Many quality-of-life improvements to CD in VR (Patreon)

Yes, I'm talking about https://store.steampowered.com/app/3321460/Crimson_Desert/

I spent an indecent amount of hours on this one, and it's starting to look almost like a native VR game now. In fact, it's arguably the best-looking game you can experience in virtual reality these days, although it wants a beast of a PC in order to run at high resolution and frame rate with ray tracing activated. But which game doesn't, really? Ray tracing is being pushed so hard, yet basically no consumer GPUs are ready for it.

And of course in VR we pay double the price: literally, because the card has to render two eye views, and figuratively, because NVIDIA does not allow us to use their Frame Generation hardware, which is the only thing that makes RT remotely viable on current generation GPUs.

So... back to CD. First of all: I fixed the UI for good. Everything draws in its proper place now; HUD elements are gathered in front of you, while world markers are at their correct depth and stick to the objects or NPCs they belong to.

Honestly, the only gripe I have with the GUI right now is that the all-important hints the game gives you (like, which buttons you're supposed to press, and in which order, when you need to use a new ability or combo), are confined to a very small area in the top-left corner of your field of view, and drawn with a tiny font, which makes reading them and especially making out the button glyphs quite challenging. Please write back in the comments if you can find any third-party mod that allows you to fix that issue satisfactorily, and if you include a short guide on how to configure its settings I will add it to the post.

The R.E.A.L. VR framework will automatically switch to 2D rendering inside the headset when menus are detected, so the map, skill tree, inventory and so on will no longer show the glitches and usability problems that used to require manual switching every time you wanted to access the world map for example.

You asked for it, so I ported over the new camera system that I first implemented for BG3, giving you more control over the degree of tilting that the horizon is allowed to have. You will have three presets to negotiate the tradeoff between feeling queasy and having to crane your neck up and down ;-)

I fully rewrote the frame synchronization code for this game to get much better stability, especially when DL(S)SS is active and your GPU is pushed to the max and struggling to hit the refresh rate. The sporadic rendering hiccups present in the initial version, where it looked like the left and right eye wanted to swap places for a moment and DL(S)SS appeared to desync, should be a thing of the past.

I also fixed photo mode, so that it renders in beautiful 3D while at the same time allowing you full freedom in controlling the camera, even the field of view. Even though photo mode might not be a priority in most games, this one has such breathtaking vistas that you'll probably want to take some nicely framed shots to send postcards home!

If you haven't started your playthrough of CD in VR yet, then I'd say it's time to do so now []-D

Get all the gory details in my game-specific post, and the link for the latest Early Access release of the R.E.A.L VR framework can always be found here these days. Enjoy! Carry many cats around!!