The wrinkle slider

[Actually, maybe I should say the wrinkle sliders, because there's more than one. But they all kind of seem to behave the same: pull to the right for more wrinkles, to the left for the original plasticky faces.]

Release v2609.8.2_early_access of R.E.A.L. makes the necessary adjustments (quite a few of them this time) so that https://store.steampowered.com/app/3321460/Crimson_Desert/ can run perfectly in VR again.

You can safely update the game to version 2.01.00, which should carry you through the week until Friday at least, and then install my v2609.8.2 which you can find in the usual place. Remember that you need to rerun RealConfig after unpacking the archive and overwriting the old files.

[Well, no, I'm not being fully honest: some of them actually give you more wrinkles when dragged towards the left, whilst others do that on the right. And there are even some that seem to be doing nothing at all.]

I also fixed an oldie but goldie, https://store.steampowered.com/app/990080/Hogwarts_Legacy/ which had been broken for... well, I'm not actually sure how long. There were crashes at launch and when changing resolution, and due to some changes the developers made which somehow went unnoticed by us, the DL(S)SS-RR fix for Ray Reconstruction was completely busted. It's 100% repaired now, and it works even better than the original release.

[Yet, those wrinkles have been plastered all over the net for about one week now, so there must be something big going on... Maybe it's because of the additional flickering? Or the bleached colors?]

For reasons that will become clearer (or darker) as you read on, I also think that you might want to revisit a few somewhat forgotten gems, namely the three Spidey games that we support:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1817070/Marvels_SpiderMan_Remastered/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1817190/Marvels_SpiderMan_Miles_Morales/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2651280/Marvels_SpiderMan_2/

I backported to them the adaptive camera pitch control which I first implemented for https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086940/Baldurs_Gate_3/ . What that means is, by default the camera will remain level (locked to the horizon) only up to a certain absolute pitch. If the pitch gets out of that comfort zone, or in other words if the camera is pointed way up or way down, then the world will tilt in the opposite direction so that you can hold your head more or less still and not be forced to strain your neck to look beneath your feet or high above your head. This is sorely (neck pun intended) needed for Spidey games, due to the artistic direction of cutscenes that will often have the camera point up/down/up/down repeatedly every fraction of a second, particularly during QuickTime-style events, and due to things you need to do during gameplay like running up walls.

[Okay, okay, I've been a little snarky in my comments about the new DLSS 5 implementation from NVIDIA that has been spreading like wildfire. Like wildfire during a dry bout in a region with strong winds and dense vegetation. But I'm just joking. Truth is, DLSS 5 is shaping up to be the most significant (r)evolution we've seen in gaming since the introduction of consumer VR.]

For reasons that I will explain in a short while (sorry for all the interferences from the paragraphs in italics, it almost looks like there's two posts here that are competing for your attention), I finally got around to implementing a much needed quality of life improvement that should make your experience a little less jarring. As you know, when VR is activated games need to run at super high resolutions, and yours truly was only able to decouple the window size on the monitor from the rendering area in the headset for a few select games. The majority of titles implicitly assume that the presented image is the same size as the game window, because of course they expect that the window is what the user is actually looking at. So when coaxing those titles to run in VR we need to deal with huge windows that overflow the monitor/desktop area and cause all sorts of annoying behaviors, for example when you're trying to interact with the game or the overlays using the mouse.

Starting from this version, all games will support keyboard shortcuts to freely reposition the window on the desktop. The shortcuts are Alt+NUMPAD1 to Alt+NUMPAD9, and do what you would intuitively expect. For example, Alt+NUMPAD5 centers the window on the monitor it's being displayed on; Alt+NUMPAD7 aligns the top-left corner of the window to the top-left corner of the monitor; Alt+NUMPAD6 nudges the window to the right; and so on, you get the pattern. Using those shortcuts, it will be easy to do stuff that used to be frustratingly hard, like reading the optional DLSS indicator in the bottom left area of the window, finding lost overlays and use the mouse to undock them and/or pull them back to a more comfortable position, dragging the window title bar, things like that.

[How cool would it be if we could turn on the wrinkles even in VR? They look so amazing in YouTube videos, surely they will be even more impressive when you're inside the virtual world, won't they?]

Okay, dear interferences. I give up. Yes. Let's talk about DLSS 5. Nobody wants to hear about anything else anyway []-D

As you probably know, the R.E.A.L. VR framework is based on a quite "old" fork (old in computer years) of ReShade, precisely on a heavily modified and customized version of ReShade 4.9.1.

Back then, that is, about 5 years ago, ReShade had no concept of addons, while today they have become the most common way for modders to distribute and inject their libraries. Addons were introduced in version 5.0, and these days ReShade has reached version 6.8.0.

I've been thinking for quite a while of porting my framework to the new version of ReShade, but it's a huge undertaking that doesn't appear to be justified in terms of costs/benefits. Sure, I could have AI do it, so it would be ready in one day... and working correctly nevermore. And after that, no one in the world would any longer understand anything about its inner workings. The road to AI in the software business is paved with lemmings.

But I digress. Addons. They're important, there's no denying that. For example, the community-fueled wildfire spreading of DLSS 5 to almost all games ever created by mankind has been mostly driven by a ReShade addon.

