Avoid starting game on VR headset for user

Development Platform & Builds
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I received a report from a user who played my music toy Robo Maestro on Steam, but it launched on their VR headset instead of on the monitor. Robo Maestro doesn’t support VR, so that’s not intended.

I don’t have a VR headset myself, so I can’t test this myself. According to that user, the fix was “to disable it by editing the launch options for the game by typing “-nohdm” in there.” However, I can’t find any documentation on what “-nohdm” does, nor how to set this correctly in builds so the user doesn’t have to do this by hand.

I did find this topic, where it’s mentioned that one should disable the SteamVR and OculusVR plugins. However, that topic is about the editor, not builds, so I’m not sure whether disabling those plugins actually does the trick in my case.

So, my questions:

  1. What does “-nohdm” do?
  2. How can I change my project so that the game defaults to the monitor instead of to the VR headset?
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I used -nohdm. No complaints after that… It’s in the windows config page.

( There’s stuff about it in the steam docs - although I can’t find it right now ).

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I don’t know about nohdm but I was talking with someone that said something interesting that may apply to your situation. A place you may want to look into is some third party plugin you are using such as anti-cheat software. It may include some plugins that is triggering the VR.

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In my case the problem was due to the SteamVR plugin enabled by default in unreal, try to check if it’s enabled in your project

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Where can I find the “Windows config page”? I don’t see such any VR related settings in the Windows page of the Project Settings. Do I need to add -nohdm by hand to DefaultEngine.ini? If so, how?

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Sorry, too vague. Took me a while to find it, those Steam menus are a bit of a labyrinth!

General installation settings:

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image545×724 33.7 KB

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Ohhhhh, this is a Steam config thing! I was looking in Unreal engine itself. Thank you so much!

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Thanks! I’ve proceeded to just apply both options: -nohdm as launch argument as Steam, and disabling the SteamVR and OculusVR plugins in Unreal.

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By the way, it turns out there’s a typo in my post and in yours: it’s “-nohmd” instead of “-nohdm”. Your screenshot shows the correct spelling. That typo is why Google didn’t give me any results when I searched for this. I guess the user sent it to me with a typo in it, since I copied it from there. I assume this means “No Head Mounted Display”.

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