It's not just an update... IT'S A SUPER UPDATE.
It's time again for a big update! It's about time, right? Well, finally, we have an update that marks one heck of a milestone for us - we finally have a full end-to-end experience for setting up and getting your lovely bodies into VR!
We reckon this update's big enough to take us out of the v0.0.x trenches and into the v0.1.x mountains. That's one whole point-oh more than before!
Though, updates aside - what we do is
always a work-in-progress, so keep the crash reports & suggestions coming. Don't ease up on us.
The Big Stuff™
VIVR, our mad-easy calibration tool, is now fully integrated with LIV! And that's not the half of it.
One of our biggest points of user friction was calibration. What's the deal? Calibration is what you need to do to your camera before we can bring it into VR - there's lots of cameras out there, and it's impossible to automatically detect the specific setup that you have.
We take you through a three-step improvement program process that has you marking out the limits of what your camera can see. Done properly, you can get that crispy calibration in no time at all. These steps work out where your camera is, how wide it can see, and where it's pointing.
On top of that, we needed to support people with both static cameras, and cameras that can
move. This point here was the one that threw a wrench in the works. To calibrate, you need a reference point that we can offset from. This reference point normally doesn't move, but we support using extra controllers or trackers as that reference point. There used to be two places to set that up, one in LIV, and one in VIVR.
Well, no more! The long-foretold marriage of VIVR and LIV has taken place, and now there's only one place to set your camera up. Create a camera profile, choose your camera, calibrate. You can do it
all in your HMD, and even tweak your latency compensation whilst you're at it.
Neat.
What's gonna happen to standalone VIVR?
Good question! We will soon remove it from the Steam store, as just having it up there and public is enough to cause confusion. We're invested in giving you all the best user experience possible for this madness that is mixed reality, and this is a change that will simplify things for everyone.
That said - don't worry. We're not taking away the ability to export your calibrations outside of LIV at all, so getting your calibration is as easy as exporting it.
Time for the changelong!
VIVR's integration is pretty neat, but what about the other stuff we've been up to?
New:
- Performance! We know we have a long way to go here, and the first of many changes is already in place - users compositing Beat Saber & Tilt Brush will be happy to know that there's a ~10% GPU utilisation drop when compositing at 1080p now!
- Viewfinder flip! It makes sense to show you mirrored, so that's what we've done. Defaults to enabled!
The LIV Wiki! The guide in the client now links directly to it - check it out for some really helpful tips for streaming and recording! Big-ups to ragesaq from our community for getting us set up.
- Camera latency is now stored in milliseconds, not frames. Doesn't sound like much, but it's a move for the fuuuuutuuuureeee.
- Speed improvements! We now batch up commands sent to the compositor so things feel shnappy.
- The "SDK Enabled" switch has moved directly into manual mode! You can toggle it without needing to re-capture the current application.
- Calibration magic: We tell you exactly what you need to do if you've missed a step in setup!
- Calibration: There's now a prompt on the screen if you're trying to do things too close. Remember that the first step needs to be right on the lens!
- Calibration: Added a "lock UI" switch!
- Calibration: Latency adjustment now happens in milliseconds, and it's way easier to adjust!
Fixed:
- Latency compensation. This is one of the big ones, taking half a week to solve!
- We sometimes checked if the compositor was running on your PC after it'd already disconnected, which was causing a crash. We make sure we're not just asking nobody now.
- When Steam was updating your libraries whilst LIV was loading, it'd cause a crash.
- If you closed Beat Saber, your camera would stay dimmed. We shone the light on this one!
- Refreshing your camera list several times could lead to odd behaviour. Now it doesn't matter how fresh you are, it'll behave.
- If your camera had loads of different resolutions, it could expand the window off your screen. Growth inhibitors in place!
- If you tried to open the camera settings more than once, the compositor would get real hung up about it. With careful coaching we've been able to get it back on the straight and narrow.
- Anywhere we had clickable URLs or opened stuff in your browser had the potential to cause a crash if you didn't set your default browser. We now fall back to Internet Explorer, and yes, we're sorry.
- Cropping, for good this time. We completely rewrote the way cropping works, and now it's much more... consistent. As a bonus, we let you make small X/Y adjustments again!
- If you had the zoom feature enabled, it would be ignored when you first selected the camera profile!
- Some Unreal engine games would always fail to configure. We now take a much longer look at those games to work out exactly how they gotta be configured.
- Launching Unity games before running them first would cause Steam to ask you for permission to launch it - turns out that's not necessary, so it's fixed!
- In some really odd DNS setups (leave localhost alone pls), the compositor couldn't connect to the GUI.
- When Steam told us you had a library somewhere, we trusted it. We got hurt, the library doesn't always exist. Now our guard's up.
- Sometimes in code we needed to check if two folders were the same - but if one of those folders... wasn't a folder, it'd cause a crash. Fixed.
- Closing the compositor is now much more reliable, and faster too!
- When the compositor first loaded, your viewfinder settings were not correctly restored.
Whew. That's v0.1!
We're seriously excited to push this version out to y'all. LIV is now in a position where we can start to work on the more interesting future features that we've been teasing on our streams since like... December. And it goes without saying, we'll be testing these things with people in our Discord, so if you're interested in keeping up to date, stick around in the community!
Our gratitude goes out to everyone for being
truly amazing. Seeing everyone chip in with support, advice and feedback on content is exactly why we opened our doors wide open. Keep being rad.
Finally though - got a suggestion? Like... a curveball of a mind baby? Throw it at us. We want that mind baby; we're all ears.
That's all for this update!
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