Re: Target indicator does not point to target

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@Droflew wrote:

grabbed the update hoping for a fix - unfortunately this is still and issue for me. Oculus quest / link /Epic Games ☹️ 

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Yep, same here and STILL no acknowledgement as they only have this listed and it's NOT in the "under investigation" section

• When using VR on steam, the user may not be able to see the UI if the game is in Fullscreen mode

THIS IS NOT THE ISSUE EA - NOR IS IT THE FIX. Please @Straatford87 PLEASE can we get an acknowledgement that so many of us can't even play the game we spent $40 on AT ALL. Sure I can turn off my HUD entirely but you know what, the game really sucks like that. A friend streamed to me and showed me everything I'm missing and I was stunned and even more disappointed. Please, just acknowledge this and give us some idea or hope that it'll be fixed.

This really does need a more thorough reply from EA. This is literally game breaking.

Check out TESTED's review on YouTube. Right from the start you can see a variation of the VR targeting bug that is never mentioned in the review. Norman Chan's screen recording shows that he has the proper target indicator AND the bugged one. Yes, unless I'm seeing this wrong, he gets a missile lock directly on the target and a duplicate square with a duplicate lock -- up and to the left of center. I did not scroll through all the comments to see if anyone pointed it out to him.

Star Wars- Squadrons VR Gameplay Review! - YouTube    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mPB52xUO_I

I am old and relatively patient, but, please, EA...

-JC

I am copying my reply on the steam community post with a solution that worked for me. @Straatford87 this may be useful information for debugging the issue.

TL;DR: Find the proximity sensor on your headset that is used to make sure your headset is actually on your face, and make sure that it's working! Cover it with something, if you have to.

As far as I can tell, most VR headsets have some kind of proximity sensor to see if the headset is attached to your face. For example, the Index's is here:
https://preview.redd.it/k3jaw8mfh6x21.png?width=950&format=png&auto=webp&s=16cba61e6a937f6bce60948d0223ba685247b562

Star Wars Squadrons displays weird behaviors when this sensor thinks that the headset is not "worn" (i.e. it does not detect your face because it is too far or something similar). Many other games ignore the proximity sensor input entirely, so it's possible that those of you who are used to playing other games haven't had issues in the past with this sensor not working.

(In my case, the reason the sensor was not tripping was because I was spacing the top of my headset away from my face using magnets between the gasket and the headset. This is for better fitment with my face shape, otherwise the headset ends up angled quite upwards.)

The behavior of the game when the headset is not "worn" is that it will assume that the player's head position is somewhere else entirely. In my case, what really tipped me off was that when this started happening, my openVRtwitchchat window (which is injected to a particular world coordinate) disappeared, and when I looked around, it was behind me and in the floor, about 2-3 meters away from where my head actually was. When I pressed the headset in towards my face with my hands, the problem went away temporarily, because I was physically moving the sensor close enough to my face to work again.

When I say that the game thinks that your head is somewhere else, I don't mean that it will affect how the game renders 3d objects such as your cockpit, other ships, the map, or even menus. Those are all rendered correctly relative to your "real" head position. However, there are 2d GUI elements that are rendered into your viewpoint by the game, and these will be affected by the "wrong" head position that I mentioned earlier. For example, the weird orange lines in the menu are usually far in the background, but when the headset isn't "worn" then the orange lines will be in the foreground. I assume this is because the game thinks your head is far behind where it actually is.

Similarly, the in game GUI for targeting is affected. I did some testing in the practice arena by targeting the frigate. I found that I could get the targeting box to show up by looking in a particular direction, but the targeting box both did not line up with the actual frigate, nor did the movement line up with my head movements with respect to the frigate location. However, with some careful head movement, I was able to line up the targeting box with the frigate and I found:

When I moved my head up, the targeting box moved down.
When I moved my head down, the targeting box moved up.
When I moved my head right, the targeting box moved left.
When I moved my head left, the targeting box moved right.

The targeting box consistently moved in the opposite direction of where it would need to move to track the location of the frigate correctly. I think this is because the game is using the "wrong" head position to calculate where in the field of view to render the targeting box, and the "wrong" head position is not only offset from my real head position, it's also upside down.

It's not clear to me exactly where this "wrong" head position comes from, although in my case I suspect it may have something to do with some kind of default position that steamVR gives to the game that is based on your room setup. I would assume WMR does something similar. Regardless, I was able to fix this by removing some of my magnet spacers from my headset to make sure the face proximity sensor was close enough to my face to work correctly. Similarly, the game worked fine for me yesterday, and I suspect this is because yesterday I was playing with some lens adapters in the headset, but today I took those out and played with contacts on. I suspect the lens adapters actually occluded the proximity sensor well enough to make sure it was always on, even with the display spaced fairly far away from my face.

