Release 9.2.0 supports Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered and Miles Morales (Patreon)

Dear friends, it's the end of 2022! Let's celebrate with not one, but TWO amazing Spidey games []-D

Before we begin though, let me state clearly that I'm deeply sorry for the raw state in which you're going to find the mod. Due to all the time I had to spend on AER v2, and to some health issues I experienced recently, there will be several operations that you'll have to perform manually and some annoying problems still left to resolve.

Setup

If you have an NVIDIA card, make sure that your drivers are updated to the latest version (at least 527.56).

Extract the mod archive into the "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered" folder for the first game, or "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales" for the second game in the series. You might need to change the paths slightly if you have moved your Steam library from its default location, or if you own the games from a different store.

Then run RealConfig.bat. It will perform a few indispensable operations (including the v-sync fix to work around the recent NVIDIA drivers bug), but I haven't been able to make it automate the game configuration yet, so you'll need to start the game launcher and set the following mandatory options before entering the game:

In the Display tab:

• Window Mode = Windowed
• HDR = unchecked
• Aspect Ratio = Auto
• Dynamic Resolution Scaling = Off
• Vsync = Off
• NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency = Off

In the Graphics tab:

• Depth of Field = Off
• Motion Blur Strength = 0

(From here on I'll be referring for simplicity to Spider-Man Remastered, but the steps are the same for Miles Morales).

Spider-Man is mostly CPU- and storage-bound, especially when traversing the city, so if you have a 3090 or 4090 you should be able to set everything else in the graphics options to insanely high values. Even RT reflections are not much of a resource hog with these games. If you have lesser cards, scale back accordingly. The camera in Spidey is so wild that you want all the fluidity and framerate stability you can get!

At this point you can finally press Play on the launcher. The game should enter VR and after the intro movies you will see Spidey on the radio tower. He should be 3D, but quite wobbly and low-resolution. Also the city behind him, which is just an imposter, will rotate in weird ways with the camera (luckily that's only an issue in the loading menus, the actual game is true 3D).

Unfortunately the game offers no resolution control for windowed mode, so here comes the worst nuisance: bring up the mod overlay and in the main tab find the slider that says "Target pixels per degree". Set it to a value approximately in the range 10-20, depending on your GPU, then press the "Adapt resolution" button to set the game resolution to your preferred value. You will have to set the resolution again at the start of each game session, as it won't be remembered. You can also do that at any moment while in actual gameplay.

The mod will default to the new render mode "1/2 rate". If your HMD is set to 90 Hz (recommended for my mods) 1/2 rate will lock the game at 90 fps. If you observe juddery movement or dropped frames, go down to "1/3 rate" which will lock the game to 60 fps. If you are hitting the target rate consistently, both modes should feel fluid like the full 180 fps we had in Dark Souls (albeit with a few more artifacts).

Note that with these two new AER v2 modes, the GPU should never reach 100% usage. A bit of headroom (say 5-10%) is needed to allow the VR runtime to hit Vsync reliably and also for the video capture to run smoothly if you are recording or streaming.

There is no first person camera (at least for the moment). Yeah, I know :'-(

The recommended gamepad for this game is the PS5 DualSense connected with an USB cable, due to the special haptics and adaptive triggers. Web-slinging feels much more immersive. The Xbox controller kinda works too, but has a few problems, most notably the fact that when the mod overlay is open, the navigation inputs you send to the overlay will incorrectly affect the game too.

The in-game camera will mostly work as intended. However:

• QuickTime action sequences (where you have to mash buttons in sync with the prompts) will often have weird camera angles where you have to look all the way down or up every few seconds;
• the Oscorp Research Stations missions tend to grab the camera very hard and don't allow you to look around for several seconds during their mini-cutscenes;
• there are (few) moments in the game which are actually impassable in VR, because the game wants the camera to be oriented in a very specific direction which I don't know how to reproduce. That happens for instance during tutorials when the game wants you to look at a specific object and activate it. Those sections need the magic cure-all button "Force 2D virtual screen" which is found in the "SPIDEY" tab of the mod overlay. On a happier note, there you'll also find the time scale slider for the coolest-looking slow-motion aerial acrobatics :-)

Known issues

• 1. If the game does not enter VR (i.e., the "Start VR" button on the overlay doesn't seem to do anything), rename the file "sl.interposer.dll" to "sl.interposer_bak.dll". This does not seem to be a problem for all users and for all cards, but it happened to me with the RTX 4090. I will try to find a better solution than renaming the file.
• 2. Changing the resolution, or tweaking the graphics settings while in game, may put the HUD in a weird state where the menu items rotate with your head instead of remaining fixed in space. It doesn't happen every time, so both the beta testers and myself have always been able to fix the issue by repeating the operation a few times or changing another setting back and forth (for example, toggling the RT reflections always seems to reset the HUD to its correct behavior for me).
• 3. If you can't seem to get past a crash at startup, try disabling Steam Input, either globally or for the game. That solved the crash for one of the testers. It seems to be dependent on the controllers that you have connected to your system.
• (I will update this section as new issues are found/solved)

Additional notes

Today I bought an RTX 2060 and spent several hours with it in order to fix the scaling problems that were present in the previous AER v2 release. While I may be able to do more in January, I did make some progress, and on my test system (Intel Core i9-9900K, 32 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 2060) I can now play both Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered with perfect fluidity in AER v2.

In particular, keeping in mind that the RTX 2060 is the absolute minimum to be able to use AER v2 (older cards lack the necessary hardware):

• you'll want to set all graphics options to the lowest possible values, and use a resolution no higher than 1696x1696 in FF7R (with Spidey you can go a bit higher, around 2000x2000, since the game supports DLSS);
• don't use "1/2 rate" unless your headset is set to refresh at 60 fps, but prefer "1/3 rate". The card is pretty weak, and with AER v2 you want to always hit the target rate and to leave the GPU some headroom, in order to allow the VR runtime to work without hiccups.

With the above settings, I was able to get rock-solid gameplay at 60 fps. Of course the image quality won't be comparable to that of a 4090, mainly due to the low resolution, but you should be able to get a taste of what it means to play without ghosting :-)

One very important note: if you get awful judder, or long pauses where the headset doesn't seem to update (like one second or more), it's an almost sure sign that you're running out of VRAM. Dial down the texture quality, and close all other applications in the system that might be hogging your precious video memory (Chrome, I'm looking at you). Sometimes, especially if you've been playing for a while, it might even be helpful to restart the game and/or the VR runtime.

Of course with more powerful midrange cards, like for instance the good old 2080 Super, you'll be able to get the same fluidity while pushing higher resolutions. And if your card has a larger amount of VRAM than the puny 6 GB of the entry-level 2060, freezes and hiccups will be a much rarer occurrence.

An awesome 2023 to all of you!! This will be the year of VR!!!