There will be a new version of the hlvr mod http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=923491647 [External Link] https://www.reddit.com/r/hlvr/ [External Link] but - you guessed it - only for windows.

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Quoting: FredOX-plane VR support will be out long before their Vulkan support is finished, and as Linux SteamVR needs Vulkan, we will not see Linux supported initially.

Quoting: slaapliedjeFor what it's worth they have to actually use Vulkan. It's required for it to broadcast through the Headset.

No. SteamVR has been using EXT_memory_object for a while now. It allows efficient sharing of rendered frames between OpenGL and Vulkan.

Granted, almost all OpenGL games have terrible performance (at least here on my RX 480 with radeonsi/radv), but High Fidelity really surprised me with great performance.

Quoting: slaapliedjeBut so far, the Vive seems to work like it should in Arch Linux. Except I haven't tested the bluetooth shutdown of the Lighthouses yet (though I found out the firmware file was missing for the bluetooth that the Vive uses, now it's installed I should test that function.)

Lighthouse Basestation firmware update and power management is not implemented on Linux. Why? Who knows. You can pair with the stations without issues, steamvr just won't do anything with it.

The protocol for power management has been (mostly?) reverse engineered and if your bluez still has gatttool you should be able to use that (on archlinux it doesn't, they deprecated it): https://github.com/nairol/LighthouseRedox/blob/master/docs/Base%20Station.md#bluetooth-le-communications [External Link]

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Quoting: mike44Once X-Plane supports it, I'll have a look again. But I might wait for the next gen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/6oalkh/xplane_11_vr_vive_rift_native_support_coming_this/ [External Link]

But there's a good chance it won't support OpenVR on Linux and you won't have to spend money.

There are already a couple of games with VR support that never bothered with linux.

Alien Isolation had short lived experimental Oculus Rift DK2 support, but never in the linux version. There is now an independent mod, but only for the windows version.
Dirt Rally has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 has Oculus Rift support on Windows.
X Rebirth VR is only for Windows.
Serious Sam: The Last Hope is still only for Windows.

There are some open source engines that are in desperate need for some porting
KozGit's doom 3 bfg fork: https://github.com/KozGit/DOOM-3-BFG-VR [External Link] (there's a fork with fewer features that does compile and work on linux: https://github.com/Codes4Fun/RBDOOM-3-BFG/ [External Link])
Penumbra VR doesn't compile because the original engine doesn't compile on modern gcc on linux: http://rly.sexy/penumbra-vr-release/ [External Link]

I'm sure there are lots more but those I remember right now.

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As someone who doesn't use windows I can not recommend buying a Vive or any VR headset unless you want to be hacking on

• open drivers like OpenHMD


• open libraries and engine integration like OSVR/OSVR-Unreal/OSVR-Unity


• native OpenVR projects like Doom 3 BFG, Vivecraft, High Fidelity, ...

More than six months after Unity had an experimental OpenVR linux beta, which they quickly removed from their releases, they STILL don't have OpenVR support on Linux.
OpenVR support in Unreal Engine should work on Linux, but I still don't know a single application making use of it.

Unfortunately nobody cares about OpenVR on Linux. Even Mozilla (!) is all about supporting proprietary platforms with WebVR and as far as I can tell has not lifted a finger to make it work on Linux in the 6 months steamvr for linux has been available. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1310663 [External Link]
High Fidelity is another such project which touts open source and cross platform values, yet it looks like nobody has even looked at Linux support for their OpenVR plugin. After an unrelated GPU hang issue I had with it was finally solved I got to do some tinkering and after just a couple of hours with minimal experience with it, I got it working (including investigating and filing a mesa bug and getting a patch soon after): https://github.com/highfidelity/hifi/issues/10098#issuecomment-323547377 [External Link]

The sad truth is, until there is a complete (unity, unreal) and proven ecosystem, pretty much nobody will care to make their VR application work on linux.

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Quoting: ArdjeAt the current state I don't think it is interesting for valve to promote the VR on steamos yet, as they are still developing on RADV and hoping nvidia will follow.

