How to use Oculus Rift with Doomsday

This article contains some helpful tips about how to use Oculus Rift with Doomsday.

Doomsday supports Oculus Rift starting with 1.13. DK2 is supported in 1.15.

Oculus Rift support was discontinued in 2.0 (pending further changes in the renderer).

1. Plug in Oculus Rift.
2. Launch Doomsday and a game. Doomsday should detect that you have the HMD connected and switch to Oculus Rift VR rendering mode.
3. Setting up gamepad bindings is recommended, including ones for game menu navigation (they are all in the Controls menu)
4. Click on Apply Rift Settings in the 3D & VR Settings dialog. This will configure things like HUD graphics size and head bobbing.
5. Reset your head tracking while standing up to fully match the pose of the Doom Guy.

The Apply Desktop Settings button will restore desktop default settings.

Oculus Rift is supported in the binary packages for Windows and OS X. On other platforms, you'll have to compile Doomsday yourself using the Oculus SDK. (Set LIBOVR_DIR in your qmake config or config_user.pri.)

(LibOVR 0.4.2) Doomsday works best (only?) in the “extended desktop” mode. The game window is automatically moved to the HMD screen when the Oculus Rift VR mode is enabled. The game window is moved back to a regular monitor when the VR mode is changed back to “no stereo”.

You must move the game window to the HMD screen manually. The easiest way to do this is to use the duplicate monitor mode. Make sure the window is in fullscreen mode (F11).

In 1.15, the UI adapts automatically to be a good size for Oculus Rift.

In 1.13, there is no support for alternative UI styles, so you'll have to manually adjust the font sizes to suit Oculus Rift. The best way is to increase font sizes with the command line option:

-fontsize 1.5

While Oculus Rift is connected, an auto-configuration button (“Apply Rift Settings”) is shown in the 3D & VR Settings dialog. This will set a bunch of cvars to values that work better on the Rift. Most importantly, the auto-configuration will ensure you have the appropriate head tracking input bindings:

bindcontrol lookpitch head-pitch
bindcontrol yawbody head-yaw

In 1.15, a new player control for reseting Oculus Rift tracking has been added to the games' Controls menu. The corresponding console command is resetriftpose.

For a good experience on the Oculus Rift, make sure you'll keep the FPS at 60.

Disabling the Bloom effect helps a lot if your GPU is struggling with fill rate.

In 1.15, you can adjust the Oculus Rift frame buffer pixel density in the 3D & VR Settings dialog. Reducing density will improve rendering performance, however this will reduce image quality.