Steady 1st person cam, orange is the new blue (Patreon)

Hey friends! Just a couple of weeks have gone by since this beautiful community's first birthday, and I already have another amazing number to add to the list: 3,055 Patrons as of today!!!

Now, I know that on average one in three will cancel the pledge before the end of the month, so as June rolls in the number is likely to drop to around 2K again. But still, for a moment there we touched the stars []-)

Speaking of stars: Elden Ring is a hugely complex title, and I know that its performance hasn't been stellar for many of you, what with the game being almost completely single-threaded, and all in all not a very good PC port. However, it's also so beautiful and addictive that it somehow makes you forgive every defect.

One of the most interesting ways of taking in its wonderfully detailed, epic world is by playing (or at least exploring, if you find combat too hard) in first person VR, and since the game doesn't implement a 1st person camera, in my original release I "hacked" it by attaching the camera to the character's head, which unfortunately bobs up and down like there's no tomorrow. When you walk, when you run, whenever you step on a small irregularity in the terrain: up and down and all around it goes, really putting your VR legs to the test.

I've been working hard on it (also in view of my next upcoming conversion, which should be ready in a couple of weeks and suffered from the same issue) and I'm happy to announce that I now have a general solution to the problem that seems to work pretty well, at least according to my preliminary testing.

Release 4.2.0 attached below implements this solution for Elden Ring. It is active by default, but as usual with my mods you can also revert to the previous configuration in case there's anything you don't like: the checkbox is the one highlighted in the picture above, "Disable head bobbing" in the "ELDEN" tab of the mod overlay.

I will try to make a video comparing the 1st person camera feel before and after the smoothing, but if any of you guys who are more skilled at this than I am wants to do it, I will add the link here!!

Besides the 1st-person camera stabilizer, this release brings several additional quality-of-life improvements, some of which can also be seen in the picture above.

• Completely redone color palette: I have to confess that I was never a fan of the original palette the R.E.A.L. VR mod came with, as I felt that it was too cold and impersonal. However there were always more important, urgent things to deal with. For our birthday, I decided it was finally time to gift us a good makeover :-)
  The previous palette is still selectable as "Legacy" from the "Global style" drop-down in the "Overlay" tab, if you're feeling nostalgic or just want to make comparisons.
• New scalable font: Besides having a warmer, 70's inspired look, the mod UI should now scale much better on different headsets and monitors. The new font is much cleaner and more legible, and the spacing between controls will no longer get cramped on super-high resolutions.
  A quick reminder: the mod always tries to choose the best magnification level according to your headset characteristics, but in case it guesses wrong, you can customize the font size manually when you are in the main mod overlay (not the quick menu) by using Ctrl+Mouse wheel up/down.
• Software mouse cursor: This was a much requested change, especially for those of you who like to play with keyboard and mouse. It took a nice amount of work, but I believe it was worth it.
  The mod will now display a software mouse cursor (you can see it in the picture above next to World size, with the tiny "REAL VR" label under it), not only when you're navigating the mod overlay, but at all times when the game would have displayed the normal hardware mouse cursor on the monitor. This way you'll finally be able to select all buttons, menus, icons, etc. in the game menus and interfaces without flying blind and having to guess where your mouse cursor is.
• Mousetrap: Going together with the previous point (and also quite a lot of work but long overdue): the R.E.A.L. VR mod now implements a mousetrap which will keep the mouse pointer confined to the game window on the monitor.
  You will no longer lose track of where your mouse is, and there will be no more accidental clicks out of the game window that make it lose focus and randomly activate other programs or windows in the system.
  This however needs to be implemented separately for each game, and for the moment it's active only in Elden Ring and the next upcoming title.
• More robust head detection code: Some of you experienced an issue with the first person camera in Elden Ring, where the attachment point would sometimes randomly shift from the character's head to the midsection (for instance when falling, mounting/dismounting Torrent, opening chests). It seemed to depend heavily on the character type and probably also from the items being worn.
  I made the detection code more robust, and with the new changes I was no longer able to reproduce any camera shifts with the saved games that you guys kindly sent to me.
• 1st person camera resync: Just in case the previous modifications should turn out not to be as failproof as I hope, I also added an explicit "Resync camera" to the first person control panel (you can see it in the picture above), which will reset the detection code if anything goes wrong. Previously you would have to die or teleport to bring the camera back from the midsection to the head if sync was lost.
  There is also an "Auto resync" in case you experience frequent problems, but I don't believe it should be needed. Your feedback is important and welcome as usual!

I hope this release will make Elden Ring a lot more enjoyable for you guys, and I'm also very happy to confirm what I already anticipated in a few comments to previous posts: the next game on this Patreon will have AMAZING performance! In playtesting on my RTX 3090 I'm seeing a steady 180 fps at 3920x3920 in almost all areas, which translates to a super-sharp image with absolutely zero artifacts.

Let's keep the VR torch burning!

P.S. The Epic Games store is giving away the BioShock Collection for free!!! Make sure to grab it before June 2 unless you already own it! I'm not working on it at the moment, but many of you have been asking for a VR conversion and sooner or later it's going to happen :-D