Even in VR projects you spend comparatively more time not wearing your HMD, and for non-VR projects this is 100% of your time. It’s annoying that
SteamVR is always launched whenever you open the UE4/5 editor regardless of your project’s actual VR support.
You need to edit the .uplugin to make it default disabled after every update if you don’t want any new sandbox/test projects to start with it. Turning it off for a project only affects that project.
Please make the plugin opt-in instead or at least remove the unconditional launch of SteamVR.
I have this problem with all VR apps. Steam used to have an option that prevented anything from starting steamvr if it wasnt running but that option has been broken for years now.
Yes, I agree that the VR plugins should always be opt-in, not opt out.
The issue here is that few of the startup templates have VR support, and Epic probably wants to make the experience as easy out of the box for the beginners as possible. In that case, I’d keep VR plugins enabled when creating projects out of the templates that support VR, but I would still strongly suggest to keep the plugins disabled when creating blank projects.
I have been turning Steam VR and Oculus VR plugin off every time since I started a year ago. If you have a headset hooked into your machine it automatically uses the plugins. It does get annoying to constantly have to turn them off.
Update: As of UE 5, SteamVR no longer starts automatically.
Original answer:
You can disable it starting by default by editing “Engine\Plugins\Runtime\Steam\SteamVR\SteamVR.uplugin” and changing "EnabledByDefault": true to "EnabledByDefault": false.
Note that you have to do this every time you update the engine.
Yep, this is horrible and should be changed. Because of this, there’s even games that ship with SteamVR enabled even though they’re not VR-based, causing those games to start SteamVR randomly. It’s really ridiculous.
Overall, the default enabled plugins are a very strange bunch, and I feel like it’d be a good idea for someone at Epic to go through the entire list and get rid of all of the stuff that isn’t used in the majority of projects (like the half-dozen VR/XR plugins, and niche function libraries). It’d clear out a lot of bloat from packaged projects, and save a lot of time to not have to do that ourselves on each project.
Yeah, I don’t mind to much about disable VR plugins when I create a new project, but those 5 or 6 Magic Leap (Lumin) plugins that keeps complaining about the other plugins already disabled are a pain.
Another curious bunch is the amount of Apple/iOS plugins wasting time in Windows PCs since we are forced to package for Mac/iOS using a Mac anyways.
Agreed. Every new project I create I have to go in and disable a whole bunch of plugins I know I will never use. I think as many plugins as possible should be disabled by default.
If there is a plugin that is 100% critical and needs to be enabled all the time for every project, then why is it not part of the engine core.
You can launch the editor with -nohmd. It is a bit of a pain when launching through guis since you can’t put in the parameter.
You may still need this pull request if they haven’t merged it, but i think for steamvr I haven’t seen it getting launched with the launcher build when I use the parameter:
They should probably make it default in editor to not launching the runtime until you click a special button or something. The biggest issue is launcher a second editor by accident with vr force exits the first.
I would also love if we could hide function libraries in the blueprint graph context menu. It’s really irritating to have to scroll past endless VR and multiplayer functions that I could not care less about.
I agree, this has annoyed me for over 5 years now…
By default the SteamVR and Oculus plugins are enabled by default every time you start a new project, its quite frustrating.
This ^^^^ Yes please! I do use the multiplayer stuff… but yeah I’d love to get rid of all the VR rubbish… couldn’t care less to scroll through VR functions and even some other stuff would be good to get rid of.