I really don't have a clue what to do with PE. Don't know were to start

PimaxVR Software PE Discussion
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Hey guys! As I already replied in another thread about a “wizard”, let me just repeat myself a little in here too clarify a few things:

Yes a wizard (like mentioned above) could definitely help some people, even if it theoretically is a step backwards and also of conflicts with the entire profile-based settings PE is made for, I think some people might need a 1-2-3 step wizard to just get started. Me and Armin will work on a qizard like this.

But…

One thing to remember though, is that no matter how much you customize/change PE or no matter how cool wizard we create, a VR HMD will never be plug and play out of the box. This is not an IPhone. SteamVR is definitely not plug and play. At least not when you want to bring the best our of your HMD, whenever its Pimax or Valve Index.

Not even the Oculus Quest is plug and play when it comes to optimized settings, despite the fact it only contains a library of a few hundred games all optimized for the device. Yes it can run games with 1 click with default values, but once you want to adjust anything ,you need to fiddle around.

Using a Windows based PC, which can have 1000 variations of GPU/CPU/etc, its basically impossible to get it really optimized for all scenarios and for every single person. Or maybe it is, but would require a huge team of people working on this.

Same for IPD guide. Once we add it to PE, the guide will be a great “wizard” to (kind of) help you finding the correct IPD+offset etc. But it will never be a one-click solution to please everyone. And it will either way require you, as a user, to determinate if the IPD is your correct value. So its basically a manual process of calibrating your headset for your eyes, which some charts and images can help you with. Nothing and nobody else can determinate if the IPD is correct for you or not - its all about what you see, and in the end, nobody can see what you see.

As a Pimax user - or actually a VR user overall - there is and always will be a level of knowledge/skills required. Same for Valve Index or G2. Its basicaly the same for PC monitor gaming. Im talking about kids playing CounterStrike for instance. You can install windows, install drivers and just start the game as-is, or you can spend weeks tweaking the settings until you get satisfied, and eventually - most likely - get a better performance and image quality. After all, its not an XBOX console. It requires some fiddeling before you hopefully get satisfied. This may or may not be the reason why millions people just buy an XBOX and stay away from PCs.

While PE actually doesnt really require much skills/knowledge to master and undestand, it still may require some time from you to get adopted to the UI and understand the basics:

  • What is a settings profile
  • What is SteamVR optimization
  • What does it mean to “apply settings upon game launch”

This is basic stuff that you simply should learn and adopt to, sooner or later. Im sorry to say this, but there are no straight forward highways to success. There are shortcuts that might help you, but in the end, you need to hold the steering wheel, find the way and at least know which one the gas pedal is.

I hope you somehow get my point… I dont want to be harsh here, but I feel that nowadays, we are in times where people just doesnt want to adopt to anything. Things are just supposed to work. Magically by themselves. Everything else is garbage. Im sure others agree with me…

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Oh and I forgot…

DCS and P3D v5 (together with Xplane 11) are probably the 3 all-time worst-case scenarios you can find when it comes to VR performance. All these 3 simulators are old as ****, with single/dual core utilization, bad optimization and as soon as you run them on higher resolution - they all choke and make your PC Master Race rig feel like an old 486 DX machine. Its basically Crysis 2.0. Sad but true…

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Another thing is the so called “issue” of exiting SteamVR to get back to PE. Its a 3 click procedure.

  1. System button brings up the SteamVR dashboard (if you are in-game).
  2. Click Quit icon
  3. Click “Quit VR”

The game exists and SteamVR quits. PE starts.

Im still today looking for a way to automatically quit SteamVR when a game quits. But so far no success.
And maybe thats for a reason. SteamVR doesn’t want you to quit VR instantly. Why? Because once u quit VR with a Valve Index, HTC Vive etc, your headset turns off. Which is not what they want.

Either way. Just let it sink in… is this REALLY a huge problem? The fact that you need to click 3 times after playing a game, to get back to PE?

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For me, this is borderline. Moreover, I don’t trust software much not to get stuck somewhere forcing me to take my headset off. My solution is to hook VoiceAttack to start up with PiTool Home (of any kind) through my batch scripts, so I can bark ‘respond’ (disable need for Push-To-Talk), ‘dangerlift’ (disable lockout), ‘destruct all’ (forcibly terminate SteamVR process and restart everything back to Virtual Desktop), ‘ignore’ (re-enable Push-To-Talk).

As for “a VR HMD will never be plug and play out of the box” I totally agree. At the very least, SteamVR and Oculus runtimes will both need to be taken out of the loop before this is even technically feasible.

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But I mean you do it all in VR, in SteamVR Dashboard.

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With respect, @Sweviver, I didn’t think that the OP or others in this thread were asking for “plug and play”. Nor do I think that they are unwilling to learn a complex system. But there are things that can assist them in doing so, such as actually explaining terms that are used in the interface. I understand that you are very busy working on the software - perhaps other users can help. Asking and answering questions on the forum helps the questioner, but in the absence of a dedicated beginners’ section, it may not help the next person who fires up Pimax Experience and thinks “WTF does all this stuff actually mean?”.

