Avoid SteamVR. And probably avoid HTC Vive until they get there act together.

[Thespider]

Hi There,

 

 

 

I'm posting this due to my frustration with SteamVR. And their lack of I.T. Support and customer care.

And as for HTC if they don't act upon this they are also guilty of their lack of due diligence. As I an individual who spent big buck on upgrading my PC and buying the HTC Vive Pro. Is left helpless other than voicing my anger to anyone that will listen. As SteamVR support don’t care.

 

Apparently I’m not the only one that has issues with their policy of militant forced bug ridden updates that don’t allow you stop the updates or roll them back. This luckily only affected only 2 of my VR games as totally useless. Others on the Steam forum have experienced much worse issues.

 

The problem is, I only play one games with well over 100hrs called StandOut. For those who are not familiar it's like fortnite but in VR. This is the only game I play. Unlike my kids that play the other games. Hence you can see my frustration. My HTC Vive VR unit is pretty much useless to me now. I bought a game called AnimVR for my son. Yep the same fault occurs. It tells me it “starting”. Sits there for a minute then goes back to home. Tried using the Beta version. It tells me it “starting”. And stays there to infinity. Can’t even go to home using my controller.

 

I have rebuilt windows10 three times on 2 different hard drives. I tried installing windows 7. The same error exists. I borrowed my son’s graphics card. The same problem occurred. I had an old hard drive with a working copy of StandOut. As soon as I plugged it in. SteamVR automatically forced the upgrade and I could not stop it. And again this hard drive has the exact same problem.

 

I logged the fault with SteamVR support. Got a reply that they don’t allow roll backs and try upgrading the drivers and powering of the hardware and back on…. WTF…… Where they serious…… That’s not support that is a TV show called “The I.T. Crowd” And still nothing from support. Asked should I apply for a refund? Not holding my breath.

 

The frustrating thing is there is a very simple fix. Let the user roll back if there are issues. It’s not rocket science. Every other operating system and software allows this. Even the militant Apple IPhone asks the users for permission before upgrading. And when the bugs are ironed out let the user of their choosing allow it to be updated.

 

There are a lot of frustrated helpless users with the same issues only wanting the option to be able to roll back till the bugs are ironed out. Is that too much to ask?

 

Please please please for the love of God give SteamVR a good kick up the back side. Before I and others will start hammering Social media about the terrible experience of SteamVR and the HTC Vive product.

 

I for one have better things to do than spamming social media. But if I don’t have better things to do with my time like playing  Standout. Might as well use my I.T. knowledge create bots and start spamming social media. As what other option do I have?

Yours Truly

A helpless and frustrated VR fanatic.

[Synthesis]

 

Hi there, thank you for reaching out to us. I've read through your message and started looking into the issue. There's a couple different elements at play here and I want to make sure I fully understand what you're referring to. 

SteamVR works normally until you try to start Stand Out or AnimVR? Do other games work normally? 
When did this start happening? 

Thank you,

-Jack S

[HackPerception]

 - 

In most cases, you'll need to first isolate the issue from being an issue with the SteamVR enabled build (application layer), the SteamVR compositor (compositor layer), the HMD (hardware layer), or the PC (which has both hardware and software layers). There's not enough info in either of your two posts which would point towards any of the layers as standing out as a potential culprit for the issue you're encountering.

 

If you purchased ANIMVR from Steam, Valve is responsible for supporting that build from a technical standpoint as the digital retailer/distribution partner. That said, the support for the application itself would come from the developer - not the distributor. In a situation like this, you should have probably contacted the developer (mind@nvrmind.io) for additional assistance. In this case, the HMD is functional (which is Vive's component of the puzzle); the issue is somewhere else in the tech stack, possibly within SteamVR but possibly elsewhere.

 

You've seemed to have honed in on it being related to SteamVR's version number. I just tested out ANIMVR (the Viveport build) on both SteamVR v1.4.18 (current stable) as well as SteamVR beta v1.5.8 and it worked flawlessly in each version across 3 different workbenches (Vive & Pro, wired & wireless), and on a 4th bench with a Rift S. In my professional opinion, this is likely not related to SteamVR versioning and I'd need to see some logs to be convinced otherwise.

 

SteamVR doesn't allow rollbacks because it presents a massive security vulnerability and fragments your user-base. They're releasing updates too frequently to provide support for older compositor runtimes - their model requires users to be on the most recent public branch; occasionally they'll release a SteamVR plugin update which developers will have to implement but for the most part, SteamVR is actually rather lax about version compatibility on the end-user side so long as they have the compositor installed.

If you're really trying to downgrade SteamVR - you can use the manual methodology here to pull the correct assets from Valve's servers. These are the commands for two distinct versions of SteamVR.

 

October 10th 2018 (Pre-Motion Smoothing):
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May 8th 2018 (Pre SteamVR Skeletal Input):
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download_depot 250820 250824 3595168062848968923
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