthy and safety screen ironically.  It's time that's a complete waste of my development day and adds up over every iteration and change I test.

Please can we have an official response from Oculus on this matter soon?
wbskAuthor
Up and Coming
March 31, 2016
A note that apparently I didn't have the latest nvidia drivers from this week.  Installing those seems to have fixed my dual monitors flickering every time anything rift related starts/stops.  Also Oculus Home didn't seem to start up automatically on reboot which is good but I don't know if that was related...
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