VorpX Virtual Screen & Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Hello fellow VR lovers,

As explained in previous posts, VorpX is a great bit of software that lets you turn your legacy games into VR experiences. The results vary a fair bit, from Borderlands, which to me just looks 3D but not really immersive, to Fallout 3 where it really feels like you are there. Setting these games up right takes a fair bit of tinkering most of the time, but the results can make it really worthwhile.

However, there are some games where no amount of tinkering helps you get the right result. Sometimes these are because of technical issues with the game, and sometimes it is because the game itself just doesn't translate well to seeing it in first person in VR all the time. This is where VorpX's virtual screen mode comes into play.

What is Virtual Screen Mode?

What DE:HR in Virtual Screen mode looks like

In standard VR mode you are looking at the game through the eyes of your character. You can turn your head to look around, you'll see your guns being held up in front of you and generally the desired result is to feel like you are in the game world.

In Virtual Screen mode, the game is running in a large virtual screen placed in front of your view point. The effect from a VR-perspective is similar as if you were playing the game in your own virtual cinema, and indeed you can easily configure VorpX to draw you sitting in a chair in front of the screen, and draw a theatre room around you. Look down and you can see your (drawn) legs.

The point of this mode is to enable you to still play games in 3D even if they don't lend themselves to being played in full VR mode. It's the same as if you were playing on a 3DTV or a 3D-enabled monitor. But if you don't have a 3D monitor and you do have a VR headset, this is for you!

In this post I talk about how it was to set up Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and what the results are like.I chose DE:HR because there are many third person view elements in this game, such as the cover mechanism which you use extensively if you play this game in stealth mode (i.e. the proper way). This means even if you got this game working smoothly in VR mode, you are not going to get the full experience because you'll get many issues in relation to switching to third person mode all the time.

Technical Issues Abound in VorpX and the Game

The basic setup of this game is actually fairly easy, the problems are the technical issues you have to overcome. The game engine itself is quite solid and stable, the specific problems are around the graphics.

Actually, the Deus Ex engine has a 3D mode built-in. The trouble is, it is tied around nVidia 3D Vision and other 3D monitor-based solutions, and I didn't find any way to enable this for use with a VR headset. So you might as well ignore this feature.

Turning off DX11 is currently needed due to a VorpX problem

There appears to be in a bug in VorpX at present that really kills performance in some Direct X 11 games, and I discovered this bug trying to play DE:HR. It doesn't matter what performance improving tweaks you try such as lowering the resolution or switching away from geometry 3D mode, the game runs like crap. You have to switch to DirectX 9 mode, which luckily you can do directly in the game options rather than have to mess about in some config file.

The good news is, in DirectX 9 mode, DE:HR runs really well. The bad news is, we have another technical problem to resolve. For some strange reasons, Geometry 3D mode in DirectX 9 causes shadows to render out of position. The shadows for one eye are too far left and the shadows for the other eye are too far right. Disabling shadows in the game does not resolve this issue, because all objects in the game have lighting effects and the shadows option only covers actual shadows cast onto the ground. The other big problem with this mode is you get permanent "shadow" bars on the left and right side of the screen.

The solution to this problem is to switch from Geometry 3D mode to Z-Buffer 3D. Unfortunately, you do lose some of the very sharp depth perspective you get with G3D mode, but overall the game looks better because the shadow problem is solved.

Finally, at this stage you probably notice that whilst the game looks fine, you'll chop around a lot between getting great frame rates and some really bad stuttering. Unfortunately you can blame Eidos for this one. The original DE:HR game had a patch that solved these problems, but Eidos created the Director's Cut version based on a pre-patched version of the original and so these bug have returned. The worst part is, now the Director's Cut version has been out for several years, clearly Eidos are not going to re-patch the game, thanks a lot Eidos!

Luckily, our friends on the internet have some simple tweaks that resolve a lot of the issues, although you'll need to be comfortable editing the windows registry. The tweak is explain in this post on the Steam community, but the those already familiar with RegEdit, all players need to make the following change

• Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC. Change AllowJobStealing to 0.

And if you are an nVidia card owner (like me) you also need to make the next change as well.

• Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Eidos\Deus Ex: HRDC\Graphics. Set ATIForceFetch4 to 0.

The Results

After all this work, the game is great fun to play in 3D. It's pretty similar to watching 3D movies in BigScreen actually, a great way of taking a 3D screen principle and getting it to work in your VR headset.

At some point in the future I'm going to try the same thing with the original BioShock (not the remastered version). I've tried getting it to work in VR before and although technically I have got it there, I was never able to fix the zoomed-in/POV problem. Using virtual screen seems like a good idea!

Until next time!