RealRTCW XR 0.1.0 - Early Access In-Development Build

Dear Patrons

So another week has passed and it's time for a bit more Team Beef fun... another something completely new (well.. kinda) for you to play with.. RealRTCW XR (for PCVR only) can now be downloaded from our Patreon download site (link at the end of this post)!!

Obviously this is the first early-access, still in development, has a lot of issues and incomplete stuff in it still, build.. so take it as you find it. We're not really looking for too much feedback on specific bugs at this point in time as we are aware of a great deal of them, however this is something we would be very keen to hear about if you are feeling technically inclined (more on this shortly).

Apologies this is a bit of a wordy post, but there's a lot to say about a new port like this, and please do take the time to read through it as there's stuff in here that you will need to know!

Caveats

There's a few caveats, obviously this is very early, however some things have already been addressed but are not the final implementation:

• The HUD has been made visible to make life easier, but it isn't in its final form, and there's issues with it the way it is, but you can at least see health/ammo/notifications/hints etc
• Weapons are roughly aligned, but have the original arms/hands and in the case of the alt-fire mode of the luge (with the silencer) you'll notice you have 3 arms!
• Scopes don't work at all
• Changing weapons is still up/down on the primary thumbstick
• The knife _is_ motion controlled, but grenades etc are not yet
• Performance (see the performance section)
• Gesture use is implemented (thanks for MuadDib's code for this), so you can physically push doors open (however it can be a little finicky at times, primary thumbstick click is also "use")
• Mounted guns are a total PITA to use
• I've not actually tried left-handed mode.. there's a good chance the guns look really bad at the moment

Despite the above, it is already very playable we feel and you can probably get through a large amount of the game as it is.

Installation

Once you've downloaded the package, you can unzip it anywhere on your PC, you will then need to locate the game files for the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein and copy the following into the "/main" folder within the location you unzipped the package (it should already contain z_zzRealRTCWXR.pk3):

pak0.pk3

All the sp_pak*.pk3 files

Once you've copied all that lot, you'll also need to install RealRTCW (either on Steam or download from moddb), links at the end of this post. If installing on Steam, it is free, however there's a supporters build that only costs a small amount and supports the RealRTCW developer in their hardwork (they're continuing to update it, so there will be more features in the future!). Find the location of the RealRTCW install and copy the follow files to your main folder:

All the z_realrtcw_*.pk3 files

realrtcwdefault.cfg

Once that's done, run it just once so that it generates the default config (see next section) and then quit immediately if there's something you might wish to change.

You can see how the final folder should look here: https://www.rtcwquest.com/img/rtcwfiles.jpg 

Configuration

At this time there's no configuration menu in the game yet.. so any changes you might wish to make will have to be made in the realrtcwconfig.cfg file, which can be found in the following location on your PC:

C:\Users\{username}\Documents\RealRTCW 4.0\main

You'll probably notice a bunch of vr_ cvars that refer to the "saber".. that's just a hangover from using some of the same code from JKXR, so you can ignore any like that for now..

Left Handed

If you are left handed you will want to set the following (you may or may not want the switch sticks, that's up to you):

seta vr_control_scheme "10"

seta vr_switch_sticks "1"

Turning Mode

Some of you have a stronger stomach than others and therefore prefer to use smooth turn when playing, if you want to do this then you can set the following two cvars as follows (find them in the file and change their values, if they aren't there, add them):

seta vr_turn_mode "2"

seta vr_turn_angle "20"

If you want faster or slower adjust the vr_turn_angle.

Walk Direction

If you would rather use controller oriented walking direction:

seta vr_walkdirection "0"

Weapon Angles

If you are playing on a device that needs to weapon angles adjusted (looking at you Valve Index owners) then you'll want to tweak the following values.. we believe a good value for the weapon pitch adjust on the Index is about -45, and the knife pitch adjust is probably -25, but we would like to hear what you find to be good values.

seta vr_weapon_pitchadjust "-20.0"

seta vr_knife_pitchadjust "0.0"

Immersive Cinematics

Cut scenes are immersive by default, however if this is too much for your delicate constitution, then you can change it with the following cvar:

seta vr_immersive_cinematics "0"

Performance

We've found some differing performance characteristics, which we are currently unable to explain, BaggyG and I have almost identical spec PCs  (3080Ti, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 64GB), and yet we seem to get a different behaviour, mine seems to perform a lot worse (which sucks for me), so I get frequent drops to 45 fps with it set to run at 90hz.. BaggyG stays at 90. We would be very interested to hear how various machine specs find things.. you can enable the fps counter in the options menu (though it will crash the game; some of the options do that, but it will save the change first).

If you are willing and able and have a Meta device, it would be good if you could enable the Performance Overlay in the Oculus Debug Tool which can be found here:

C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-diagnostics

and see what sort of performance you get (the performance overhead is a good metric), the area we have been testing in is the Training Ground. Looking out across the firing range seems to be fine, but when I turn around and look towards the hut that contains a lot of the weapons my performance tanks :-(

For comparison, this is what Baggyg gets:

Struggling to reconcile this behaviour; this is hardly Half Life: Alyx level graphics, so there's something suspicious going on.

Anyway, I think that's probably enough for now, we hope you enjoy having a play with this, interested to hear how you get on!

Thanks again for your continued support, appreciated as ever!

All the best

- DrBeef / Team Beef

Download site for Mid and Gold Tiers (€6 a month and up): https://www.quakevr.com/patreon/