Vireio Perception 1.0 Released!

[cybereality]

Yep, I've seen that issue with Mirror's Edge. Not sure exactly what the problem was. It comes and goes. Sometimes it helps to launch the exe directly, sometimes better to go through Steam. You can also try right-clicking and run as administrator. Or copy the dll files into the Binaries folder in the game directory. Hope one of those things help.

[mscoder610]

My specs: Intel Q6600 CPU, Windows 8 64bit with 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 460.

I'm downloading the source now (although I've done basically zero Win32 programming), maybe I can get more info on the crash though.

[cybereality]

Seems like it may be an Windows 8 issue, since it seems no one so far has got it working on Win8.

One thing I can think of is the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package.

Download that here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... px?id=5555

It may be needed to run the program (I probably installed it on my machines long ago).

[eqzitara1]

Admin worked for me.

Injectors have problems with windows 8 at least at one point. A lot of people had trouble with helix injector with windows 8. Not sure if it was patched or what.

[mscoder610]

Might be a simple change: When I run & debug the Perception app, I get an exception at line 221 of Main.cpp in Perception
(SelectObject(paint_dc, This->logo_bitmap);)
The message param of main_window_proc at this point is 1 (WM_CREATE), and the code for that case prints a debug statement, but then falls through to the next case (WM_PAINT), which is trying to paint with logo_bitmap before it's been loaded.

If I just add a 'break;' to that WM_CREATE case, the app will launch for me fine when running as Administrator.

[cybereality]

@mscoder610: That is interesting. Thanks for taking the time to debug this.

You are correct. There should be a break there. No sure how I missed that (or how it even worked without it).

Do you think you can push that fix for the code? I'm going to be too busy this week. Thanks.

[drgroove101]

Seems like it may be an Windows 8 issue, since it seems no one so far has got it working on Win8.

One thing I can think of is the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package.

Download that here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... px?id=5555

It may be needed to run the program (I probably installed it on my machines long ago).

I'm having problems getting Perception 1.0 to run on Win 8. Tried to install visual c++ from above link and rec'd message "a newer version of Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable has been detected on the machine." And the it will not let me continue as the button is grayed out. Not sure if Perception 1.0 requires the older version of MS Visual C++ Redistributale?

[mscoder610]

https://github.com/cybereality/Perception/pull/1
https://github.com/mscoder610/Perception

With that change the app launches fine on Win8 x64 as Administrator, but no luck so far using it in Left 4 Dead 2. Still experimenting though.

Edit: Haven't posted an updated binary since I haven't been able to try it in a game yet.

[Mel]

Something I've been wondering about since building my Rift clone: what resolution should we run games at to get the best performance/quality trade-off? I assume that the ideal would be the native height of the HMD screen and half its native width (first generation Rift = 640x800), but since this is not an option in any game I'm aware of, what's the next best thing?

Would it be safe to say that games designed specifically for the Rift will render two views at 640x800 each and merge them into a SBS frame? Is this even possible with DirectX, or are only a subset of standard resolutions do-able, and anything different must be handled by post processing?

What say all you experts?

[cybereality]

@mscoder610: OK. I merged that into the code-base. Will have to figure out a good way to update the binaries.

@Mel: You want to run the game at 1280x800 if possible. The Perception app is designed to take a full-resolution image and fit it to the Rift. Even if you could render at 640x800 I don't think its designed to handle that. Most games should have 1280x720, which should be close enough, and many games will also have 1280x800 which is the best option.

[fraherd]

Ok, so I've just downloaded Dear Esther, (looks like its going to be worth its $9.90 price tag) however the driver doesn't seem to be working for me.

There is a flash at the start whilst the game loads. Then the menu appears to be working fine (split screen with the Rift warp) but when you enter the level and the voice over starts the text starts the overlay and stretch into the attached image. Thoughts?

Dear Esther.jpg

[cybereality]

@fraherd: Yes. That started happening to me too. Its strange because it worked perfectly for a while and then just started like that the other day. Not sure if it had anything to do with the Steam update. Interesting enough, it works fine on my laptop (but not on the desktop). Still unsure what the problem is.

I can only guess that the game is double injecting for some reason. The same thing happens with L4D sometimes. Again, not sure.

[geekmaster]

... I can only guess that the game is double injecting for some reason. The same thing happens with L4D sometimes. Again, not sure.

The recursively nested warping in that image looks like at least 6 iterations -- more than just double injecting. Perhaps a static flag is needed to detect that and exit the DLL immediately without correcting the image. Set that flag after warping and reset it on VSYNC.

Of course eliminating the cause would be a better solution, but an expedient (quick and dirty) fix would get by until then.

