Playing X Rebirth VR on the Pimax: a few quick tips

Feedback and information for X Rebirth VR Edition

Moderator: Moderators for English X Forum

Post Reply
Tolmos
Posts: 394
Joined: Thu, 23. Feb 06, 03:37
x3tc

Playing X Rebirth VR on the Pimax: a few quick tips

Post by Tolmos » Mon, 1. Jun 20, 07:05

I'm making this thread mostly for folks who may come here looking for how to play X Rebirth VR using a Pimax. Out of the box it doesn't quite work, but the level of effort to get it up and running is pretty minimal... as long as you know ahead of time what to do (thus this thread! It took me a sec to figure it all out). Most of this thread is just recommendations to make it look better; if you just want to get it working, the first section of "It Doesn't Work!" might help get ya running.

It Doesn't Work

If the game doesn't open at all for you in VR and just opens in a window, you will likely need to do two things (at least, this is what worked for me):

1) If starting it from steam, right click the game in your library and go to properties. Click the "Set Launch Options" box and put this in without quotes: "-openvr_force_proximity"
2) Hop into PiTools with your headset on, go to the Games tab on the left and make sure that "Compatible with Parallel Projections" is set to true.

Go ahead and close on out of both PiTools and SteamVR if it's open, then start both back up. If you load X Rebirth VR and you get 2 identical screens on each eye, it means that the settings in PiTools didn't quite save for some reason (this happened to me). Just go back in there, maybe uncheck and then re-check the parallel projections box and hit both Apply and Save for good measure. Then make sure to exit both SteamVR and PiTools, and try again. Should work this time if it didn't before.


"I Got It Working, But It's Blurry!" Plus some other general visual improvement suggestions

Now, you may get into the game and find the it is VERY blurry for some reason; far moreso than it should be! This game is quite sensitive to lower quality, but with a few quick tweaks I'm sure we can get it right up to good quality!

First: One thing that helped me a LOT was following the change detailed here for projection based games like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pimax/comments ... ness_with/.
  1. Close SteamVR and Pitool if it's running
  2. Head over to X:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SteamVR\resources\settings and open the file "default.vrsettings" in Wordpad or Notepad++ or whatever.
  3. In that file look for that entry -> "maxRecommendedResolution" : 4096,
  4. Change the "4096," to "8192,"
  5. Save the File.
  6. Change the SuperSampling Value in SteamVR and Pitool, to your desire.
  7. Try out and see if it makes a difference.
Doing this was a huuuuuge help and the screen became much more readable. This is pretty special to games like X Rebirth VR that rely on the projection to work; projection is very blurry on the Pimax.


Second: I also noticed that resolution scaling was a bit of an issue; and generally is with the pimax. One recommendation that really helped me a lot was putting the SteamVR resolution scaling to 100% even and leaving it there. If you upscale to > 100%, there is a chance that it might fail to scale it properly and will completely wreck the image, making everything very blurry. It can end up being even worse off than it was before. So if you want to try to improve X Rebirth's image further, it might be worth trying to do the scaling to 100% in SteamVR settings. I know it sounds counter intuitive that going from 150%+ to 100% would make it look better... but apparently that's exactly what can happen.


Third: If you want to try to squeeze just a bit more out of it, there are some free "OpenVR Advanced Settings" programs, including a completely free one on Steam itself, which would allow you to turn up supersampling. SS helps with game clarity, though I personally didn't experience a massive difference even turning it up to 3.0 (or 300%). Advanced settings can be tricky, and you can make your experience worse before you make it better, so be careful if you decide to do this!


Fourth: if you are noticing some oddness on the screen by way of distortion, play with your FOV settings in PiTool. I leave mine at Normal and the game works great. I had set it to Large, and I may try this again in the future and update this post accordingly, but I did not enjoy the overall effect of the game using it at large.


Fifth: This last one is pretty Universal, but if you haven't already played with the Contrast and Brightness settings in PiTool, I recommend doing so. I hated how my Pimax looked out of the box, but there were some great suggestions online that made it look a lot closer to the quality I had gotten used to with the Vive Pro. If I remember correctly, I chose +2 contrast and -3 brightness. IMO it looks fantastic in this game, but YMMV. Might be worth playing around with the settings and see if you can find something that looks good for you as well!


Good luck, and hopefully the Pimax will be a lot of fun for you! I've played this game on the Vive, Vive Pro and Pimax 8k+, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it on the Pimax right now, so hopefully y'all will too. :)
Last edited by Tolmos on Mon, 1. Jun 20, 16:59, edited 2 times in total.

Alan Phipps
Moderator (English)
Moderator (English)
Posts: 30349
Joined: Fri, 16. Apr 04, 19:21
x4

Re: Playing X Rebirth VR on the Pimax: a few quick tips

Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 1. Jun 20, 14:00

Thanks very much for this post and advice. :thumb_up:
A dog has a master; a cat has domestic staff.

Post Reply

Return to “X Rebirth VR Edition”