I’m having some trouble with tabbing while playing my game. It doesn’t matter if it is Play In Editor or in a packaged game. When I alt-tab the HMD flickers the “SteamVR dashboard” and I can also see my game but the stereo mode is off. This seems to only happen on Windows 10. I have Win7 at home and I don’t have this problem in PIE. I haven’t tested a packaged game at home yet.
A workaround is to enable borderless window. That makes the problem go away.
I tried a basic blueprint project and I get the same problem in PIE but the packaged game crashes on startup for some reason.
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that the stereo is off but that you can still see your game? Do you mean that you can still see the game in the headset or something else?
Yeah, sorry. I misunderstood what stereo off would do. When I alt tab there is flashing between three cases.
“Stereo off”, or rather when the /hmd is set to “off” and I can see the lighthouses and a 2d screen saying Waiting … or similar.
Normal game
The one I called “stereo off” earlier but it may just be the resolution being wrong I think. This case is similar to if I were to set screenpercentage > 100 in a postprocessvolume, instead of r.screenpercentage in a console command. It’s a little hard to explain but I can see both “screens” in each eye I think.
After doing a bit of digging I was able to find that this is a known issue. I have provided a link to the public tracker. Please feel free to use the link provided for future updates.
That’s a similar issue but not the one I’m having. When I “Alt-Tab” my game(PIE), the game is not playable. My issue is not the editor itself. I am not exiting SteamVR. The issue is just from “tabbing”/unfocusing the game.
Think of some training session where an instructor wants to do something else on the same computer the student/instructee is using the on. Then the students game is interrupted/“not working” while the instructor is doing something else.
On the Win10 box I only have the cases 1 and 3 above. And where case 1 is the major part and 3 is in the background/transparent on the “left eye”. So this could be two different bugs I guess and also why the explanation has been a little ‘straggly’, sorry.
The picture above was one that I found on google. Also, one of your other answers in a bit unclear. Where you able to reproduce this issue in a clean project? If not, could you provide a project that reproduces this issue so that I could take a closer look?
I used to have this issue both in a packaged project and when playing from the editor. Now I only have it when playing in the editor. Maybe 15.1 fixed it?
Yes, I have this issue if I just make a blank blueprint project.
Create project
Play VR
Tab to file explorer
The hmd should now be in “vivewaitingroom” with some distorted version of the game being added/rendered in the background
The SteamVR application is also flashing between the attached image and the normal “UE4Editor.exe” in white.
If you are getting kicked back out into the Vives waiting room, this is working as intended. The defaults to this room anytime it goes a certain number of frames without getting information on what it should be displaying.