Time for another big update (Patreon)

Hey dudes (and dudettes)!

I've been busy on several fronts lately, but I believe it was worth it because I have very good news for you.

The fixes you were waiting for, since both https://store.steampowered.com/app/3321460/Crimson_Desert/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/2677660/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Great_Circle/ were no longer working in VR due to the recent official patches, are ready and included in the latest R.E.A.L. releases. The free version, supporting INDY and lots of other games, can always be downloaded at the end of this post. The "VR friend" version, which supports all the games of the public version plus the ones which are currently in Early Access, including CD, is attached here.

The full list of all supported games is always in the pinned post, which is also the recommended starting point for people who are new to the Patreon.

But as I was saying, I have also been working on something else, not just the fixes.

The first new thing you will find is what Brandon calls a "major improvement" to DL(S)SS. At the moment it is available only for CD, but if the results look as good to you as they seemed to be in our internal testing, in time I will port it to other games in our collection. Anyway, CD is probably the title that needed it most, since the crazy amount of detail in the foliage combined with a less-than-perfect DLSS implementation by the developers make for a lot of shimmering and artifacts, especially when the upscaling factor is high. By the way, those problems are present in the base game and many people who play it flat have complained about them, but of course in VR they tend to be even more visible because VR magnifies both details and imperfections.

Brandon is very sensitive (more than me) to image quality issues, and he says that with this release of R.E.A.L., using DL(S)SS in the game is now a much better option over FSR, which was my previous recommendation for people who couldn't afford to select the DLAA preset. So I have high hopes :-) Please let us know about your own results!

This new release also fixes a bug I had in my game startup code for quite a while, which would make some titles launch at a resolution different from the one you had chosen during your previous session. Now all games should correctly remember the last resolution you set with the slider, and they should be able to restore it automatically for you at the beginning of the next gaming session.

And finally, there are big improvements to the FOV management offered by the R.E.A.L. framework. The FOV-related controls have been reorganized and moved to their own section, which makes them easier to find and navigate, and offers a cleaner way of either remembering them across gaming sessions or restoring them to default values when needed.

But most importantly, the FOV restriction sliders are now available and supported also for OpenXR, which makes them usable with a much broader selection of VR headsets rather than just with Meta devices. SteamVR is not yet supported because it doesn't offer a programmatic way to access its own internal FOV restriction controls, although you can do that manually from your SteamVR settings (we will try to come up with a guide about that, maybe even make a video tutorial).

And last but not least, the FOV restriction controls (horizontal and vertical) can now be linked together in such a way as to automatically select the optimal FOV aspect ratio for the resolution that you are currently using in game. This gives you the best possible match between the headset form factor and the image size that the GPU has to render, which can result in rather dramatic performance improvements because the GPU no longer has to waste any power drawing useless pixels that will never be sent to the VR headset. The same optimization was already available before this release, but it needed some tedious manual intervention: basically you had to inspect the log in order to find out the ideal aspect ratio, then change the game resolution and/or the headset FOV parameters until you achieved the best compromise. Now you can have R.E.A.L. perform the same calculations automatically just by ticking a checkbox []-D

Tomorrow I will start looking at 007 First Light to see if it's possible to make it playable in VR; I'll let you know what I find. But for the moment, I hope you will enjoy this new release!!