[bobjwatts]

I'll post my Dear Esther settings when I get home. I might have something turned off/on.

[fraherd]

I think you're right.

What I did after that was close the driver and run the Dear Esther executable (with the driver closed/off) and believe it or not it worked with warpping??? strange, i then quit the game to make sure the driver was off and it was. I loaded the game up a third time and it loaded without the driver this time.

[geekmaster]

I think you're right.

What I did after that was close the driver and run the Dear Esther executable (with the driver closed/off) and believe it or not it worked with warpping??? strange, i then quit the game to make sure the driver was off and it was. I loaded the game up a third time and it loaded without the driver this time.

So perhaps the driver needs to check for previous instances of itself already running? Having the image processed by multiple instances of the driver could certainly cause recursive warp distortion similar to the posted image...

[mscoder610]

I've attached rebuilt versions of the binaries, with the following fix:
- Shouldn't crash on launch anymore due to the logo drawing issue
And the following caveats:
- There's both Debug and Release versions of Perception.exe and d3d9.dll included (the debug versions are in the root directory).
- When I use the release version of Perception.exe, changes I make to the output type aren't persisted when I close and relaunch the program
- When I use the release version of d3d9.dll, the injection / rendering changes aren't applied in Left 4 Dead 2.

Using these binaries (Debug versions, for reasons noted above), I can successfully run the Perception app, then Left 4 Dead 2 and everything seems to work as expected, in Windows 8 64bit. I tried the Oculus, Side by Side, and Anaglyph outputs at least briefly.

[cybereality]

Thanks mscoder610!

I've placed your new debug files into a zip:
http://vireio.com/files/Perception_1.0.1.zip

Looks good on my laptop, at least with the Source engine games.

Will try to keep the latest version hosted on my site (but eventually maybe we should make this part of GitHub):
http://vireio.com/

[Vamplifire]

YOU ARE THE MAN CYBER! Can't wait to take a vacation to skyrim in March!

Fingers crossed for fallout

[djdevin]

Nice job

I'm getting some big delays with my hillcrest tracker. About 1/2 delay in movement. Haven't seen this before in anything else (HL2 VR, FreePie). Anyone else?

[cybereality]

The Hillcrest (or maybe my tracking code, not sure) has issues in certain games. It appears Source engine titles are all fine, but many of the other ones have huge lag (3 seconds or more). I'm hoping the Rift tracker doesn't have this problem. Otherwise maybe some people in the community can try to find a fix (either by using the Freespace async functions, and/or breaking out the tracking into its own thread).

[brantlew]

It could be data message queues in the game engine or tracker building up. I suspect the game engine because I believe libfreespace will just drop packets if not polled high enough (but not sure about this). Anyway the Hillcrest data stream is fast enough that the game engine may not be able to pull messages off of a queue quickly enough to catch up and any delay between tracker thread initialization and game poller could become permanent.

Haven't looked at the code so pretty much just pulling this out of my a$$, but this reminded me of a an issue I just had in some related code.

(PS. cyber if you are using any of that TrackIO code I sent you then it can have this characteristic)

[Baristan6]

I can not get Skyrim to run. Have copied all dlls to the Skyrim dir, ran perception as admin set to sidebyside then ran SkyrimLauncher as admin, but SkyrimLauncher crashes. After testing SkyrimLauncher crashes anytime the d3d9.dll is in the Skyrim dir.

Debug Assertion Failed!
...
File: f:\dd\vctools\crt_bld\self_x86\crt\src\fwrite/c
Line: 77
Expression: (stream != NULL)

Have checked all my drivers(video and VC) even downgraded VC the ones linked to.
Do I need a specific directX version?

Will download the source code and look into what is causing the error.

[cybereality]

@brantlew: Interesting. I am using pretty much the code you sent me, so that sounds likely. What I would want to do is just poll the tracker once for each frame, and have it return whatever the latest orientation is. Do you know if its possible to clear or otherwise disable this queuing behavior?

[cybereality]

@Baristan6: Hmm, maybe it was a bad idea to post the debug binaries. For some reason the release build was crashing on the game launch, but it seems like the debug build is having problems too. Will have to look into this, because we should be able to use the release build.

[brantlew]

@brantlew: Interesting. I am using pretty much the code you sent me, so that sounds likely. What I would want to do is just poll the tracker once for each frame, and have it return whatever the latest orientation is. Do you know if its possible to clear or otherwise disable this queuing behavior?

This happened to me when I ran TrackIO through HL2 synchronously. If you are using it synchronously (as I'm guessing you are), then the behavior is just the effect of the named pipe stream as it fills up. The simplest thing to do is just to run it in a thread. I have code that I will send to you that does what you describe - pull the latest value only. That should eliminate the lag.