(Aside: there are apparently other games that have issues with the proximity sensor! LA Noire apparently just never progressed past the loading screen but at least it told you exactly what the issue was with a message telling you to put on your headset.)

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@achreios wrote:

I am copying my reply on the steam community post with a solution that worked for me. @Straatford87 this may be useful information for debugging the issue.

TL;DR: Find the proximity sensor on your headset that is used to make sure your headset is actually on your face, and make sure that it's working! Cover it with something, if you have to.

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Mine has had a piece of tape over it since day one - this is NOT the solution. It might be a workaround for some and I appreciate the time it took for you to type all that out but this is in no way a "fix". Nor is changing screen resolutions, windowed/not, standing on one foot while barking like a dog and looking at the ceiling.

I wouldn't be surprised if the pathology of WMR headset problems is slightly different from what appears to be the same problem on SteamVR. The normal way of determining if a user is wearing a headset is to use the OpenVR API, which then polls the sensor. But it's also possible that the game is polling the sensor directly, which opens the door for all sorts of misimplementations of sensor polling, especially for different platforms.

I do agree that I probably should have worded it as a "possible workaround" rather than a "solution" though. The only real solution is for EA to fix their buggy headset sensor implementation. The fact that the game mostly works even when the headset appears not to be worn makes me think that the fact that the game behaves differently when the sensor says that the headset isn't worn is an oversight and not intended (i.e. the game shouldn't be taking that sensor's readings into account at all). So hopefully that means it will be a quick patch.

I have tape over my sensor at all times as well. I'm actually going to try the *opposite* of what they suggested to see if that does anything.

YES This fixed it for me, had to change in WMR the sensor detection from manual to automatic. The sensor on my headset seems to be shaky, so I either have to press Win+Y during the initial WMR calibration (this is why I had it on manual in the first place) but after this, its working as intended.

Fidget around with your WMR settings and in Control panel



https://i.imgur.com/iWgbgUL.png The setting marked in red is the one that did it for me.

It worked! HP Reverb here, I had always had tape over my sensor and had the setting on manual. I took the tape OFF the sensor, and switched to automatic... and it works!

So full working details for me:

* Run WMR and SteamVR

* While *not* wearing headset, Run squadrons in windowed VR mode

* Put headset on. Make sure the Win+Y grey message bar shows at top of the screen.

How I knew it was working: Those weird lines were no longer visible on the menu screen. Went into practice mode and spawned enemy squadron. Targeting boxes were in the right place and moving in the right direction!

Shot in the dark here but I wonder if the game is defaulting the engines sensor variable to 'off' and waiting for the 'on' event before calibrating properly, instead of just reading the sensor properly at startup as 'on' from the get-go.

Oh god! At last! In my case for some reason my proximity sensor doesn´t work, so I followed these steps and it works now:

1. Switched WMR input settings to manual (with Win+Y)
2. Ran Windows Mixed Reality
3. Switched input to HMD with Win+Y
4. Ran SteamVR from within WMR
5. And ran Squadrons from within SteamVR

And it´s working as expected now! Hope you all find a solution on these steps! Thanks @achreios for finding this out! Shame on EA for not helping us here on anything.

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@cjchacon82 wrote:

Oh god! At last! In my case for some reason my proximity sensor doesn´t work, so I followed these steps and it works now:

1. Switched WMR input settings to manual (with Win+Y)
2. Ran Windows Mixed Reality
3. Switched input to HMD with Win+Y
4. Ran SteamVR from within WMR
5. And ran Squadrons from within SteamVR

And it´s working as expected now! Hope you all find a solution on these steps! Thanks @achreios for finding this out! Shame on EA for not helping us here on anything.

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HOLY * - I can't believe it!!

YES - this has fixed it for me too! My speculation is that with the sensor covered at some point too early in the process the headset is registering itself pointing in some backwards way, etc. and that the game is reading this data rather than calibrating at run-time. Wow, I've been playing in my Quest 2 and it's unreal how much smoother and prettier it is in the Reverb Pro.

THANK YOU @achreios YOU FIGURED IT OUT!!

After all these weeks my biggest problem in this game was solved by A PIECE OF TAPE.

Ages ago I bought and installed a custom cushion from VR Cover to replace the original pathetic piece of foam on my Lenovo. I never noticed the proximity sensor working either before or after. I didn't care. I was a bit further away from the lenses but a heck of a lot more comfortable.

