Endless floor problems

[Hastor]

I've found posts about this but no real solutions, and most of the posts seem to be really old.

 

I've had my Vive for a couple of months. After running the Room setup, it works great for as long as I leave it on. After shutting it off and back on, the floor is always a little above or below where it was calibrated to be. This has often prevented me from picking up objects on the floor in a game, meaning I need to stop and recalibrate. I end up running Room Calibration a couple times a day to correct this, as I power it off to take breaks.

 

I don't think there's any issue with my room since it works great until it's shut down and restarted. There's no easy way I can find to reset the floor without rediong the entire room calibration. I love playing Vive but its really annoying, especially with friends over, to constantly run the room setup to get the floor right.

[Falturilturaltura]

I have had the same problem from time to time. I ended up installing the 3rd party tool "OpenVR advanced settings" https://github.com/matzman666/OpenVR-AdvancedSettings/releases 

It contains various tools which you can access from the SteamVR interface. Among them a quick calibrate for floor.

EDIT: Oh btw - I have also read that if you remember to turn on the controllers/wands/whatever before starting SteamVR, that the floor calibration usually is OK.

The SteamVR should start automatically the moment you have powered on the controllers.

[Hastor]

Thanks, I'd heard of that and will look into it. I'm currently using one called ViveFloorFix, which works to quickly recalibrate the floor, but has a memory leak (due to a problem on steam/vive's end that they've filed a report of), so it gradually uses more RAM until you need to restart it (granted, slowly enough to play a game, about 0.1MB every minute, but I don't like having memory leaks running).

 

I'm not sure if this other program encounters the same problem, but I'll give it a look. I just don't understand why this isn't considered a bigger problem as I've found plenty of complaints, and it seems that Vive should have a quick-calibrate for the floor. Too many times I've been unable to reach something. At the very least, it should lower the floor if your controller goes below it since that obviously isn't the floor when you're sticking your hand through it.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll report back, but still consider this an issue until it works correctly or has an easy fix within the official software.

[Falturilturaltura]

I totally agree that it is an issue, but I do not think official HTC or SteamVR support will make any note of the problem just by us describing it in these forums. I think enough people need to contact the official SteamVR and HTC support before they bother looking into it.

[Hastor]

I did submit a request to Vive Support, but as expected, got a much faster reply here, and probably more useful. I've not yet dealt with Vive support but I expect I'll get back a list of basic troubleshooting steps I've already tried a dozen times. I've worked in software QA and still analyze and document bugs for devs as my job, so I'm used to trying things that shouldn't work to see if they have any effect and so on. I think I'm out of things to try using only official Vive stuff.

 

So I'll try the above and hope that they fix it eventually. I've also gotten every firmware update for all components if anyone was wondering about that.

[Hastor]

I ended up trying the Advanced Settings add-on you mentioned, and that seems to be the best solution so far, and doesn't seem to have the memory leak that the other program I tried had, at least as far as I can tell so far.

 

It gives quite a few handy options, and I've seen it recommended on many boards. It's a shame that we have to rely on 3rd party developers and kind souls sharing their code to get basic things like a consistent floor. I wouldn't have a problem if SteamVR asked me to lay a controller on the floor every time it started, at least as an option, to reset the level. Right now I need to open the advanced settings app then redo the floor nearly every time I play. I'd say it is correct when I start about 20% of the time. I also like some of the other options this app gives that are sadly missing from the official software, like being able to quickly disable my mirrored audio when I join multiplayer so that there's no echo.

 

I also think many more people have this issue than realize it. I didn't notice for months because it is usually less than 3cm off, often just 1 or 2 (though sometimes several feet or meters, but that seems like a different bug). I only noticed when a game asked me to pick up a small object from the floor and I couldn't reach it due to my controller hitting my real floor before reaching the virtual one. I did find that turning on the controllers first gives better results, as I was often 10cm off before, and now it is only 1-3, but still a big problem with several games.

 

So thanks for the workaround, but c'mon HTC and Steam, you have people at home making free software to do basic things your official $800 package doesn't cover.

[Rockjaw]

, thanks for the reports. Sorry you had some problems, but it's good to see you seem to have found a workaround.

 

As I'm an HTC rather than Steam / Valve employee, I can't guarantee this will be addressed immediately, but I'll pass the feedback on. Thanks again. :)

[Hastor]



 

Thanks for passing this on. From what I've read, there isn't a clear line between Steam and HTC on the Vive, though if you could suggest another place to send this report that's better, I'd appreciate it. There's plenty of online discussion about it, and a couple of non-official tools that have become popular workarounds.

 

I'd appreciate your passing this on either way, but would love to know a better place to be heard. With something as big as the Vive, it can be hard to have your voice heard about a legitimate problem in a sea of people contacting support because they don't know what an HDMI port is, or are trying to run it on a 5 year old machine :) I think having this heard would help the Vive itself as well, as floor calibration is one of the very few places I feel Oculus outperforms Vive.

 

Thanks again!