I would suggest having a hotkey in the vireio driver which essentially scales the render down to a size so that the left and right edges are visible within the rift, with a black border around the edges. When there is something like a menu button outside of view you could hit the hotkey in order to see it and then toggle back after exiting the menu.
Unfortunately this only compounds the issue of small text. An alternative would be a hotkey that puts you in a mode that allows you to pan your view within the rendered image. I.e. looking down and to the left shows you the bottom left quadrant of the image, just showing black outside the rendered borders. Again allowing you to see menu options that were out of view but without making them smaller.
Neither option is ideal, obviously it's much better to support the rift view area properly either natively or with a mod. But it could help with a number of games that don't have that level of support yet and beats removing the rift to look at your monitor. Sorry if this has been discussed already.
Suggestion: 'menu mode' hotkey to downscale or pan image
-
MisterPete
- One Eyed Hopeful
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Mon Sep 10, 2012 8:01 am
-
cybereality
- 3D Angel Eyes (Moderator)
- Posts: 11407
- Joined: Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:18 pm
Re: Suggestion: 'menu mode' hotkey to downscale or pan image
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it would work. The screen real estate is already low on the Rift, with the distortion shader and the way it scales down on Vireio currently, I don't think shrinking more will help. Enlarging the image also probably wouldn't work since the game is at a fixed resolution (for example 1280x800) and enlarging won't add detail that isn't there already. Maybe there is another option, I'm not sure.
-
MisterPete
- One Eyed Hopeful
- Posts: 7
- Joined: Mon Sep 10, 2012 8:01 am
Re: Suggestion: 'menu mode' hotkey to downscale or pan image
Scaling down would certainly lose detail, but could be enough to see that you are selecting an option like 'start new game' or 'load game' that was otherwise out of view.
For the second option I wasn't thinking of enlarging the image at all, just being able to pan around the image so you could look at the bottom left corner for example.
In other words something that is actually displayed on the rift screen already but can't be seen by the eye as it is too close to the periphery. You would then be exposing an area that was originally offscreen which could just be black. Certainly not something that you would normally want to do during game play but that can be useful in limited situations like when in a menu. Could even bind the driver hotkey and the game menu hotkey to the same key so it toggles automatically.
Anyway, just an idea for being able to work with an interface not designed for the rift. Hopefully better solutions will come along for individual games so that it wouldn't be necessary.
For the second option I wasn't thinking of enlarging the image at all, just being able to pan around the image so you could look at the bottom left corner for example.
In other words something that is actually displayed on the rift screen already but can't be seen by the eye as it is too close to the periphery. You would then be exposing an area that was originally offscreen which could just be black. Certainly not something that you would normally want to do during game play but that can be useful in limited situations like when in a menu. Could even bind the driver hotkey and the game menu hotkey to the same key so it toggles automatically.
Anyway, just an idea for being able to work with an interface not designed for the rift. Hopefully better solutions will come along for individual games so that it wouldn't be necessary.