OpenXR Toolkit development apparently ending

[Charlo-VRde]

It appears mbucchia is moving on from maintaining OpenXR Toolkit and some of his other VR tools, which affects more than just Pimax headsets or IL-2 in VR:
 

https://imgur.io/a/2mLPQSy

 

Others who understand OpenXR better can continue this discussion.

[Drano]

That does suck but I get why he's done it. He's shown proof of concept that game developers could easily implement all of this stuff so everyone could use these features without the app. That and I think he doesn't have nearly enough time and has run out of patience to deal with supporting people that just can't seem to follow the user guide. Heck I figured it out--it's not hard. I'll continue to use it until it just doesn't work anymore. You know how that is. There'll be an update to something that'll kill it and that will be that. Enjoy it while it lasts.

 

Golf clap for MBuccia for taking the time to put it together for us!

[Argosafe]

That is a shame.  Hope someone can pick it up, as its what has kept many in VR. 

[Charlo-VRde]

I just ran across this image of mbucchia's announcement:

 

[Charlo-VRde]

Yesterday in https://www.reddit.com/r/Pimax/comments/186lj8y/uncertainty_of_the_pimax_crystals_feature_set/ mbucchia posted the following:

 

”Hey there,

 

I'm try to detox from social media but I will make an exception to reply here.

 

First off - everybody takes a deep breath - this isn't "life and death matter".

 

Also to be clear, I think I read elsewhere that Pimax was [partly] responsible for my decision and I really don't know where you guys get this stuff ^^ because this isn't true at all. Last week I had Pimax engineers talking to me privately and answering my questions. They've been nothing but helpful to me for 1.5 year (on top of sending me free devices).

 

To the state of the tools, you guys are being over-dramatic ^^

 

PimaxXR has been stable for a while now with the recent Pimax Play and there isn't really any reason this would change. I haven't even been working on PimaxXR very much for a few months, and AFAIK it's just worked. Heck even after closing my Discord I've been working on small bugs (like the battery hot-swapping). So IRL, my announcement isn't really impacting PimaxXR, like at all. The runtime has had full features for a while. Also, my other project VDXR remains active, and it shares 90% of the code with PimaxXR. You can see how last week I cross-ported minor fixes from VDXR to PimaxXR. This is why my message said "Maintenance mode". There will be a minor release with these changes soon.

 

Quad-Views support is also in a stable place, and honestly all the changes I've had to do for a while where to unbreak ED's doing. So it's their tree you need to be barking at, not Pimax ?

 

The only thing you're not going to get for Quad-Views is Direct3D 12 and Vulkan support, which IMO, these are being super over-hyped anyway. I think I was reading some people saying that DCS adding support for Vulkan is going to deprecate the use of my tools due to the performance gains... I have to say I'm quite skeptical, but if it does, then good, the problem is solved. My guess is it won't, and y'all will stay on Direct3D 11 with Quad Views anyway ?

 

What Quad Views needs is all of the industry (HINT: Meta, Valve) to just include that feature in the base platform. This was the original plan with PimaxXR, and then I changed course in order to support Quest Pro and combo with OpenXR Toolkit... Doing it via the API layer is a massive PITA. So perhaps now that I have a Quest Pro runtime (VDXR) I will just fold the feature back into the runtime (which might end up in PimaxXR too) which will give the proper support (including missing features like D3D12/Vulkan). That's all low priority at the moment though, perhaps won't happen at all.

 

Also there is work you don't see behind the scenes like quad views becoming part of the (future) OpenXR 1.1 core spec (so no longer tied to the Varjo name) and trying to encourage more vendors to support it. There was also a tech-talk I had planned for a big gaming conference, however the topic wasn't selected so it's not happening (which says a bit about how much game devs care...), but perhaps we will try to do a blog post or something like that.

 

I also forgot to mention: I looked at the Almalence + Quad-Views issues and I sent them a list of issues to resolve to make the two work together (thanks Omni for acting as intermediate).

 

OpenXR Toolkit... hasn't been worked on since April now... Did you even notice?

 

And yes, all these tools have source code freely available with a very permissive license (basically "free for all"), so it's up to whoever wants to take over or improve them.

 

Thank you all for all the kind messages.

 

I'm not going to be on my phone and computer 20 hours a day. That's really the main change I announced. It's not going to stop Earth from spinning or Pimax from doing VR :D”

[kestrel79]

You'd think one of these VR hardware companies would scoop a guy like this up, hire him to build these things into their next VR headset so it runs all our favorite sims really simple and easy "baked in" better than the competition. I'm sick of "the dance" to get a lot of this stuff working and tweaked...with little kids now my time is limited just want to load up on game, put on my headset and play and get good fps without all these tool kits and tweaks.

[Argosafe]

1 hour ago, kestrel79 said:

You'd think one of these VR hardware companies would scoop a guy like this up, hire him to build these things into their next VR headset so it runs all our favorite sims really simple and easy "baked in" better than the competition. I'm sick of "the dance" to get a lot of this stuff working and tweaked...with little kids now my time is limited just want to load up on game, put on my headset and play and get good fps without all these tool kits and tweaks.

Absolutely agree.  It's time to stop this almost elitist tweaking and get stuff that just works.   Not having a go at those who invest time and energy in having to put right the programmes and goods we buy - but they shouldn't have to do it in the first place!