So, starting from this R.E.A.L. VR release, it will be possible to chainload a second, newer copy of ReShade together with my framework. My .dll will take care of the interactions with the engine and the rendering on the headset, while the other copy will have access to the same DirectX device and will let you apply all kinds of new shaders (and most importantly, addons) to the game. The results will be visible in VR, not just on the monitor, and all the tests we carried out during these past few days show that there's negligible performance impact from running two simultaneous instances of ReShade (the one R.E.A.L. is based on, and the second one you chainload to run additional stuff).

No measurable increase in the frame time. Of course there WILL be a performance hit if the second ReShade is doing some heavy work, like for instance running the Neural Rendering addon, but that's a hit which would be there anyway. So the solution of having two copies, while slightly clunky, is perfectly feasible and actually gives us more freedom because you will also be able to run other customized copies of ReShade or complex third-party mods.

Instructions and caveats

You knew I would get to this section sooner or later, didn't you?

As you know from the Harry Potter movies, in order to have the magic work properly, it's extremely important that you spell the incantations correctly. I'll go through the incantations needed to run a basic version of DLSS 5 using an extremely popular and simple tool.

Then, Brandon will write a follow-up post with additional magic so that you can use a somewhat more advanced version, which offers a way better tradeoff between image quality and frame rate.

Just keep one thing in mind: this is very experimental, cutting-edge stuff. Unless you're kind of an expert at tweaking stuff, you might want to wait for an official release of DLSS 5 from NVIDIA. It can't be too far in the future anyway, given the explosive success the leaked implementation had.

Also, please realize that most of the code which has been popping up wildly over the net, about this DLSS 5 thing but also more in general, is AI-generated and might do all kinds of weird stuff to your system that no one even knows about. Case in point: during testing, Brandon and I had games that would no longer close properly, multiple processes spawning and never terminating, game options randomly reset, and I even had my game saves for DS2023 completely wiped out.

Luckily I had a backup. But our feeling is that the Wild West era of computing is upon us. I don't want to sound melodramatic, yet I believe that downloading AI-generated code from the net is a bit like going for street food in the back alleys. You might be lucky and find a real gem of a place, or you might get some exotic parasite. Not saying any of the DLSS 5-related code is infected or anything like that. Just saying that AI has been reported to do unexplainable stuff and has absolutely zero accountability. Most of the time it doesn't even have any recollection of what it did :-D

So, for the basic version:

• install or update R.E.A.L. VR in the game folder following the usual directions, then check that the game is displaying correctly in VR and DL(S)SS is working properly;

• download DLSS 5 Swapper and either install it on your system if you got the Setup version or put it in some folder of your choosing if you prefer the portable version. For reference, when I was testing, I used the Setup version 2.2.1. NOTE: this is the "DLSS 5 Swapper": despite the similarity in names, it's got nothing to do with the well-known "DLSS Swapper" that you might have used in the past to force updates to the DLSS libraries before the NVIDIA App was extended to support that operation directly;

• BEFORE running the DLSS 5 Swapper, rename my dxgi.dll inside the game folder (the same folder where you ran RealConfig) to something else, say dxgi_rvr.dll. This step is crucial: if you don't do it DLSS 5 Swapper will fail because it will believe there's a competing installation;

• now you can run DLSS 5 Swapper. You will need to point it to the very same folder where you renamed the dll; make sure it picks the correct executable for the game in case there's more than one. You'll also want to double check the other fields. Rendering API must match the one used by the game, typically DirectX 12; Automatic sometimes fails to recognize it. The rendering backend must be ReShade (default), and the installation route must be Native DLSS (RenoDX). Brandon will likely cover other paths in his post, but this is the one I tested personally;

• after DLSS 5 Swapper has done its thing (check the results for any errors in the bottom panel), close it and go back to the game folder. This step is essential too, and you must use the exact names I'll mention, otherwise things won't work correctly or at all. Rename the new dxgi.dll that the swapper put in the folder to ReShade64.dll (it should be slightly more than 5 MB in size and the version should be 6.8.0.2155 or later), and rename back my library from dxgi_rvr.dll to dxgi.dll (the size should be more than 10 MB);

• do NOT follow any random guides that suggest to use different names for the .dll, or to use third-party ASI loaders or chainloaders or whatever. To allow the delicate clockwork of two simultaneous injectors to work as intended, it's fundamental that my framework gets loaded early, before any graphics-related system library (so it must be named dxgi.dll), and that I chainload ReShade myself in order to perform the before-and-after housekeeping needed to make it believe it has full, undivided control over the application;

• at this point, when you run the game the next time, you will have two different overlays accessible. Mine, which you typically bring up with the Pause key or the gamepad gesture, and has an orange theme; and the one from the second ReShade, which by default will be blue-themed and can be brought up with the Home key. The overlays will coexist rather peacefully; when mine is open it will get priority, when it's closed mouse and keyboard will be directed to the other. Unfortunately ReShade's native overlay can only be navigated with mouse/keyboard, as implementing gamepad navigation was my own extension. That's where you will find the new Alt+NUMPAD shortcuts useful, as the ReShade overlay often tends to hide offscreen ^_^

At this point, if everything worked correctly, you will have DLSS 5 in VR! You will notice it when it happens, because of the wrinkles, and because your frame rate will be basically cut in half. But Brandon still has a few cards up his sleeves to help you with that, stay tuned!