Release 7.1.0 supports Ghostwire: Tokyo! (Patreon)

7.2.0 update: Release 7.2.0, attached at the bottom of this post, fixes all VR-related problems introduced by the Edgerunners Update (1.6) that came out yesterday for Cyberpunk 2077. It also solves a regression in my VR conversion for Horizon: Zero Dawn that was making the crosshair appear very close to your eyes, instead of placing it at the correct depth in the world. I'm aware about the binoculars issue in Ghostwire: Tokyo; I will try to fix it too, but for the moment you can play that segment (and in general any portions of the game that should give you trouble in VR) by ticking the "Force 2D virtual screen" checkbox in the "GWT" tab of my overlay.

7.1.1 update: In release 7.1.0 I disabled motion blur for the game (as it doesn't work correctly in VR and smears the image), but I didn't realize that my patch was also affecting other things. Kudos to the Patrons who noticed that screen-space reflections were not working. The faulty patch is also the likely reason why some of you were noticing no performance drops when enabling ray tracing: it wasn't actually getting enabled! 

All of that is fixed in the new release 7.1.1, attached below, which also introduces another important upgrade: the mod now has experimental support for the PS5 DualSense controller! So you can play the game with haptics and adaptive triggers enabled, and still be able to open and navigate the mod overlay with the gamepad.

I'm also aware that the mod for Cyberpunk 2077 has been broken by today's big update to game version 1.6. I will work to fix it, but I can't provide an ETA yet. Finally, thanks for your enthusiasm and the overwhelmingly positive reception for the GW:T mod!!!

I'm really loving this game :-) As I wrote in my previous post, the gameplay and graphics are a perfect fit for VR. It begins perhaps a bit slowly, with lots of cutscenes and story setting, and for a while it looks as if you will be confined to a specific area, being told what to do and where to go every step of the way. Don't be fooled by that, as it's only basically the tutorial level.

Very soon the game opens up, and when it does, the city starts to feel like a huge playground where everything is possible. It's just amazing, and as you can see from the beautiful video above by Eurogamer's paladin of VR, Ian Higton, Tokyo has been recreated so well that if you've ever been there the game will give you pangs of nostalgia, and if you haven't, it will make you seriously consider a trip!

Quick Setup instructions

The steps are the same as with my previous mods; if you're a returning user, you'll only need to be careful to extract the mod into the correct folder.

• Make sure that the game was run flat (i.e., not in VR) at least once, so that it could create your user profile.
• Unzip the archive attached at the bottom of this post into the folder where "OpenImageDenoise.dll" and "GWT.exe" are. On a standard Steam installation the folder will be at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ghostwire Tokyo\Snowfall\Binaries\Win64". When you extract the zip, be careful to preserve the folder structure. In other words, don't move anything around manually, don't flatten the folders, and don't put the mod into its own subfolder: RealConfig.bat must end up at the same level as OpenImageDenoise.dll. If you are returning to this post to update to a new release, you might be asked whether to overwrite existing files, in which case you should answer yes to all.
• Run RealConfig, which will automatically select graphics settings known to work correctly in VR and finish installing/configuring the mod for you. NOTE: if you omit this step or ignore any errors that the batch file reports back to you, the mod won't work correctly, even if you are just upgrading from a previous release.
• Note that there is another folder, three levels up, which contains an executable that is unfortunately also called GWT.exe. That is not the main executable, it's only the launcher (you can see it's less than 1 MB in size). The folder you want is the one with a path ending in "Binaries\Win64", with an executable of about 90 MB.

Resolutions and additional notes

Usually for my mods I coax the games into accepting square (1:1) resolutions, like 2160x2160 for example, because it's the aspect ratio that best fits the most commonly used headsets. For Ghostwire: Tokyo however I had to fall back to 5:4 resolutions, because below that aspect ratio the game's HUD breaks and becomes unreadable. So, after running RealConfig, you will find that the game starts for the first time with a resolution of 2700x2160. You can change that according to your specs, remembering that you want to keep a frame rate of at least 60-70 fps for a good VR experience. Do not select the traditional 16:9 resolutions (1280x720 and 1920x1080) unless you want to play pancake.

The game offers lots of scalability options, and they all work correctly in VR (except for motion blur, which I hard-disabled in the renderer). You can experiment with the various combinations, and you should find that performance is generally quite good for such an impressive looking open-world game. Depending on your system, and perhaps using an upscaling technique like DLSS, you might even be able to hit the 180 fps needed for R.E.A.L. VR without any AER artifacts!

Other games

I'm constantly evolving my framework, in an effort to make all the mods run as well as possible on all hardware and software combinations out there. Sometimes that can introduce regressions though, and in particular with the previous 6.1.0 release I received several reports of crashes at start (or the game refusing to enter VR) with H:ZD and CP2077. If you were one of the affected users, and had to revert to 5.1.0, I would kindly ask you to try out this 7.1.0 release on the games in question to see whether it fixes the issues for you.

Happy ghost hunting!!!