Oculus Rift L4D2 Setup

We spent some time last night working up a guide on how to use the Oculus Rift with Perception’s Vireio drivers. Not hard to get the whole thing setup, but tweaking the output to be effective was a bit more of a chore than we thought. Here’s how to get started:

1. First launch L4D or L4D2 without the rift and change the following video options:
Set the Resolution to 1280×800
Turn the film grain off. You’ll be glad you did.
2. Download the latest Vireio driver. You can take a chance with the beta if you’d like, but we stuck with the stable download just to be sure.
3. Run the perception.exe in administrator mode by right-clicking (in Windows 7) and selecting “Run as Administrator”. This is at the recommendation of the Perception Team to cut down on lock-ups. Now select “Oculus Rift” as the 3D option. There is no support for head-tracking at this time.
4. Launch the game from Steam. Perception recommends launching it from the exe if you have and crashes, but on our setup it seemed fine through Steam.
5. You’ll notice that the screen is now split as you’d expect. But to make the gameplay useful, we’ll need to run some console commands to turn off the HUD, and these can’t be done from within Single-player. So instead we’ll need to launch a map from the console.
Press the “~” button on your keyboard and enter: “map _e2m1_highway” to startup the Dark Circus map. My personal favorite, and a very atmospheric level.
6. While still in the console, enter: “hidehud 4” enter. Then … This will turn off the HUD entirely, which we were never able to line up between the eyes. The downside to this is that there’s a bug in the game that prevents you from switching weapons while the HUD is hidden. You can still pickup weapons, but pick something you like.
7. Finally we’ll need to turn off the shadows. The 2-camera system of 3D means that your flashlight will cast a different shadow for each eye. Very confusing. If you want to have some real fun, leave the shadows on but keep your flashlight off. Makes the experience creepier.
8. It’s now time to jack in. Put your Rift on, but keep your fingers over the function keys F2-F5. We’ll need to adjust the cameras. First, hold in F2-F3 until your gun is in the same position in both eyes. Your character is right handed, so they’ll be on the right side of screen.
9. Next look at an object or person nearby and use the F4-F5 buttons until the two objects come together in alignment. You should finally start seeing the true 3D glory of Rift Zombies. I’d also recommend turning the sensitivity down a little on your mouse, or taking very slowly as you move around. It can still be very disorienting, but you adjust to it eventually.

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