I really hope I’m missing something basic here:
When I press “play in VR”, the main editor window minimizes (extremely annoying) and when I go back nothing has updated. Everything is frozen. I don’t see what is happening in my game world at all. Why is that?
If I click on a blueprint, I do see an animated line for what is happening though…
I understand this is about debugging a VR experience. There are few things to note:
This said, you can always bring back the editor and have a look at it, but you will note a significant hit on VR performance.
But since this works fine in Unity, are you saying that Unreal is very demanding and that I shouldn’t be using it to develop VR? I’m being facetious but that’s sort of what I’m hearing.
Surely not during development? I tried the Editor in VR and it wasn’t very effective. I only have a Vive and not a Vive Pro, so text was a bit difficult to read.
That sounds like how you developed back in 1995… 
Ok, so here’s my point:
When I do, the 3d viewport is frozen. Static. Nothing moves and nothing has moved. It looks as if I haven’t pressed play at all.
Surely that must be a bug or glitch or something I did wrong?
it usually plays in a new window, and this never caused severe performance issues for me. try creating a new vr blueprint based project and play there. if the issue remains, then you need to contact epic support. but most probably you’ve tweaked something, like forgot to set tracking origin in character. if the example works, compare, its got to be something simple
I think you misunderstood me. I am wondering how to do this in Unreal:
Look at that video. There is an editor view and a game view side by side, both running live, and the editor view is fully interactable while VR is running similar to Unreal’s simulate mode, but simulate mode doesn’t work with VR.
He is able to see exactly what objects have spawned in VR, where they are located, what their transforms currently are, etc. etc. In Unreal, I’m flying blind in VR unless I had a whole bunch of debug stuff, that I already have for free in the editor.
Hahaha, you can hear what you want, but that is not what I said!
Definitely there is something wrong with your setup, not sure what though. You can always summon the editor while playing in VR (or during any gameplay) and you will see what is happening in the underlying BP’s / world outliner (spawned actors etc.) You can also set BP breakpoints and inspect variables.
For what concerns debugging via log files, you may see it as 90’s, I see it as still very effective and this is what I teach my students as well. All post-mortem analysis and profiling relies on log files, there is no other way to do it. It happens too quickly anyway for you to catch it during a visual debugging session. So long-live log files!
Ok, sorry for asking you to triple clarify this: So there is no way to see what is happening in the 3d viewport of the level in Unreal Editor with VR?
(Again, I can see BPs fine, and I guess the yellow things in the outliner are spawned actors.)
This is the exact opposite way that Unity works, and feels very unintuitive.
In Unity, I can update values live to test them in VR while playing, yet those values revert when I stop playing (because I was just testing).
It cannot possibly be that I have to code an in-game UI to change these values while playing!?