Like others have noted, I typically do more walking forward, than side to side or turning to the sides. It always defaults the arrow to creating a long width at my sides. I have a rectangle as well (not a square) and SteamVR will not allow me to face the arrow the long way. They still haven't changed this, I take it? I can't find any way to change the direction of the arrow. After tracing the room bounds, the editing screen has a white rectangle showing the edge of the traced space, a green rectangle showing the playable area, and a white arrow showing default forward. Originally posted by gevarre:Actually, that is only partially correct and the whole reason for the problem. Hopefully, this provides some useful insight into that refinement. I know you had to start somewhere, but of course part of what makes this all so exciting is that it's never been done before, and so things have to be refined as we learn. Additionally, as has been said before, at any point during the game I should be able to bring up the dashboard and click on a rotate left or right button to re-orient the game to my preference, but now I'm just dreaming. I, for one, instinctively always put on the headset facing forward and then start the game. Go ahead and snap that to 90-degree increments relative to the capture volume if you want. Right now your setup tries to interpret the player's intentions (if the computer faces this way, then they must want to do this.) rather than explicitly asking the player what they want to do.Īnd if you really want to improve the system, it would be great to have an option in steam that says, 'Always orient VR games in the direction the player is facing when the game starts.' Just like when the dashboard comes up. Honestly, it would be so much easier if instead of the instructions saying 'point the controller at the computer', it just said, 'point the controller in the direction you want to be forward', or, 'point the controller in the direction you would like to face when playing games'. Unfortunately, he's going to be a bit confused when what was implied as forward gets rotated left or right. Interestingly, the illustration in the setup showing the guy pointing at his computer shows the computer at the long end of a rectangular room. Putting the forward direction facing the shortest distance doesn't really make much sense, at least not to me. All the testing I've done points to people instinctively wanting to move forward and back a lot more than side-to-side. It currently seems rather arbitrary, and I can't see a reason for it. What we need is to be able to rotate just the arrow, not the play space, re-orienting forward independently of anything else.

The only way to get this orientation to work is to reduce the sides of the rectangle until it becomes a square. Yes, you can rotate the green playable area when you edit, but the problem is, if I rotate it 90 degree so that the forward arrow faces the long direction of the rectangle, both sides of that green rectangle are now out-of-bounds. Of course I can't release the game like that or others will then find everything off.Īny chance this could be added? Or is it already possible and I'm missing something obvious?Īctually, that is only partially correct and the whole reason for the problem. I would really, really like to see the ability to rotate which way is forward when I do room setup (not rotate the playable volume inside the rectangle, but rotate the actual outer rectangle itself)įurthermore, it would be even better if the player could bring up the dashboard and set forward, in 90 degree increments, on a per-game basis.Ĭurrently, while I'm developing, I find myself orienting my game, knowing that SteamVR is going to rotate it, to force forward to be in the direction I want it. Instead of just blocking off a square in the middle of that rectangle, I'd really like to take advantage of the whole space.

This means that I smack into a wall right away when I try to walk towards something, but there's all this wasted space to the side. Unfortunately, I have a volume that's roughly twice as long as it is wide, and no matter what I do when I run room setup, SteamVR always seems to force forward as facing one of the short sides. So pretty much every game I've played so far has their play area set up to be either square, or if it's a rectangle, the long way faces forward, which to me seems natural.

Playspace mover