Viveport and WMR not working

[viperchannel]

Hey there! Just out of curiosity I decided to give the new supported WMR functionality a try.

 

Here is my Setup:

Lenovo Explorer

Win10

all set up and working great with games on Steam and with games on Viveport while SteamVR is installed

 

But without SteamVR installed, I can launch the Viveport games but they will not trigger my HMD and just show up on my monitor. It will stay turned off and the WMR Portal will not launch.

If I launch the WMR Portal before I start the Viveport game, I will just see the cliffhouse in the HMD and the game on my monitor.

 

In both cases, it does not respond to moving my HMD. So the games do not hook into the HMD software.

 

I followed the how to article on viveport and tried out 2 games that are listed as compatible with WMR on viveport. Both games work properly when having SteamVR turned on.

 

And just to be safe, I tried running a game from the Microsoft store while SteamVR was uninstalled and it launched and played perfect. So just the Viveport games did not attach to the HMD.

 

Since you officially support WMR now, it should totally be possible to run games on Viveport without having SteamVR installed -  And the whole list of the currently 87 supported games would make no sense at all.

[viperchannel]

Ok, looks like I missed a step.... You need to install SteamVR as mentioned in the instruction. Come on Viveport. How shady is that to make a customer install a competiotioners software to make games run, because your own software can't?  Really, shame on you for this.

[HackPerception]

, I'm sorry to hear you encountered confusion while setting up Viveport to work with your WMR headset. Some of what you said however is a severe misrepresentation of why SteamVR is required in this circumstance.

 

Viveport does support native WMR builds. That said, very few developers take the time to natively integrate WMR support. A huge portion of the VR titles can only be accessed via SteamVR for WMR as most VR titles have SteamVR support but not WMR support. In other words, without SteamVR acting as a compatiblity layer, a huge portion of VR titles would be completely unplayable via WMR and the number of titles you'd be able to access via Viveport would be a fraction of the current library. WMR integrations must be done by the developer, not HTC/Vive/Viveport.

 

Currently a developer can post a single OpenVR build to Viveport and have that build work across WMR, Oculus, and all SteamVR headsets. That's actually pretty important from a developer prospective because maintaining various build target branches is very expensive (which is a huge reason why WMR isn't commonly integrated - it costs developers $$$ to maintain). While the flow is a bit clunky because you have to install additional software, WMR allowing OpenVR connectivity is a huge win for developers and customers and without this flow your headset would have so much less capability than it does currently. If you're using WMR - you'd likely want WMR for SteamVR and SteamVR installed in any case simply to access the wider VR catalog that's on Steam/Viveport; otherwise your content options are pretty slim.

 

Viveport is a launcher - it is most certainable capable of launching an WMR native executable contrary to your criticism. The real issue here is that developers don't publish to WMR and instead publish to SteamVR/OculusSDK as that's where revenue is generated. We'll make all efforts to support whichever headsets and ecosystems we can hence why we support WMR and Oculus headsets in the first place.

[viperchannel]

Hi and thank you, for your very nice answer!

 

It infact is nothing new.- You were always able to play games from VP using SteamVR and I like the Idea of officially labeling those games that work with a WMR supported tag, but it is kind of fishy to make users of one launcher install an competitioners launcher to make games on their platform work.

 

Another thing is, it is a bad start, since you have around 600 titles on Viveport and there are around 90 that are marked as "working with wmr". Eaven some of your best games that support WMR are not marked as wmr supported games. (yet) This is a bad start, since interested people will check out the store and won't do that on a daily basis to see if new games are now marked as WMR.