VR Theater Mode
Toggle between full VR and Theater Mode at any time, giving you the best of both worlds. Theater Mode projects a virtual screen in your headset with full game compatibility using the standard desktop pipeline.Love flying in VR but prefer traditional controls for FPS? Just press a button to instantly switch between full immersion and Theater Mode, complete with head tracking support. Theater Mode mirrors your desktop resolution, so you can even play in ultra-widescreen in VR without ever removing your headset.
VR Dynamic Switch
Let the engine handle the VR switch automatically. Whenever you put on the headset VR will be enabled on its own. If you take it off you are back in desktop mode!Note that not all headsets support this at the moment.
Getting Started
Make sure you are running the game using the Vulkan renderer first. Starting with Alpha 4.5 this should be the default, and the D3D11 renderer is not currently supported. Simply connect your VR headset and ensure your preferred OpenXR runtime is set as active. Star Citizen will automatically detect your headset and initialize the engine for it. If a headset was detected, VR options will automatically appear in Settings → Comms, FOIP, VR & Headtracking section. All you have to do is turn it on there.When troubleshooting, if VR options do not appear, check your Game.log file and search for "OpenXR" to identify any initialization errors.
Default Keybinds
- Toggle VR on and off: “Numpad /”
- Toggle Theater Mode on and off: “LALT + Numpad 5”
- Recenter View: “Numpad 5”
VR specific settings
You will find a series of new settings in the options under
Comms, FOIP, VR & Head Tracking. They will only show up when you have a VR headset connected:
- VR - Enabled: Enables and disables the headset (also available via keybind)
- VR - Theater Mode: Enables and disables Theater mode (also available via keybind)
- VR - Theater Mode Scale and Distance: Allows you to adjust Theater mode to your liking.
- VR - Automatic Switching: Automatically enables / disables VR based on headset detection if your headset supports it via a sensor (verified on Quest 3 - compatibility varies by headset)
- VR - Interpupillary Distance (IPD) Scale: This allows you to further scale the IPD distance that the VR headset is reporting. Effectively it means you can expand and contract the distance between your eyes.
- VR - Show Console: self explanatory
- VR - Monitor Mirror Mode: Allows you to set what your normal screen will show while you play. Useful specifically for streamers.
- VR - Actor Control Mode: Allows you to define how you want to play the game in VR during the FPS / on-foot sections using the default mouse and keyboard controls. Since we do not support normal VR locomotion yet there are two ways from you can pick:
1- Pitch-locked (default): The mouse yaw allows you to turn but aiming up and down will not move your head but just your gun pitch angle. You have to manually adjust your head to look along the aim line of your gun. This gives you a stable view (which causes less motion sickness) but a somewhat suboptimal aim experience.2- Direct offset mode: The VR camera is directly offset from your normal game camera. Very easy to use but the camera will tilt while leaning or high pitch angles. It is faster to use in terms of normal SC gameplay but less stable and therefore more prone for motion sickness.
- VR - Vehicle HUD Projection Distance: Allows you to define at what distance infinity projected vehicle HUD elements are shown (e.g. gunnery PIPs, the Advanced HUD or the aiming crosshair). By default, it is set at 100m at which parallax effects should not be visible anymore.
- VR - Visor and Lens Aspect Ratio/Distance/Height/Scale: Allows you to tweak placement of the visor and lens elements.
Additionally, we whitelisted some advanced settings which can be changed via the console. We do not recommend changing them, but you’re free to experiment with them.
- g_headtracking_hmd_actorIK_offsetPosition_applyInSeat (1 by default): This will adjust the actor rig based on the VR position offset while being seated (similar to what normal headtracking does).
- g_headtracking_hmd_actorIK_offsetRotation_applyInSeat (0 by default): This will adjust the actor rig based on rotational VR offsets while being seated. Enabling this will adjust the unified actor rig based on where you look with the headset, but it will also induce more motion sickness as the actor posture changes with it.
- g_headtracking_hmd_actorIK_offsetRotation_applyDefault (0 by default): This will adjust the actor rig based on rotational VR offsets while not being seated. Enabling this will adjust the unified actor rig based on where you look with the headset, but it will also induce more motion sickness as actor posture changes with this.
- g_headtracking_hmd_vehicleAds_allowPositionOffset (1 by default): If enabled, allows the VR offsets to be applied to the the precision targeting camera.
- g_headtracking_hmd_actor_shake_applyRotationOffset (0 by default): If enabled allows shake to happen to the VR camera. Until further testing we turned this off, but you’re free to try it out.
- r_StereoDepthComposition (0 by default): If enabled, provides OpenXR with the scene's depth buffer. This may improve any kind of reprojection behavior. Please let me know if you see any improvements from this!
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