Release 5.0.2: "slightly less Dark" Souls (Patreon)

This release brings several improvements to the Dark Souls: Remastered VR conversion. If you are a new Patron (welcome!) or haven't tried my DS:R mod yet, please read the original post for the game first.

• Area lights will now work as expected. Previously their clipping in VR was wrong, which caused certain sections of the game (notably the initial dungeon) to look too dark; also, the lights appeared to "switch on" only when your character was very close to them, with visible illumination artifacts.
• Fades to/from black, like when you start the game or during cutscenes, will now be correctly applied to the 3D world instead of the in-game HUD.
• The first person camera will no longer randomly switch to 3rd person for brief moments during gameplay (the issue was visible for instance from 0:12:15 in the video embedded above).
• The 1st person camera should also be more stable from this release, and exhibit less tendency to shift from the character's head to the midsection. However, if that happens to you (it seems to be especially likely when you respawn at a bonfire) please remember that you can bring it back where it belongs using the "Resync" button in the "DSR" tab of the main mod overlay. You should never need to reload or restart the game just to fix the camera.
• A new option has been added to the Quick Menu: "Force 60 fps for Mono and Stereo (AER)".  This can be used as a workaround if your character gets stuck into irregularities in the terrain and/or seems unable to jump far enough to reach a ledge or cross a gap. See the "Frame rate in Dark Souls: Remastered" section at the end of this post for more details.

Dark Souls can feel very hard in the beginning. I mean rage-quit hard, especially for people who have never played a FromSoftware game before. So I embedded in this post a great stream from a couple of days ago, in which  Beardo Benjo plays live for almost four hours (!) going through the initial sections of the game. He has very good technique, and he doesn't speedrun but instead explains all that he's doing, so if you need somebody to show you how to win at the game (all the while using the first person camera!) he is the man for the job :-)

Frame rate in Dark Souls: Remastered

For its PC port, DS:R was programmed in a weirdly anachronistic way: EVERYTHING in the game assumes a fixed frame rate of 60 fps, and freaks out otherwise. Movement speed, key autorepeat, physics, animations, jump length, weapon degradation... An endless list of hard-coded dependencies.

As a consequence, no other modder in the world (that I know of) has been able to unlock the fps cap for this title. I am very persistant, and I didn't give up, but I had to tweak so many computations to make the game work at arbitrary frame rates (and with a speed slider!) that it's quite possible I missed one or two. So, in certain specific parts of the world, you might see your character running in a cartoonish way as if on ice, or it might refuse to climb over a rise in the ground, or perhaps you feel that it should be able to make a jump across a gap and keeps falling short instead.

If that happens to you, from this release it's possible to force Mono and Stereo rendering to run at a fixed 60 fps, so everything from physics to timings to input frequency will be precisely as the game developers expected. If you want/need to use this option, my suggestion is that you devote one of the four presets to it by changing the preset render mode from R.E.A.L. to either Mono or Stereo, and then check the "Force 60 fps for Mono and Stereo (AER)" box.

With this trick, every time you need to make an extra-long jump or your character gets stuck onto some irregularity in the terrain, you can just use the Quick Menu to briefly select the modified preset (the world will look very jittery, as VR should never be forced to obey a 60 fps v-sync, but it's only for a few moments), go across the jump or transition, and then return to your previous preset.

Hope that these fixes will make the mod more enjoyable for you!!!

NOTE: Release 5.0.2 was removed following a DMCA takedown notice issued on July 6, 2022 by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., parent company of Rockstar Games, Inc. and 2K Games, Inc.
It is replaced below with release 5.1.0, which completely drops support for the games that Take-Two, Rockstar and 2K don't want their customers to be able to play in VR.