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  • Dave Andersondanderson@hachyderm.io
    Nov 8, 2026, 9:34 PM

    Me, a naive idiot: oh I should go play some Elite Dangerous in this swanky new VR headset of mine

    Current status: attempting to debug a Quite Large stack of software that spans my host graphics stack, the Steam Frame's graphics stack, both OSes, multi-channel wifi streaming, and a game that runs through a proton compatibility layer.

    So far I've achieved a VR launch that put the game in the headset once. Unfortunately, steam decided to stream the game launcher window instead of the actual game.

    This is apparently enough of a known issue that someone wrote a whole-ass custom .Net launcher for Elite:Dangerous that doesn't do that, and also supports launching a bunch of plugins and integrations at the same time.

    Oh and there was a frame OS update, so who knows maybe that helped. I still give this about a 5% chance of working right now. Seems annoyingly close though...

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Replies

  • Dave Andersondanderson@hachyderm.io
    Nov 8, 2026, 9:37 PM

    Don't get me wrong I'm super grateful to all the people who developed the linux 3D and VR software stacks to the point where this could even plausibly work! And I'm definitely playing in hard mode by trying to stream from a linux OS, and streaming a game that has no linux builds and so somehow has to persuade an entire pretend-to-be-windows stack to do VR properly.

    It's so close, I feel like if I could just get the stderr from both the PC and headset sides of this I could figure out what's up, and it's going to be something stupid like some 32-bit library isn't installed and it poops the bed in non-obvious ways or something

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  • Dave Andersondanderson@hachyderm.io
    Nov 8, 2026, 10:11 PM

    hahaha FML it was the fucking firewall on my desktop, it was denying steam link streaming connections. Added an allow rule for it and boom suddenly SteamVR is like oh behold a headset do u want to do a virtual reality

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  • Dave Andersondanderson@hachyderm.io
    Nov 8, 2026, 10:12 PM

    Even when I try to forget about the day job and play some videogames, cursed networking problems follow me around like an angry little leprechaun

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  • Dave Andersondanderson@hachyderm.io
    Nov 8, 2026, 10:16 PM

    ok well Elite Dangerous launches, but I think I need to disable the eye tracking or foveated rendering or whatever, because it's fine as long as I hold my eyes perfectly still, if I move them the rendering glitches out quite hard

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  • Dave Andersondanderson@hachyderm.io
    Nov 9, 2026, 1:56 AM

    Well, ED in VR on linux works... okay. With eye tracking disabled it's mostly fine. Definitely some iffy link stability on the streaming, it occasionally freezes for a bit while it figures things out. Usable, but needs work. I think I read somewhere that there's some wifi power management buttons I should push to help with that, and allegedly there's also community patches for VR that do... something, not sure yet.

    Still, even with a little jank, it's just as fun as I remember doing cargo runs in a Type 9 Heavy. The cockpit has a 180 degree view, and my goodness it's a cool sight when you pull into spacedock in the giant sky truck.

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  • CMDR Yojimbosan 🅅⁂yojimbo@masto.hackers.town
    Nov 9, 2026, 3:54 AM

    @danderson Excellent achievement! I gave up on VR a few years ago while still running ED on Windows, it was excellent in combat but for everything else ... I wanted to be able to keep an eye on things outside the game while flying ... which wasn't easy. And typing while in VR was horrible.

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  • Dave Andersondanderson@hachyderm.io
    Nov 9, 2026, 8:58 AM

    @yojimbo yeah, the price of having a very immersive time is quite high for interaction with second screens. Pretty good touch-typing practice though!

    A basic head tracker would probably be more ergonomic generally, but nothing quite beats the immersion of coming up to a station for docking in a panoramic cockpit.

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