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How The FFF Are you supposed to set Rift as your main displa

Funkman
Explorer
I downloaded Estranged Act 1, which looks quite interesting.

I went into the game, and in options, VR Mode was disabled. I wasnt able to select enable.

So I went on the Steam Forums and looked at the tutorial for getting it to work in VR Mode.

It says, among other things, "Make sure your Rift is set as the primary display" and "make sure your Rift is to the left of your main screen".

Ok, so I opened up Catalyst Control Centre, I was very very hesistant to select the Rift as my main monitor, with the possibility of being stuck and not being able to undo it, due to not being able to see properly.

Well I did it, and my fear nearly came true. I wasnt able to close the Catalyst CC, it was stuck on full screen and I couldnt see the close down the bottom, or the X up the top right. By forcing my eye right up against the top of the Rift, I could just make out the icon on the taskbar, so I right clicked and closed it. THen re-opened it and Selected my normal monitor as my main monitor.

This is a joke. I am not blaming Oculus here, as this is a dev product. But what kind of a joke of a solution is this? Selecting the Rift as your main monitor feels like commiting electronic suicide to me, with the possibility of never coming back.

How to others manage this? It seems insane to have to do this to get a game working in VR mode.
8 REPLIES 8

Disdroid
Honored Guest
If you have trouble with seeing everything in your oculus, take out the lenses. It really is just a normal screen then and you should be able to find what you're looking for.
People tend to believe what they want to be true.

Funkman
Explorer
Ah thanks.

Well, I went into the game, and still I cant select VR Mode.

I really dont understand why developers, or engines only allow this solution.

If it is the case that the engine is not capable of sending two separate signals to two separate monitors, or turning main monitor off and just sending to the rift....Then why dont they just have the engine send the VR signal to the main monitor and the second monitor? This would make much more sense, and stop people from needing to set the rift as a primary display..which is a ridiuclous solution.

Anonymous
Not applicable
Ensure Rift is plugged in (HMDI CABLE) to your Graphics card.

Right click on the desktop..

Click Screen Resolution

Detect

Click the Rift

Tick 'make this display my main display

H-street
Honored Guest
Make sure you setup your Hotkeys incatalyst control center.

I have the follow hot keys set

CTL+ALT+N = single screen on my main monitor
CTL+ALT+E = Oculus in Extended Mode (Main Monitor = Primary, Oculus = Secondary)
CTL+ALT+O = Oculus main and only screen


once you get the hot keys setup switching between the display mode is a breeze

A tip I can give you is before you switch to the Oculus as the main display, move the CCC to the Right or the the Left so its only in one eye's view

but if you set your Hotkey for yoru monitor and you get stuck trying to set the oculus as main, Hotkey puts you back to the regular setup

TomSD
Honored Guest
Setting the Rift as primary may be scary and frustrating at first. But this is just a newbie stage you can easily get over. You just need the right attitude. Once you educate yourself and experiment a little, you'll find that it's really not so bad. Just man up a tiny bit, ok?

So, what do you need to know to survive and thrive with the Rift as primary? First of all, you don't need to remove the lenses. That's a terrible solution and way more work than necessary. Just use the following tips:

- Close all open windows before starting a session with the Rift as primary. The fewer windows you have open, the easier things will be.

- Use the Win+Shift+Left and Win+Shift+Right keyboard commands to shift windows between your monitor and the Rift. These are standard Windows multi-monitor shortcuts.

- Use Ctrl+Shift+Esc to bring up Task Manager at any time. If it's not visible on your monitor, don't panic. Just hit Win+Shift+Right and it'll be visible. In its Applications tab, you can select a running application and click Switch To to give it focus. If it's not visible you can then use Win+Shift+Right to make it visible. Task Manager is also useful for killing things that aren't working (as often happens when messing with VR stuff at this stage).

- Get Open Broadcaster (aka OBS). Run it, make the Rift is primary, and move OBS onto your monitor. Set it up to do full monitor capture. Click "Preview" in the main window. Now you can see the contents of the Rift on your monitor and interact with stuff normally, so there's no need for guesswork or panic. Note that some people use a program called Virtual Desktop for this purpose. You may want to try it. Personally I use OBS.

- Note that you should not use the full monitor preview mode in OBS while running a game - it'll hurt performance. But you can set up a game capture (instead of full monitor capture) and use Preview again to be able to mirror the game on your monitor with minimal performance loss. In this situation, the game is not being rendered twice. Each finished frame is copied by OBS and displayed in the OBS window on your monitor. This can be a little tricky to set up depending on the game. Setting a hotkey in OBS may help.

- While the Rift is primary, you can just turn it off (using the button on the Rift) to return to a single monitor setup. The next time you turn it on, it will automatically go back to being primary. If you leave it as primary and just turn it on and off as needed, you don't need to mess with changing which display is set as the primary all the time.

- While the Rift is primary, you can drag desktop icons over to one side of your monitor. This is easy if you use OBS. The icons will then stay over there for future sessions when the Rift is primary. At least this works on NVIDIA, I'm not sure about AMD. This can be handy for launching stuff later.

- You can see an area near the center of the 2D screen in the Rift if you close one eye. Which eye you close will determine where you can see. Depending on the situation, this may be preferable to taking off the Rift, messing around on your main monitor, then putting the Rift back on.

- You can move a window on the desktop around even when you can't see the window's title bar. Give the window focus and press Alt+Space, press M, and press the up arrow. Now move the mouse around and the window will move. Practice this outside the Rift first. Similarly, you can minimize, maximize, and close the window by pressing N, X, or C instead of M here. No mouse OR vision needed - just focus on the window.

Anyway that's it, basically. If you can do at least a few of these simple things, you'll do fine with the Rift as primary.

Btw, don't get the idea that I think having the Rift as primary is great or a long term solution. This is a short term hack to get by until VR generally gets easier to use in the future. All I'm saying is that it's not nearly as bad as it seems at first, or as some people around here make it out to be. There's absolutely no need to dread or avoid it.
i7-4770K, 2x GTX 780 SLI, Windows 7 64-bit, Oculus runtime 0.6.0.0

VizionVR
Rising Star
The lyrics to this ancient dirge are oddly appropriate to VRgin trials.

Welcome to the jungle we've got fun and games
We got everything you want honey, we know the names
We are the people that can find whatever you may need
If you got the money honey we got your disease

In the jungle, welcome to the jungle
Watch it bring you to your knnn knne knees, knees
I want to watch you bleed
Not a Rift fanboi. Not a Vive fanboi. I'm a VR fanboi. Get it straight.

cybereality
Grand Champion
Yeah, it's a little strange at first but you can work with it.

Windows Key + Shift + Arrow Left/Right will move windows from one monitor to the next. Very useful.

Also Windows Key + P will let you switch displays if you get stuck or need to go back.
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV

Funkman
Explorer
Thanks for the tips - that shortcut will come in very handy, I didnt know about that.

Sadly, even using the Rift as my primary monitor, the VR Mode option is still greyed out in the game options.

Not sure what to do, no one on the game forums has replied to me yet.