So I was asked if my head tracking approach of reading the IMU data from my Viture Pro to OpenTrack and SBS (side-by-side) mode with ReShade would also work with StarCitizen.
It works with the Breezy GNOME xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop (but the Vulkan one works probably too but that’s untested). It should also be compatible with other glasses that have IMU for Breezy available.
There is an unlisted SBS version of this video linked in the description. You will need XR glasses that do FULL SBS though to watch it!
Until now I used OpenTrack with my DIY IR tracker or the Neuralnet tracker. I knew that my XR glasses feature IMU data though and the xr_driver of the Breezy Desktop project allows to access the data via IPC on Linux PC. So I did what Linux user do: I wrote a script to access the IMU data and forwarded it via UDP to OpenTrack:
This reminded me that I also wrote a proof of concept to implement the FaceTrackNoIR (or OpenTrack) protocol into FreeSpace 2 Open on Linux PC ( https://makertube.net/w/7VtfAjW7EiAUS5aiPwG7if ) so I gave it a spin to test the data bridge. That was smooth sailing!
The mod is Diaspora: Shattered Armistice, still awesome today: http://diaspora.hard-light.net/ (Warning: This may fuel a desire to re-watch the BSG series again 😀).
It works with the Breezy GNOME xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop (but the Vulkan one works probably too but that’s untested). It should also be compatible with other glasses that have IMU for Breezy available.
Update: hodasemi wrote a Rust connector based on the idea that works without Breezy: https://github.com/hodasemi/xr_to_opentrack_rs – comes with a systemd service file so it can run in the background. Once installed the only step left to do is fire up OpenTrack 🤘
I know most of you won’t care or see why this is of interest but I got another game, this time No Man’s Sky, working in #SBS (side-by-side) mode using #ReShade [on Linux PC] 🤓
As usual: Viture or XReal users can probably just press fullscreen after switching into SBS mode to watch this. Others may need an external player to sort it out – I sure love delivering to the absolute niche of the niche [of yet another niche] 🤷
I know most of you won’t care or see why this is of interest but I got another game, that I like a lot, working in #SBS (side-by-side) mode yesterday using #ReShade [on Linux PC] 🤓
I’m considering to start an extra channel for the SBS stuff since this probably just annoys most people. In fact downvotes started to pile up but is it my fault that YT (or PeerTube for that matter) doesn’t support this in any sane way? I know about frame packed versions now but that only results in badly automated out of focus Anaglyph 3D videos nobody can enjoy.
So bear with me if I mix something up, this is all news to me and I’m still flabbergasted. I got myself some XR glasses mostly for watching movies and perhaps some gaming on the Steam Deck a while ago.
Now I learned about “SBS” (Side-By-Side) mode like ~3 days ago, that the glasses support. I tried this with the game Elite Dangerous first, since this has an SBS mode built in too, and was mind blown. My current favourite time stink is Ace Combat though so I started digging.
Turns out there is this Reshade tool that would forcefully enable such a mode for basically any game with the right shader. Several exist but the first I found, “SuperDepth3D.fx”, seems to do the trick. Enabling it split the 1920×1024 in half with two slightly different view ports, one for each eye. There are many options to fine tune this and I’m still fiddling with this to find the perfect settings but results look great already.
My glasses do Full SBS though and have a resolution of 3840×1024. I read somewhere that wide-screen is possible with more DLL shenanigans with Ace Combat 7 too but I run the game on a Linux PC anyway, where we utilise a tool named “gamescope”. This allows basically to configure a virtual display for each game and override the game resolution in various ways. It also has a stretch option, which is exactly what I needed to get the “compressed” SBS view from 1920 to 3840, where the aspect ratio would fit again. BTW: This also has FSR built in so any upscaling looks good enough too. I’m not entirely sure but I think there’s a similar tool on Windows called “Virtual Deskop”?