In my Squadrons situation, all that was needed was to set sensor to AUTO and put tape over it.

KUDOS @achreios for fixing something that has apparently befuddled a multi-billion dollar company.

Side Note: I made the frame rate issue tolerable by setting WMR to 60Hz. Not ideal, but smooth instead of choppy. Where can I put the tape to fix that?

-JC

P.S.: After these weeks of playing the game in pilot mode and using on-ship radar, I am now suddenly death incarnate in VR with a joystick. At least in practice mode.... 🙂

IT WORKS!!!!

Haven't been able to enjoy this game at all until now. I'm using a Lenovo Explorer headset and was having the target tracking issues reported here. Here are the steps I took to resolve the issue. 

- Placed piece of tape over sensor inside headset

- Changed Input Switching from Auto to Manual in Windows settings

- Started Windows Mixed Reality software

- Started Steam VR

- Started Squadrons from Steam and selected VR headset at the prompt

Thank you to all who contributed here, game is a ton of fun when it works!

All of these "fixes" are for WMR headsets. Has anybody found a fix for the Valve Index?

Well, spoke too soon I guess. I had launched the game 4 times without issue, I shut my PC down and went to play again about an hour ago and it's no longer working correctly. ☹️

I tried setting everything back the way it was and followed the steps again I took last night to get it working to no avail. 

Played around with starting things up in different orders, nothing I do seems to make it work again. Hopefully EA will come with a fix soon as the game really was great when the targeting system was working correctly. 

Such a shame, if I get it working again I'll remember to keep the PC going next time. 

Looks like this issue is finally considered one of the "known" issues, but unfortunately, it's been labelled as a  "HP Reverb/VIVE" specific issue. https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/SW-Squadrons-Known-Issues-amp-Announcements/m-p/9526030#M22 I have the issue on my Valve Index and I have no tape or whatever on my headset. As far as I know my proximity sensor is working just fine, but I have no solution for this issue.

@vaerkay @Tineras I actually play on the Index (and SteamVR), although (as I mentioned in my original post) the reason my sensor wasn't working was simply because I had spaced my headset too far away from my face, which may not be applicable to you. I assume you've both tried something like sticking your finger in front of the sensor while you're playing in the practice arena? Targeting the frigate is a good way to see if it's working or not.

@SR_Jay788 @achreios @vaerkay @Tineras 

Aaaaaaand.... then it didn't work tonight.

Took me a half hour to make it work again. I don't remember the exact steps I took -- and why should I, EA?

Yesterday I had done the "thumb-on-sensor test" with just the Steam VR pop-up -- making it think my head was there and then not. The game worked. This makes me think that it's tied to SteamVR's implementation of presence sensing.

Today, once I somehow got it to work again, I did the test in game and took a clumsy video. You can see the grid lines appear and disappear. Once it succeeds it seems to work between sessions -- until it doesn't the next day because I forgot my steps?

Again, I wish I had a nice scientific procedure, but my brain is mush.

FIX PLEASE!

-JC

Okay... I had it BACKWARDS.

For *me* tape was not the answer. My extra padding was already making the sensor think I always had my headset on. So every time I started a session I would always see that floating warning and keyboard enter "Win + Y to use the desktop instead..." -- maybe reverting to manual and telling my system that my headset was ALWAYS not on my face. Possibly turning off the sensor entirely -- or at least whenever Squadrons boots, it reads "sensor off" and Squadrons NEVER registers it as on again.. So...

I moved my extra padding up out of the way very slightly (which in the video below you can see also has a white sweat-soaking stick-on on top).

I have sensor SET TO AUTO.

I start WMR and then DO NOTHING with my keyboard. I DO NOT see the floating warning.

Before even starting Steam or Squadrons I can confirm that everything is working properly and automatically with the Thumb Test --  the big bar with "Win + Y to use the desktop..." appears and disappears with the thumb. THIS IS KEY and if it's working you're basically done.

(Also, in this state I can completely turn off WMR and it will automatically turn back on when I put my headset on -- a behavior I never did before.)

Then:

I put my headset on.

Start Steam and Steam VR.

Start and play Squadrons.

I've tested this both through desktop shortcuts and inside VR with controllers.

EA needs to unhook any and all behavior from presence sensors.

-JC 

@EA_Tom @SRJay78 @achreios @vaerkay @Tineras 

Sorry, I have no idea why my videos are so tiny. Clicking on the right edge at least brings up bigger picture-in-picture mode.

-JC