I bought into the 8KX because it was the first HMD that seemed likely to offer acceptable performance, and also because with time on my hands in lockdown I was looking for a project. I accept that at the moment I am spending more time trying to learn and configure the device than I am actually playing with it. That’s OK and actually part of the fun - up to a point. But I look forward to a time when I am not constantly taking the HMD off to alt-tab the window back into focus, or trying to work out, by trial and error, how to set up game-specific profiles. I understand that Pimax Experience is a beta and has (a) bugs and (b) placeholders for future functionality, but the concept is excellent. The idea of users sharing profiles, and the application selecting “best-fit” profiles, is particularly clever.

TL;DR - you can be very proud of what you have already achieved - no need to feel defensive!

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After using the Pimax Experience a few days now exiting SteamVR that way isn’t that bad. It’s just a matter of changing the habit of exiting the game and instead exiting VR. I personally don’t think it’s a problem at all and really love using PE.

I’ve been using my 8KX a lot the past few days and with the new Pimax Experience I’ve rarely had to exit the headset. It’s been fantastic. The fact it’s only going to get better is freaking awesome!

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That was my thought too Troz, when I brought up some of those questions.

The wizard idea is to get someone started…ie sort of a walk through if you will. Then as experience builds, they may no longer need a wizard anymore.

Perhaps if a good interactive tutorial is added, maybe a wizard won’t be needed after all.
I just envisioned a newbie being very frustrated, startingout of they don’t even know were to start.
Hence liking bob_ontario idea of a wizard type structure.

I do understand this is not plug n play. I was thinking about other newbies too, in that they may get quite frustrated initially with out some hand holding. Perhaps not though.

I do get the concept of PE. Again, perhaps instead of a wizard, give folks a good interactive tutorial…ie “Getting Started” type thing…then that will suffice for everyone. I appreciate Sweviver responding to the thoughts and ideas from us.

I’ll keep working on things with PE. Perhaps when the stream session starts for more in depth look of PE…that will suffice anyway.

Thanks for your time.
David

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Not sure if this is relevant but it took me ages to figure out how to change the settings in PE using my index controllers. You have to click the index finger button on the back all the way down until it clicks.

It really should work when its most of the way down or partially down (everything else works this way) @SweViver

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OK thanks I need to check again. I haven’t round got to reinstalling it yet either, but it was the same on second try.

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Yes, of course I get that. But what if clicking ‘Quit VR’ fails to actually result in SteamVR actually exiting, or otherwise prevents PE from starting?

Then I am going to be very unhappily wondering how much troubleshooting I have to do to keep such things from happening again. And again. I have spent literally many years of my life dealing with such stuff. Maybe a full decade. Not to rant, just that this is why it could be a borderline problem for me.

Such things happen, and of course SteamVR is not very reliable. For this sort of reason, it is is common practice to send programs SIGTERM to cause them to close, then a few seconds later, if the program did not ‘gracefully’ shutdown, call the on the kernel to immediately stop processing the program at all. This is what my scripts do when called by the Voice Attack macros.

All that said, such scripts/macros to close SteamVR are kind of external to PE. Forcibly quitting SteamVR is a separate program to be called by the user.

More important is whether PE can launch VoiceAttack (or other programs by hooked script). Because VoiceAttack cannot use the Pimax built-in microphone if it is launched when the computer starts up before PiTool has turned on the headset, and VoiceAttack probably has to be restarted every time the headset is for the same reason.

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Has anyone tested Viveport? As it uses steamvrv library but not steamvr.

If it works there then maybe launch without Overlay might work.

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I’d really like to see your script for “destruct all”!! Would you mind sharing? Thanks!

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@mojojojo could likely wipe up a quick script as well to kill steamvr as he made one for pitool before I believe.

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There are a lot of capable programmers here. Sadly I haven’t even got steam installed.

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Might be easier to install the VoiceAttack macros, after cloning the repository to ‘C:\core\infrastructure\extendedInterface’ (this absolute path is basically required, among other things, VoiceAttack finds the sound effect files here).

See the README, and the VoiceAttack subdirectory.

A script to forcibly stop/start/restart SteamVR and similar programs themselves, is here. Call it with the ‘_stop’ parameter (I think that might be the default actually).

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Holly Crepes, Batman! Gonna have to break out my dos book for this, lol! Jeez, I think I still have one, too!

Fascinating Github page, I don’t recognize a dang thing! If I didn’t have a major issue with putting personal information online, I’d ask wth your education/background was! Wow!
Thank you for sharing!!!

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DOS… indeed. Don’t let that scare you though. I just use ‘batch’ under MSW when possible because MS has made some commitment to continue supporting these ‘scripts’ for some long number of years. They are actually incredibly simple scripts, that would be far more readable in bash if this were for UNIX/Linux machines…

My background is public knowledge, though I hesitate to link you to my resume/site/LinkedIn at the moment because these things are hopelessly obsolete. Among other things, I have served on HacDC’s (The Capital Hackerspace) BoD for three years, learned a lot from people there, taught some myself, built a bunch of custom hardware including electronics and 3D printers, and recently finished a huge piece of infrastructure called Ubiquitous Bash…

Eventually ‘extendedInterface’ will become end-user software, with a graphical installer, user guide, or some such. It provides a common standard for joystick layout, voice macros, etc.

Right now, these PDF files are the important parts.

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