[cybereality]

That sounds like a good solution.

Won't have time to work on it at the moment, but maybe you could post the code and someone else could pick it up.

[brantlew]

ok, here's an async wrapper around a synchronous tracker call. It should allow an async poll of the tracker data and prevent any buffer build up. Not sure how this fits into cyber's code, so you guys will just have to pick through it - but it's pretty small.

Code: Select all

...
#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN             // Exclude rarely-used stuff from Windows headers
#include <windows.h>
 
const float RAD_TO_DEG = 180.0f / 3.14159265f;
CRITICAL_SECTION DataLock;

//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DWORD WINAPI RunTracker(void* parms)
{
   TrackIOReceiver* object = (TrackIOReceiver*)parms;
   object->RunTrackerPoll();
   return 0;
}

 
/****************************************************************************
*  Constructor 
******************************************************************************/
TrackIOReceiver::TrackIOReceiver() {
 
	//Put in code here that is needed to connect to your tracker and initialize it
	//my_tracking_api.open();
   Connected = false;
   Yaw = 0;
   Pitch = 0;
   Roll = 0;
   X = 0;
   Y = 0;
   Z = 0;

   InitializeCriticalSectionAndSpinCount(&DataLock, 1024);

   Msg("Connecting to TrackIO data source\n");
   int err = TIO_Connect();
   if (err) {
      if (err == TIOERR_NO_DATA_SOURCE)
         Msg("TrackIO data source not found\n");
      else 
         Msg("Error connecting to tracker data source\n", err);
   }
   else {

      ShuttingDown = false;

      // Spawn a thread to read the tracker data
      DWORD thread_id;
      TrackerThread = CreateThread(NULL, 0, RunTracker, this, 0, &thread_id);
      Connected = true;
   }
}
 
/****************************************************************************
*  Destructor
******************************************************************************/
TrackIOReceiver::~TrackIOReceiver(){
 
	//Put in code here that shuts down the tracker
	//my_tracking_api.close();

   Msg("Shutting down TrackIO\n");
   if (TrackerThread != 0) {
      ShuttingDown = true;
      WaitForSingleObject(TrackerThread, 1000);
   }
   
   TIO_Close();

   DeleteCriticalSection(&DataLock);
   Connected = false;
}
 
 
/****************************************************************************
*
*   functionName:   GetOrientation
*   Description:    Get the current orientation from the tracker
*
******************************************************************************/
int TrackIOReceiver::getOrientation(float &pitch, float &yaw, float &roll){
 
	//Here just set pitch, roll, yaw using your tracker API/SDK
	//pitch = my_tracking_api.getPitch();
	//yaw = my_tracking_api.getYaw();
	//roll = my_tracking_api.getRoll();
   EnterCriticalSection(&DataLock);
   pitch = Pitch;
   yaw = Yaw;
   roll = Roll;
   LeaveCriticalSection(&DataLock);
   
 
	//Note:  If you need to do any rotations, say to adding 90 degrees to turn the tracker to face
	// 			 the player, then this is a good place
   
	return 0;
}
 
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
void TrackIOReceiver::RunTrackerPoll()
{
   int err = 0;
   while (err == 0 && !ShuttingDown) {
   
      float yaw, pitch, roll, x, y, z;
      err = TIO_GetAll(&yaw, &pitch, &roll, &x, &y, &z);
      if (err == 0) {

         EnterCriticalSection(&DataLock);
         Pitch = -RAD_TO_DEG * pitch;
         Yaw = -RAD_TO_DEG * yaw;
         Roll = RAD_TO_DEG * roll;
         X = x;
         Y = y;
         Z = z;
         LeaveCriticalSection(&DataLock);
      }
      else {
         if (err == TIOERR_SERVER_DISCONNECTED) {
            Log("TrackIO data source disconnected\n");
         }
         else
            Log("TrackIO Error %i during receive\n", err);
      }
   }

   TIO_Close();
   Connected = false;
}

[Baristan6]

@Baristan6: Hmm, maybe it was a bad idea to post the debug binaries. For some reason the release build was crashing on the game launch, but it seems like the debug build is having problems too. Will have to look into this, because we should be able to use the release build.

... that fixed it. I copied the d3d9.dll from my system32 dir to the skyrim dir and now it works.


Deleted all Perception dlls from the Skyrim dir and it still works. Have no idea what has changed but now the DxHijack is now functioning properly with Skyrim.

[2EyeGuy]

Here's the version with the changes I made that have now been officially added:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101772879/Perception_1.0.2.zip

It's the release build.
The main difference for users would be the registry permissions possibly making it work better when not run as administrator.
I should add that this version hasn't really been tested much. But it worked for me in Portal 1 First Slice and Portal 2.