Anyway, I already managed to get my head tracker working by mapping the output to a virtual gamepad on the look-around axes before. I also found a mod that enables a wider FOV. Imagine my stupid grinning when everything fell into place: Full SBS with head tracking, a more sane FOV and yes, I jumped all the hoops to get my HOTAS and rudder pedal of my old ViperPit working (which is a different story because my devices are so old that I had to upgrade em to USB before, which involved some Arduinos, programming and soldering). I guess that makes me a member of multiple niches at once 🤓
And since I’m aware that nobody can “see” what I’m talking about, without having XR glasses or a VR headset (or a DIY VR Box for smart phones) on their own, have also an Anaglyph 3D render. This requires just some old school two coloured (red and cyan) glasses often made of paper, that many people still have around somewhere, to get an idea.
The colour of the sky? It’s perfect. A deep dark blue.
So… this is news to me, because I don’t have a #VR headset, but I can set my #Viture Pro #XR glasses into #SBS (side by side) mode by pressing the small button longer. Some games, like #EliteDangerous, can do this as well without fiddling around with Reshade. I didn’t really expect it but it just works. This way I even get 3D on foot, which is not supported for VR in Elite Dangerous Odyssey at all! Side by side Crosseye mode (right eye left, left eye right) though? Add some head tracking to the mix, which is totally possible, and I get a very nice VR-like experience even on foot in Elite Dangerous – and on Linux PC!
The FOV is somewhat cramped. No idea if this can be tweaked any further but I’ll fiddle with the settings on my next test. Mebbe this can be tweaked (or I use #Breezy Desktop to zoom in somewhat).
Update: I got the aspect ratio somewhat under control. It’s not perfect but much better and an odd combination of window mode and resolution and upscaling, that somehow affects the HUD only but make no sense to me at all. At this point I think it’s simply a bug of Elite. It’s like the HUD doesn’t get the memo to scale up after the intro played. I’m also not sure if this is a side effect of gamescope but I can totally live with this result (though it does start to stutter somewhat on foot but recording this at the same time somewhat overwhelms my rig anyway). These are my gamescope settings with Steam:
Max-scale is probably not needed but it was started with this so I won’t omit it now.
The ingame settings are 1280×960 and windowed with _NO BORDER_. Every other mode broke the aspect ratio even more! That is also true for 1920×1024, which would have made _some_ sense to me at least, but this did also NOT work FOR ME.
This results in a pixelated HUD which is worked around with upscaler INTERNAL or AMD CAS cranked to x2 – AMD FSR did NOT WORK.
If someone could enlighten me on this: Bring it!
YMMV.
Little did I know what a pain in the neck it would be to get this running. No, Linux wasn’t the problem. That was just Press Play, as usual.
There is however no settings menu for #HOTAS joysticks so any mapping has to be done by manually editing the `Input.ini` of the game in an text editor, which is a guessing game. Head tracking is also a no go. I pulled the old trick to map the head tracker to a virtual XBOX controller but the game comes with an annoying deadzone where the camera snaps to the center.
Ah well, got it all working okay-ish in the end and enjoyed some pew pew in the skies. There seem to be plenty of #Macross mods too so trying that will be next 🤘
Back in 2023 I started a new game in #Satisfactory where I did set out (on a whim) to build the #BattlestarGalactica – and fair warning: I never finished it. I found some measurements of this iconic ship from the #BSG verse online, which is apparently something like 1.44km x 551m and converted this to 179.6 x 68.9 Satisfactory Foundations (look Mom, a game made me do MATHS again).
Finding a spot with enough space was a task on it’s own and I settled for the West Coast in the end. This is so close to the edge that the game starts to kill the player because the map ends there. This is also a Vanilla game with no mods.
After laying a square for the proportion and being somewhat satisfied (haha) with that I started refining the outlines. This took ages and some mad image editing skills to scale photos with correct proportions and overlaying them with a grid in the Gimp editor. Ah well not really but you get the idea.
The goal was to build a mega factory inside the hull working with the given layout. Vehicles and trains would pick up all required resources and bring them in via the fighter decks. I kinda imagined what could have happened if the Galactica crashed on a planet after her last journey. Using the powerful engines to power machines that would aid in starting with a settlement program or something like that, while the former ship itself would get decommissioned and transformed piece for piece.
