By Liam Squires-Hand
With a whole lot of new features, improvements and fixes - Valve rolled out SteamVR 2.17 and it's looking ready for the Steam Frame release. Any day now right? Right?
There's quite a lot new with this release including more features of Steam built into the SteamVR UI, which makes sense with the Steam Frame having a full standalone mode - it needs to do pretty much everything. For Linux VR fans, there's a good few fixes there too - that will hopefully make the experience less rough.
Key FeaturesGeneral:
- More in-game Steam features are now accessible in VR, including viewing achievements, community guides, and notes.
- The Quick Access Menu (familiar to Steam Deck users) is now available on the VR Dashboard bar, integrating notifications, volume, brightness, and battery status.
- The VR Dashboard bar now exposes shortcuts to common tasks on hover, such as exiting and redocking.
- Added new slider in Quick Access to control environmental and camera brightness.
- Overlay apps can be quit directly within the dashboard.
- Improved orientation of overlays positioned above or below the player.
- Quick Access Menu shows batteries for additional VR devices.
- Refined appearance of grab handles (for moving / resizing frames).
- Grab handles (theater / dashboard / torn-off / keyboard) can be moved in depth using thumbstick.
- Keep floating frames centered when resizing.
- Updated Laser Mouse appearance.
- Updated theater mode placement.
- Recenter (long press system button) is cancellable (B button).
- Fixed cases of SteamVR dashboard bar disappearance.
- Show user notification when headset framerate changes.
- Move less frequently used window controls to “Additional Options” Menu, and added option to toggle curvature.
- Improve dashboard placement and motion behavior. New user preference tune laser pointer length (Advanced -> Dashboard -> Laser Pointer Length).
- Fix missing dashboard icons for non-Steam VR apps.
- Fix stale Per-App Video Settings when switching the dialog from one app to another, then back again.
- Environment dimming now handled in a unified manner. Users may tune environment brightness in both theater and non-theater modes under VR Settings.
- Fixed some rendering issues related to dashboard / overlay cursor visibility.
- Room view now only pauses input to apps when intentionally enabled and set to a style other than "Translucent".
- Fix for crash when taking screenshots.
- Fix bug with headset initialization on 3rd party headset when many body trackers are in use.
Steam Link (Streaming):
- Improved VR streaming on slow connections.
- Fix stutters when using Steam Link on NVIDIA cards.
- Fix an issue causing 1 frame to be dropped every few seconds.
- Fixed being unable to switch active laser pointer hand when using hand tracking.
- Numerous stability improvements.
- Adds initial support for USB streaming. Note: Requires new Steam Client Beta.
- Fix loading spinner flickering when framerate in game is low.
- Fix case where wrong framerates could show in SteamVR Settings.
- Latency improvements.
- Fixed scene dimming when dashboard is up.
- Added support for Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) prior to encoding. Can be tweaked in SteamVR Settings -> Steam Link -> Sharpen image before encoding.
- Prevent several cases that would cause video corruption on NVIDIA cards when using Steam Link.
OpenXR:
- Fix XrEventDataUserPresenceChangedEXT's session parameter being unset when using XR_EXT_user_presence.
- Improved integrations between HMDs with cameras and chaperone.
- Added support for 32-bit OpenXR applications. Users will be prompted to set SteamVR as their default OpenXR runtime after installing this Beta, which will set up the 32-bit runtime alongside the 64-bit runtime.
Linux:
- Additional improvements to wired headset support on Linux (which previously required third-party add-on layers).
- Improvements to stability and logging of error states on Linux.
- Fix crash using Steam Link on Linux when games submit invalid textures.
- Improve streaming recovery when using Steam Link on Linux.
- Improved support on vrgames that invert nearZ/farZ.
Developers
- Added setting to disable vr streaming auto-connect on resume.
- Added setting to disable chaperone bounds.
- Fix for EVROverlayFlags.MinimalControlBar overlay handling.
- Fix OpenXR bug with image submission for certain non-standard image sizes.
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