[mscoder610]

One more small fix that I think is needed:
https://github.com/mscoder610/Perceptio ... 609f9e5ae3

The first issue I was seeing with the release build earlier seems to be because baseDirLoaded wasn't explicitly initialized to false in ProxyHelper. So when running the release build, I'd see things like this in DebugView:
00000047 1.98165369 [14164] created device success
00000048 1.98168862 [14164] PxHelp: Already have base value.
00000049 1.98174584 [14164] Got base dir as:
00000050 1.98187697 [14164] |
00000051 1.98189306 [14164] PxHelp: Already have base value.
00000052 1.98198724 [14164] |cfg\config.xml

(The app thought it already successfully looked up the base dir, even though the value was still uninitialized / random data at that point).

Occasionally I get an issue with L4D2, where once the game starts, the rendered world is just black, but any HUD elements (or the ~ console, etc) will render fine, other than the 'hall of mirrors' effect from everything else not getting cleared. It sounds similar to issues that people have already mentioned in this thread though.

[2EyeGuy]

One more small fix that I think is needed:
https://github.com/mscoder610/Perceptio ... 609f9e5ae3

The first issue I was seeing with the release build earlier seems to be because baseDirLoaded wasn't explicitly initialized to false in ProxyHelper. So when running the release build, I'd see things like this in DebugView:
00000047 1.98165369 [14164] created device success
00000048 1.98168862 [14164] PxHelp: Already have base value.
00000049 1.98174584 [14164] Got base dir as:
00000050 1.98187697 [14164] |
00000051 1.98189306 [14164] PxHelp: Already have base value.
00000052 1.98198724 [14164] |cfg\config.xml

(The app thought it already successfully looked up the base dir, even though the value was still uninitialized / random data at that point).

Occasionally I get an issue with L4D2, where once the game starts, the rendered world is just black, but any HUD elements (or the ~ console, etc) will render fine, other than the 'hall of mirrors' effect from everything else not getting cleared. It sounds similar to issues that people have already mentioned in this thread though.

Here's the binary of your version:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/101772879/Perc ... nitFix.zip

[cybereality]

@mscoder610: Great. Can you push this to the master?

@2EyeGuy: OK. I will post the zip in a moment.

[mscoder610]

I created a pull request for that change - https://github.com/cybereality/Perception/pull/3

[cybereality]

@mscoder610: Awesome, thanks! Its been merged.

@2EyeGuy: I've uploaded your 1.0.2 release to my server ( http://vireio.com/ ). We will need to make a 1.0.3 release to include mscoder610's latest fix (unless that init_fix zip included all recent changes, I wasn't sure).

[2EyeGuy]

@mscoder610: Awesome, thanks! Its been merged.

@2EyeGuy: I've uploaded your 1.0.2 release to my server ( http://vireio.com/ ). We will need to make a 1.0.3 release to include mscoder610's latest fix (unless that init_fix zip included all recent changes, I wasn't sure).

That init_fix version was mscoder610's latest fix. I didn't give it a number because it hadn't been added to the official git repository yet.

[cybereality]

OK, I made that init fix version 1.0.3 now.

http://vireio.com/files/Perception_1.0.3.zip

[Baristan6]

Once 1.0.1 randomly started working in Skyrim it always works. 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 both crash Skyrim as soon an TESV.exe starts. In 1.0.3 Perception.exe no longer crashes while being run without admin, but hijackdll still does not work unless launched as admin.
Is this thread still the best place to post feedback?

[cybereality]

@Baristan6: Can you post your system specs and OS? Thanks.

If I were to guess I would think its an issue with editing the registry, as there were some changes to that between 1.0.1 and the newer versions. Not sure exactly, though, could be other things.

[Baristan6]

win7 64bit i7 920 6Gig ram 660ti with 310.90 driver
Have botth VS 2010 and DXSDK_Jun10 installed

here are the reg keys I found.

Code: Select all

[HKEY_USERS\...\Software\Vireio]

[HKEY_USERS\...\Software\Vireio\Perception]
"BasePath"="C:\\Users\\user\\Downloads\\Perception_1.0.3\\Perception\\"
"TargetExe"="SkyrimLauncher.exe"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Vireio]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Vireio\Perception]
"BasePath"="C:\\Users\\user\\Downloads\\Perception_1.0.3\\Perception\\"
"TargetExe"="SkyrimLauncher.exe"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Vireio]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Vireio\Perception]
"BasePath"="C:\\Users\\user\\Downloads\\Perception_1.0.1\\Perception\\"
"TargetExe"="SkyrimLauncher.exe"