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Team Fortress 2 Gains VR Support On Linux

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Team Fortress 2 the amazingly successful F2P FPS from Valve now has official VR support on Linux!

They have released a few patches recently to address lots of issues and add lots of items (some for halloween) but the biggest change is this:
QuoteAdded support for VR mode on Linux

Source

That is amongst many other changes of course, too large a list to put into this update article.

So any owners of the Oculus Rift I am sure will be highly excited by this news, it is yet another reason why I need to pick one up I think.

How many of you actually own a Rift? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: FPS, Hardware, Steam
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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3 comments

danieru Nov 2, 2013
Woot! I've been looking forward to this since I got my oculus setup.
Cheeseness Nov 2, 2013
I've spent maybe 4 hours playing TF2 with my Rift on Linux. There seems to be a bit of input lag when there's a bit of action going on (not enough to be particularly bad, but enough to be noticeable).

I prefer to position my Rift to overlap my primary monitor in twinview so that I can see what the HMD displays if I ever need to take it off. This is pretty awkward and requires a convar to force windowed mode, which only does borderless windowed mode, which doesn't allow for focus changing (no Alt+Tabbing out).

The behaviour of fullscreen mode is a little odd in that you can't choose which display it uses in any way other than setting the Rift to be your primary display device (which comes with its own set of issues).

The new two stage activation process is nice though, allowing you to enable VR support, but not actually turn it on until you're ready by clicking the new Activate VR button on the main menu. This allows you to fire up the game and play normally if you don't feel like using your HMD, or to just switch back to normal view without restarting the game.


One of the more interesting things that has come out of this update has been the removal of the in-game configuration utility. This has been replaced by OpenVR, a separate app (found under tools in the game filter dropdown) which aims to be a collection of configuration tools for a range of devices. Currently it only includes the official Oculus SDK configuration utility, but it also includes an empty folder for Vortex (first mentioned in this interview, which is Valve's rumoured VR/AR tech. With additional players like InfinitEye starting to appear, having Valve position their games and Steam as being VR device agnostic will allow for some healthy competition and give people more freedom to try and use different tech.

Exciting stuff! :D
Half-Shot Nov 4, 2013
The problem with getting a rift for me is:
 - Price is a bit steep for me.
 - Waiting on the proposed HD version of the kit.

But i'm looking forward to it and the new Source SDK actually added support in the code for any mods to be compatible, look out for that one.
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