While radv still needs a proper VK_KHX_external_semaphore and performance improvements, what Valve is really waiting for is STILL proper unity support for SteamVR with Vulkan. The unity 5.6 betas kinda worked, but not very well and supposedly they completely disabled SteamVR support for Linux in more recent unity builds.

Valve used Unity for even their own projects like "The Lab" and the SteamVR tutorial, so this is probably quite a hard dependency for them at the moment.

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The beta worked on radeonsi, but you had to fix some shaders and the performance was not good:
https://i.imgur.com/gED2AOM.png [External Link]

Gonna try this too after it downloaded the demo.

edit:
Thread 1 "X-Plane-x86_64" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00007fffed6966da in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007fffed6966da in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
#1  0x00007fffed56c895 in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
#2  0x00007fffed358ee1 in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
#3  0x00007fffed31a3ec in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
#4  0x00007fffed31a859 in ?? () from /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/radeonsi_dri.so
#5  0x0000000001236f35 in res_3d_class::res_3d_plot_per_frame(float const*, xcam_class*) ()
#6  0x0000000001231b06 in wxr_display_class::wxr_display_shad_per_frame() ()
#7  0x0000000000dddd4b in setup_cloud_shadows() ()
#8  0x0000000000cdbed1 in WORLD_scene_per_render(rendering_pass, float, float, float, float) ()
#9  0x0000000000ce0623 in WORLD_scene_per_frame(xplane_window*, int, int) ()
#10 0x00000000005b5495 in APP_update() ()
#11 0x000000000094cf98 in MACIBM_post_event_proc() ()
#12 0x0000000001246eca in WIN_run_app ()
#13 0x00000000005b65bf in main ()

edit2: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97909 [External Link]

edit3: So with MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE=-GL_AMD_pinned_memory ./X-Plane-x86_64 --force_run it runs fine. All shaders compile, no real rendering errors I can see. It seems to be capped at ~30 fps even though I have vsync disabled in the graphics settings. Settings are medium
+ Maximum textures: https://i.imgur.com/wx6VpSp.png [External Link]

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It's not that OpenGL is not allowed, it's just not likely to work fast enough for VR yet.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/#known-issues [External Link]

OpenGL applications are currently too slow to use interactively; only the Vulkan Submit path is optimal. See: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/wiki/Vulkan [External Link]

Dave Airlie mentioned that for example radeonsi is missing extensions that would would make it fast.

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Quoting: ShmerlIf I understand correctly, the way UE works is, that developers only create HLSL shaders, and then Unreal somehow translates them into GLSL. Does it use its own translator?

Yes, and one of the funny things is that it is based on mesa:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/Rendering/ShaderDevelopment/HLSLCrossCompiler/ [External Link]

The library is largely based on the GLSL compiler from Mesa. The frontend has been heavily rewritten to parse HLSL and generate Mesa IR from the HLSL Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). The library leverages Mesa's IR optimization to simplify the code and finally generates GLSL source code from the Mesa IR. The GLSL generation is based on the work in glsl-optimizer.

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31 titles that support OSVR on Steam right now also support Linux, so that's nice.

It's not. As far as I know. 0 of those actually have OSVR support *on* Linux. They just have OSVR support on Windows and then they also have a Linux version without OSVR support.

The two main reasons are:
OSVR's unity plugin doesn't work on linux: https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Unity-Rendering/issues/5 [External Link]
OSVR's unreal plugin doesn't work on linux: https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Unreal/pull/123 [External Link]

The thing is that nobody is *really* trying to make OSVR applications work on Linux.
You would assume that Mozilla would care for WebVR with OSVR on Linux, right? Wrong: https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/issues/83 [External Link]

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I wouldn't donate to Epic Games for this either, but you're donating to a developer who is not affiliated with Epic Games. Supporting independent developers that work on Linux stuff is alright in my book. And you're not doing it for Epic Games, you're doing it for all the games that are developed with Unreal Engine and that are going to get better Linux support.

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