SteamVR C++ Functionality

I feel the SteamVR functionality exposed to C++ is severely lacking. Is there any reason for this?

Unless I missed something, we only have the SteamVRFunctionLibrary.h available, with these functions:

  • GetValidTrackedDeviceIds
  • GetTrackedDevicePositionAndOrientation
  • GetHandPositionAndOrientation

The USteamVRChaperoneComponent is a UCLASS(MinimapApi) so I can’t access its GetBounds function from code. Why only expose this to Blueprints? This is of course easy enough to change and recompile the engine, but was wondering about the official roadmap.

I get around it now by having a BlueprintCallable function and pass the GetBounds result from the blueprint down to C++ on begin play.

I also noticed there are a lot more things that aren’t exposed that would be very useful for all kinds of things. These are all in the main plugin (private) class SteamVRHMD, where GetBounds comes from in the first place.

Are there any plans to expand the SteamVR C++ interface?

You can call blueprint functions in code, you can also directly include header files in your own project when it is a c++ project…you have access to everything.

Not if the class is marked as MinimalApi, like USteamVRChaperoneComponent is.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/UnrealArchitecture/Reference/Classes/Specifiers/MinimalAPI/

In fact, the USteamVRFunctionLibrary was like that before, but it was changed. Again, In pure C++ code, this wouldn’t be a problem, as including any headers would give you access to any public interface, but I’m guessing UE does a lot of things under the hood with their UBT and those meta tags.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/archive/index.php/t-73844.html

Sorry I missed that you said that it was minimal API, it does seem fairly barren atm.

Yeah hopefully either more static wrapper functions are added to USteamVRFunctionLibrary, or more components are exposed directly.

How would I go about including the UMotionControllerComponent? I found the header file for it, but my class doesn’t like include “MotionControllerComponent.h”

You’ll need to make the module it is in a dependency in your build.cs file, add “HeadMountedDisplay”, “SteamVR”, “SteamVRController” to PublicDependencyModuleNames to give access to most relevant modules.

Honestly you can pretty much access any source file in the engine anyway (even module private exports) but it is kind of bad practice to directly include the entire file path unless you really have to as referencing a module and using its exports is cleaner.

Thanks. I was having trouble getting this to work but I ended up regenerating the visual studio project files and it worked after that.

I’ve submitted a pull request for this

https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2880

Beause I couldn’t access the GetBounds function from c++ code.

Noticed that the same thing is happening with the OculusBoundarySystem in ue4.14

Any update on this topic?

Yeah, whats up? Pretty please 6 months since this issue have been reported :frowning: and 4 months since a pr had been submitted :frowning: and 4.15 preview is already out and does not contain any fix for this :frowning: