EternalVR v0.1.93 (alpha)

The HUD stays up through the game's short freezes, "Camera moves" pickups that keep you facing the way you were,
a steadier Sentinel Crystal, and a new experimental option that hands your headset each eye's depth.

Download

• EternalVR-alpha-0.1.93-16e8f65.zip (below)
• SHA-256: 4cc155735f2ed08be365e3a8c008a245327ea907cb941e543ac69348047d5731
• VirusTotal: scan report (the zip 1 of 67, the mod's DLL 1 of 71 and the launcher 0 of 70 engines; the 1 is DeepInstinct, a machine-learning engine that has flagged the mod's DLL in earlier builds too). Windows Defender on my PC finds nothing.

If you have 0.1.6 or later, the launcher offers this update by itself (or use "Check now" on the Checks and log
tab). Otherwise unzip over the old folder or anywhere new, and run EternalVR.Launcher.exe. Your launcher
settings carry over.

Windows Defender may on some PCs quarantine the launcher or the mod's DLL (layer\EternalVR.dll) as
"Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.C!ml" (or the launcher as "Trojan:Win32/Bearfoos.A!ml"). That's a false positive:
the mod isn't code-signed yet and every release is a new file Windows hasn't seen, so Defender's cloud model
sometimes guesses (the "!ml"). To get it back: Windows Security > Virus & threat protection > Protection history,
open the entry, Actions > Restore.

This build was launch-tested on the Steam version (in a level) and the Game Pass version (up to the main menu), on my
test PC with the OpenXR simulator at about 60 fps. Not tried in my own headset yet.

Playing on a lower-end PC? I'd love to hear how it runs:
tell me your card, settings and how it played.

Fixed

• The HUD no longer blinks off during the game's short freezes. When the game holds everything for a moment
  (its checkpoint autosave, for example, about half a second), the world already stayed steady while you turn your
  head, but the HUD went away a quarter of a second in. It now stays up through a freeze of up to a second.
• Pickup animations, Camera moves: at the end of an automap station or gore nest pickup the view could jump
  round in one frame (up to about 160 degrees at a gore nest), because the game turns you to where its camera
  ended. You now keep facing the way you were before the pickup. The gore nest's heart pull also plays now instead
  of being skipped, which had left the view tilted a few degrees.
• The Sentinel Crystal: once you pick an upgrade your hands crush the crystal in front of you, and you keep
  facing the same way after. With the default Still view the view no longer flicks about 10 degrees and back as the
  upgrade menu closes; with Camera moves it no longer turns you round as the crush ends.

New

• Depth for headset smoothing (experimental) on the Play tab (Picture, off by default). It hands your headset
  each eye's depth with its picture, so when the frame rate drops the headset's own smoothing (Meta's ASW, Virtual
  Desktop's SSW, SteamVR's Motion Smoothing where the driver takes depth) can shift things by how far away they are
  instead of moving the whole picture as one flat sheet. It has only run on the OpenXR simulator on my test PC,
  which accepts the depth but doesn't use it, so I don't know yet whether it looks better or worse in a headset.
  There it cost about 0.3 ms of graphics card time a frame. If you try it and see warping around edges (your gun,
  doorways, enemies) while frames drop, turn it off and tell me which headset and app you use. Stereo only, and
  not with Alternate eyes (on or Auto) or Parallel Eye Rendering.

All of the above was checked on my test PC, not in a headset yet.

Known issues

• Pickups I couldn't run on my test PC yet: a rune, a mod bot and the chainsaw. If the view freezes or jumps
  at one of those (or any pickup), please tell me which one.
• Virtual Desktop may not tell the game the headset is asleep, so the 8-frames-a-second slowdown may not
  happen there yet. If your frame rate still drops step by step over a long session with breaks, an export after
  one shows what's going on.
• Long sessions on Virtual Desktop can slow down (90 fps falling to the low 70s over an hour or so). Virtual
  Desktop's beta works around it, and stepping out of the game and back in brings the frame rate back.
• OFXR Bridge runs in its fallback mode with EternalVR (it gets no DLSS motion vectors from the game). That's
  expected for now.

The full list is in KNOWN-ISSUES.md.