Apologies for the rant…I am huge fan of the tech but the new SteamVR input restructuring is total disaster from my experience too. I had the same experience as deflix73. I just tried to move my simple custom VR pawn to a 4.24 project and it didn’t work out of the box. The journey to get it working again has been beyond frustrating and bizarre. My biggest lament is that we are trading usability for functionality. This is almost never a good trade. I hope it helps to highlight a few areas of the workflow that seem especially problematic for me (although I’ve heard similar issues echoed by others).
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Why aren’t there default bindings anymore? It seems odd that I still have to associate controller bindings inside Unreal Engine and then take another step to associate those UE4 bindings inside the SteamVR Bindings Dashboard. I would expect there would be a default bindings that work out of the box. So I would only need to access the SteamVR Bindings Dashboard on the occasion I wanted to make a unique binding relationship.
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The process of clicking 4 separate dropdown buttons under the SteamVR Input Toolbar menu is very strange. Then it always spawns a new browser tab. Why does this happen inside a browser instead of inside Unreal or SteamVR itself? It’s very confusing from UI design perspective.
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The UI of the SteamVR Bindings Dashboard is very challenging to “read.” What is a button? What is a dropdown? What does a pencil icon do? It’s just a guessing game to determine what is clickable or editable? How do you know if the bindings have been saved? Why have 40 years of UI conventions been thrown out the window all of a sudden? An HTML 1.0 spec interface would be far more usable.
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The disappearing SteamVR Input Toolbar icon. I had no idea this appears and disappears until it did. I still don’t know 100% why? Is it just when SteamVR isn’t installed or a HMD can’t be detected? If the plugin is enabled it should always be visible. If it can’t find SteamVR then it should just alert you and tell you the problem (ie. “SteamVR plugin can’t detect HMD or controllers”).
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Projects aren’t portable. When I bring a project to another machine the VIVE wands Trackpad bindings don’t carry over correctly, the button bindings do. Is this a bug or a feature? Either way I have to go into the SteamVR Bindings Dashboard and find out what happened to the trackpad input.
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Is there anyone at Valve that could spare the 20-30 minutes to do a screen recording of a few typical scenarios of working with the new system (starting from scratch, moving an old project over, working with a variety of controllers)? The example project does not work out of the box and gives you no information about how to use the new system. Even the Unreal Engine VR Template is broken by default now. You end up cobbling together a workflow from the possibly outdated SteamVR Plugin GitHub and random YouTube streamers which is far from ideal.
I know this is a work in progress but it is such a divergence from the previous workflow that I feel more care should have been taken in priming the developer base for the changeover. Also I imagine there is a new group of developers like me who are coming from film, architecture, education, medical, automotive, Industrial Design, fine art etc. and we maybe expect more reliability and consistency, or at least labeling things beta when they are still very much in progress.
As an educator I struggle to explain the logic behind this transition to my students. They are clearly put off by the confusion and naturally look to other platforms like Oculus because time is limited and they just want to get their projects done. I would happily volunteer my critical eye if Valve wants to share any future workflow developments. You guys built an amazing platform and there are a lot of people that want to help make it successful (and by exchange VR in general).