I am rather happy with the result, even without ever completing this. My gaming focus shifted a lot and with the announcement that no further early access updates would happen I kinda lost interest in the project. I am not expecting to complete it once the release drops. That’s okay though. I am still looking forward to said release.
I mean after ~850 of casual hours I kinda have seen it all. Best early access ever – and yes all on a Linux PC – as usual for me 🤘I’m very curious what else the devs will come up with for this title. Anyway, here are the rest of the 16 screenshots. This shows more of the inner ship including the various power plants and reactors.
Thank you Coffee Stain Studios for making such an entertaining game. I enjoyed every hour of it and despite this being basically an endless grind game it never felt like grinding at all. Heck, thinking of all the possible ways to transport, collect and divide stuff is endless fun for me ❤️
Experience the exciting universe of The Expanse like never before in Telltale’s latest adventure, The Expanse: A Telltale Series. Follow Cara Gee, who reprises her role as Camina Drummer, and explore the dangerous and uncharted edges of The Belt aboard the The Artemis. From scavenging wrecked ships in a zero-g environment, to surviving a mutiny, to combating fearsome pirates, you make the difficult choices and reveal Camina Drummer’s resolve in this latest Telltale adventure.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
There are rumours that I “just checked” if this game works at all and finished it 6.5h later in one sitting. I can neither confirm nor deny that. I’m also very sleepy today.
I got this Telltale-game to my birthday and decided to give it a go yesterday. Didn’t expect much and was already kinda annoyed when the starter suggested it requires a gamepad controller (turns out it doesn’t – it can be played with a mouse too). So I got my good old sturdy Steam Controller from next room, jacked it in and… watched it crash. To be fair: I was starting it on Linux, and this game is not made for this. So I checked briefly with the ProtonDB and switched the version from Experimental back to Proton 8.0.
Smooth sailing from here. Game started without a hitch, the controller was recognized, the provided Steam layout worked perfectly fine and it did not crash once until I finished the game hours later. It would also seamless switch to mouse input when this was touched but I decided to keep playing with the controller.
The graphics are nothing to write home about. Sound and music feel immediately like home though, as my wife put it (we’re both fans of the books and show). There are some puzzles but nothing too complicated and – thankfully – sparse. Same for some quick actions that require to hammer a certain button in time (without penalizing hitting a wrong button too). The Zero-G walks are amazing and gave my brain something to chew on when the ceiling suddenly became the new floor.
I won’t talk about the story itself, but I did like that it shows percentages of how other players decided in key situations after each chapter. Kinda interesting to know that there are other outcomes and that also makes me want to play it again. There are plot twists, backstories that may be uncovered, drama, tension, violence, love and death (yes yes, it is a telltale game :D).
Can recommend. Get it and don’t forget to change the air filters 🤓
No Man’s Sky with headtracking and HOTAS (on Linux PC)
Wondering about that button box? Didn’t use it in this demo but you can find plenty more examples on the channel and more details on my blog: https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/
How it’s done? NMS does support a gamepad but it also reads/maps all gamepads to a single device. It makes no difference between multiple gamepads!
This leaves me with a very limited amount of possible buttons on the HOTAS after mapping that to one virtual gamepad using MoltenGamepad (I usually split that one up into multiple gamepads for braindead games).
So for additional buttons I used AntiMicroX to map the rest as keyboard presses.
Doing so I noticed that NMS does “look-around” on the right stick and this is where OpenTrack comes into the play. It offers a joystick output (using evdev) and that is also just… a gamepad! Needs some remapping though to get pitch and jaw to the proper axis for NMS. This is done via SDL env (basically what Steam does under the hood but boy their GUI for that sucks): SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG="000022e86f70656e747261636b206800,opentrack-to-nms,rightx:a3,righty:a4,platform:Linux,crc:e822,"
And there you have it. NMS with my trusty old X52 Pro and a DIY headtracker for 5 bucks 🤓
PS: I’m aware that the recording quality sucks. This was very spontaneous with a webcam sitting on my chair. I basically just finished my happy dance that this started working properly and decided to smash that recording button. PC was not even in “gamemode”.
Bandai Namco Studios Inc.
