Troubleshooting (Patreon)

I will update and add to this post frequently as new information becomes available, so please come back from time to time if your problem hasn't been solved yet. I want to make the mod work for everyone of you, and even if I cannot reply to all messages I'm trying to read everything and to solve problems as they come up. Also, other Patrons are finding lots of good solutions and workarounds that I will repost here for ease of access.

Q1:
The mod doesn't work on my AMD video card.

Status:
Solved.

A1:
This only happened with version 1.0.0 of the mod. Any later release should work fine.

Q2:
The mod doesn't seem to work correctly on my WMR headset. I can only see the HUD but not the game world, or I can see the game world but tracking is very jittery.

Status:
There are workarounds: I will write a specific post for this issue.

A2:
The problem lies with the Windows Mixed Reality driver for SteamVR. Some versions of it display the RDR2 world correctly but have issues with the eye poses, while other versions (including the latest beta) have a more severe bug where the game world isn't even displayed. For the moment your best bet is to select the OpenXR renderer from the mod overlay: again, I will publish a specific post with more details.

Q3:
The game shows the intro movie and copyrights, then goes to a black screen and never loads Story Mode.

Status:
Solved.

A3: Thanks to the efforts of Patron Scott Carson, we have a solution: in Windows 10, go to Settings > System > Display and set "Use HDR" to Off. You might need to do that for each display you have currently connected. Please report back whether it works for you!

Q4:
I have successfully downgraded RDR2 to build 1.0.1355.30 (if you are on the latest 1.0.1436.25 build, i.e., the DLSS update, see Q8 instead). The game starts in VR but the headset only displays a virtual screen with the game window, instead of an immersive VR view of the world. If I press Pause on the keyboard, the "R.E.A.L. VR" overlay shows up (if it doesn't, see Q6 instead).

Status:
Should be understood and solved.

A4:
The problem seems to be with Steam/SteamVR that quite stubbornly do their utmost to force the game to run in theater mode. First, make sure that "Use Desktop Game Theatre while SteamVR is active" is NOT checked in the game properties page for Steam, as explained in the README. If that's not enough, some users recommended avoiding the game shortcut on the desktop, because it seems to force theater mode on, and instead launching the game directly from Steam (the Steam application, not SteamVR!). If even that's not enough, other users observed that if SteamVR is already running when you launch the game, it will again try to force theatre mode, so they recommend quitting out of SteamVR before launching the game (when the mod takes control, it will automatically run an instance of SteamVR itself).

Q5:
The game runs in VR, but framerate/quality/resolution is not good enough for me.

Status:
Depends on your system of course, but you should be able to get some improvements.

A5:
I will write a specific post in the next few days with hints and ideas to carefully tune and optimize the mod for different configurations. In the meantime, make sure that you're updated to the latest version of the mod as several users reported major performance gains.

Q6:
The game runs in a square window as it should, but the mod isn't loaded and VR doesn't start. There is no overlay coming up when I press Pause on the keyboard, and the "RealVR64.log" file is not even being created.

Status:
I've made some progress in understanding the root cause. It seems that the Vulkan runtime for some reason refuses to load the layer provided by the mod.

A6:
The problem might be tied to the fact that your Vulkan loader is running with elevated permissions, which apparently makes it ignore layers for the current Windows user. Double check that you are NOT running the game, or Steam, or any launcher you might be using, as an administrator or with elevated privileges.
UPDATE: If you have verified that you are not running anything elevated, yet still cannot work around the issue, try downloading the additional "RealConfigRunAsAdmin.bat" file that I'm attaching down below (new version updated on Jul 26 for 1.4.0), putting it into the game folder next to RDR2.exe and the other mod files. Then, right-click on the file and select "Run as administrator", selecting your preference of settings and checking that no errors are reported. After that the mod should work.
UPDATE May 25: If even with the "RealConfigRunAsAdmin.bat" you cannot get the mod to attach to the game, look at the end of this post: you will find a new "GetVulkanInfo.bat" file. Download it and put it into the game folder, then run it as your normal user (not as administrator). It should generate a report file called "vkinfo.txt": please upload the report somewhere, like on Pastebin, so that we can take a look and hopefully understand what is going wrong with your system.

Q7:
Running the batch file gives me an error and says 0 file(s) copied. After that, when I run the game it doesn't appear in a square window as it should, and the mod doesn't work or only shows a flat screen in VR.

Status:
Investigating, but there is a workaround.

A7:
It seems that if you just downloaded the game for the first time and have never played it at all, the Settings folder might not be present, thus making the mod installation fail. I'm not sure whether this happens with all three versions of the game (Rockstar, Epic, Steam) or only with a specific version. Anyway, the workaround is to run the game once normally, quitting out of it, and then retrying RealConfig.bat. This time it should say 1 file(s) copied which means that it worked correctly.

Q8:
Ever since I updated the game to the 1.0.1436.25 build (the DLSS update that came out on July 13), the mod no longer shows the game world in VR but only a 2D virtual screen.

Status:
The DLSS update broke my mod in various ways. Due to changes in the rendering code and new bugs that Rockstar introduced, release 1.3.1 of the mod is no longer capable of attaching correctly.

A8:
The issue has been fixed starting from release 1.4.0 of the mod. DLSS now works correctly in VR.

Q9:
I had the game working perfectly in VR with the R.E.A.L. mod, installed in <some\path>. Then for various reasons I decided to move the game installation to <some\other\path>, and now VR doesn't start anymore. I have all the symptoms of Q6, but solution A6 doesn't work for me.

Status:
Should be understood and easily fixable.

A9:
The problem stems from the fact that the Vulkan loader gets confused when there are implicit layers with the same name in different directories. Once it fails loading one of them, it wrongly assumes that the layer won't be found in any of the remaining directories either.
To fix the problem, you should use Regedit. Please be careful if you have never done that, as with Regedit you can easily corrupt your system if you don't know what you're doing. If you don't feel confident, perhaps it's better to ask a friend who has more experience to help you.
Anyway, what you should do with Regedit is: navigate to the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Khronos\Vulkan\ImplicitLayers, and delete all the REG_DWORD values that contain "RealVR64.json" at the end of their name (so for instance if you see a REG_DWORD value named "C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2\RealVR64.json" you should delete it.) Do the same thing with the key HKCU\SOFTWARE\Khronos\Vulkan\ImplicitLayers. You can quit Regedit now.
Finally, run RealConfig.bat again, from the new game folder <some\other\path>. At this point only one layer should be correctly registered for the mod, and VR should start working again.

[TO BE CONTINUED]