AMS1 working in VR

Post with beta version here: AMS1 working in VR

Hi folks,

I know VR support for AMS1 has been discussed before, but a couple of the guys on the Crew Chief team have done some magic. Their plugin intercepts the render calls to apply VR tranforms then renders the resulting image to a Dx11 surface. The plugin then moves the camera position to get the other eye and repeats the process before sending the result to SteamVR.

All this means that AMS1 can run in VR with full head tracking and stereo 3D so it's completely indistiguishable from a native VR implementation. And because AMS1 uses a forward renderer with few modern post-processing tricks and proper multi-sample AA, the result is a very crisp and clean VR image.

Anyway, it's work in progress but we're planning to release something very soon. The Stadium Trucks are particularly great in VR

and the Marcas touring cars rock too

 

that rocks!!!
As far as I remember Reiza tried to implement VR but they didn't find a way (or someone able to do that). Would be great if you guys can get in touch with @Renato Simioni and maybe release a community patch or whatever to add this to AMS (maybe on config tool tagged as experimental).
Please keep us updated!

 

This is AWESOME!!! I’m exited and can’t wait to try it out in VR!!!

 

Let me tag @Domagoj Lovric too on this, not only Renato, maybe they can help with the game's source part.

@mr_belowski there is a forum thread or external link to follow the project?
It's me or mirrors are working too?
Can you post a vid featuring another car like Marcas or Mini...in order to check how mirrors behave?

 

mirrors work as they're just part of the rendered surface. They're not positionally tracked or stereoscopic, just normal 2D mirrors. There's no link to the source or project status, this is currently at the internal tinkering phase.

I'll do a quick n dirty video of some other cars shortly

 

here's how it looks in the Marcas cars (which work will in VR because you can actually see out of them, unlike the flat screen version):

I left the frame timing widget open by accident, while this test was perfectly smooth in the headset, I don't think the frame timing shown there necessarily reflects the actual frame times when doing these render-to-Dx11-surface software gymnastics

 

on a related note, does anyone know how to lock the player's view point to the inside of the car, so the head is 'attached' to the back of the driver's seat? No matter what settings I change and edits I make, there's always a 'lock to horizon' effect where the driver's viewpoint pitches slightly to keep the horizon in view when going up or down a steep hill. For VR we really don't want this

 

This is awesome!! Sadly I can't get my Heusinkveld Ultimates to map in AMS1.. .

 

I can ask to a couple of friends which are working on AMS mods if they know about it.
As side note, AMS works flawlessly with EdTracker, TrackIR and such and the point of view is always working as should be when attached to player model head, no idea if worth a look or I am correct but I thinked was worth mentioning that.

You can also join our discord to get in touch with them, link on signature.

 

About looking out of the car model you noticed on Marcas...was occurring when moving your head on the sides?
To be more precise when using tracker devices I allow only pitch, roll, yaw and disable forward/back and left/right.

I do this for 2 reasons:
- I found forward/back and left/right disturbing while driving
- if both are active but not properly set (curves) you move too much and if you move left/right you will exit the car model or even worse see through it with forward/back on.

Here a vid as example how it works for me:

Ideally curves should be set in order to avoid fastest and bigger movements and be as in the real life limited by driver position and neck (or as you said the driver head should be attached to seat) lol

Hope makes sense

 

How many devices connected?
Feel free to DM me and maybe I can help you...

 

More I look at this...

...more I think your issue could be more related to "center view" than "lock to horizon"...

I don't know if placebo or not but looks like visual snaps to center...like the game recognize VR movements as joystick/pad movements (once there is no imput it goes back to center view, in this case looks like the game reads VR movements as small fast joystick/pad imputs) than TrackIR/FreeTrack ones...

Also the vid looks less smooth than previous one, can the hud be the cause?

 

.... And 5 days ago i uninstalled AMS1, because i don't drive without VR anymore.

 

This sounds awesome! As much as i like AMS 2, but AMS 1 still feels overall a lot more polished.

 

Really exciting news, looking forward for more information.

 

Really great news, if/when this gets released I will rebuy a VR headset for sure! It would be great to see official support given to it, but with AMS not officially supporting modding I would be surprised if that were the case...

 

Here's our AMS 1 VR implementation. First up, I have to be clear that all the credit for this goes to Sparten and The Iron Wolf who've done all the work on this, I'm just a fascinated spectator here.

https://d1o4ya81faadx8.cloudfront.net/AMS_VR_beta.zip

Installation instructions are in the readme file in the .zip.

This is a work-in-progress and there are a couple of small issues with it but we think it's pretty solid. However, it's worth mentioning that when you're developing and testing something like this you get a bit immune to small problems with head-tracking and eye-convergence. So we'd like to hear your experiences, even if they're hard to put into words (VR can be like that - a general feeling of something being 'off' but it's difficult to know what's actually wrong).

Performance is pretty good but it's obviously a lot more demanding than pancake-mode. You'll have to experiement a little here - I recommend using 4xMSAA from the config app then adjusting settings to get a decent frame rate.

 

Can't wait to properly test this later. I just read the readme file, but is there any way to recenter the VR headset ingame? And if yes: Can we assign that function to another key on the keyboard or maybe a button on the wheel?

*edit* Found it! Seems like it's 5 on the numpad, but haven't tested it yet.