The mod overlay (Patreon)

If you press Pause/Break on the keyboard when the game window is in focus, or if you squeeze both gamepad triggers all the way in while in the game menus, you will bring up the mod overlay. The double trigger shortcut is only active when the game is paused in the menus, and NOT during normal gameplay: otherwise the overlay would pop up unwanted at the most inconvenient times, like during gun fights.

The overlay consists of an initial banner and three tabbed windows. The initial banner (first image above, click on it for a larger view) shows the mod version, the current shortcuts needed to bring up the other windows, and whether any errors were found. For instance it will warn you if the mod cannot write out its log and configuration files, which can happen if your Windows user doesn't have write access to the game folder. It will also tell you whether a new release is available for download!

The initial banner should appear automatically at the top of the game window on your screen, and in your VR headset, for exactly 10 seconds when you launch the game, without needing any keystrokes. If it doesn't show, check out the Troubleshooting post, particularly question Q6.

If the banner appears but you don't have a Pause/Break key on the keyboard, and you don't have a gamepad or it's not working, so that you can't figure out how to access the other overlay windows, see Q1 down below at the end of this post.

If instead you managed to have the main overlay windows come up, you will see that there are three tabs available: "R.E.A.L. VR", "Overlay" and "Legal". "Legal" is where you can find software licenses.

The first tab, "R.E.A.L. VR", allows you to control how the game is brought into VR by the mod. In the "VR renderer" combo box you can select:

• "Auto": this is the default setting. It will default to the Oculus runtime if an Oculus headset is detected, otherwise it will try to load SteamVR.
• "Oculus" and "SteamVR" are self-explaining.
• "OpenXR" is the API that you should choose if you have a Windows Mixed Reality headset like the Reverb G2 (more on this in an upcoming post), otherwise with WMR the mod will default to SteamVR, which might give you tracking problems or even a black screen in the headset due to unsolved bugs in the Microsoft driver.

Under that, there is a big button that can be used to toggle VR rendering on and off (it will display as "Stop VR" or "Start VR"). The complete game is playable in VR and you should never need to turn it off, but if for example a part of a mission is too intense for you and it's making you sick, you can temporarily turn VR off, play past the problematic portion, and then turn VR on again without ever leaving the game.

Under "Advanced", you will find additional settings. You can choose whether the game should autostart in VR or not, whether to use stereoscopic or monoscopic rendering, the type of buffering (which should never need to be changed), the world size, and the eye you prefer to use for aiming down sights.

The world size deserves a couple of additional comments:

• you can use it to slightly tweak the size of everything you see, moving it around the default value of "1.0", if NPCs or objects in the game look generally too small or too big to you. For example, while Oculus and Valve headsets have perfect 1:1 world scaling, it seems to me that WMR headsets usually suffer from a scaling problem where all objects and characters in the world appear about 25% too small.
• or you can go wild and drag it far away from the default "1.0" value, like set it to something like "0.2" and play with doll-sized figures in a cute little toy world, or move to the other side like "2.0" and have everyone look like giants! If you choose the Toy Story side, I recommend switching to the last third-person camera which is the farthest from Arthur, so you will be able to see him clearly without getting cross-eyed.

Finally, the "Overlay" tab offers many customization options related to the overlay itself, like the font used, the transparency of the overlay, the colors and so on. I think that what players will find most useful is the capability to display the true game frame rate (and/or motion-to-photon latency) in a corner of your HUD, by checking the "Show FPS" and/or "Show latency" boxes, and optionally selecting in which corner with "Position on screen".

Have fun tinkering away!!!

Q1: I have no Pause/Break key on my keyboard, so I cannot activate the overlay.

A1: Quit the game and hand-edit RealVR.ini with Notepad. Add exactly the following two lines at the end of the file:

[INPUT]
KeyOverlay=57,0,0,0

This will temporarily set the overlay key to '9'. Save the file, run the game, press the '9' key (the number on the normal keyboard, not the keypad) and click on the "Overlay" tab. At this point you can click into the "Overlay key" box and press whichever key to want to bind the overlay toggle to. The new key that you select will be saved to the options and remembered for future runs.