How hard would it be to mod VR into Beamng.Drive?

So this isnt meant to be another post asking for an official VR implementation. I know Beamng is still in alpha and the priorities are on completing the game itself. Not implementing a feature for a small group of people with special hardware.

But with the ongoing release of OpenXR i asked myself how hard could it be to implement VR in beamng as a mod? A mod could get away with a lot of problems an official release needs to address.

• Mediocre performance? Well, its a mod, live with it.
• Menus and gui arent really usable in VR? Use the menu on your regular screen and switch the gui off. Its a mod mate.
• watching cutscenes makes me vomit. Dont watch em. its a mod
• etc.

A barebones mod would be still better than having no VR at all and it would avoid all the expectations of an official release. To put it into perspective: People are spending hours hexediting >15 year old gamecube roms so the experience of playing them in DolphinVR goes from absolutly horrible to barely useable. So theres undeniably a crowd of enthusiasts who put up with a lot of hurdles for VR.

So, with that all out of the way: Is it an realistic endeavour to mod VR into Beamng? Is it possible at all? I know VR worked somewhat already with the Oculus DK1 years ago in Beamng. But since then Beamng depreciated dx9 and even dx10 support. Torque3d transformed over the years into a more or less customized inhouse solution. Todays oculus sdk has probably almost nothing todo with the one from the dk1 times.
IDK. Are we talking about months of work? years? No chance until critical changes in the graphics engine are made?

 

8/10

 

Implementing it well? Quite hard.
Getting the game to "Work" on VR? Probably a bit of coding and an overlay. But again, i have absolutely no clue what i am talking about. Im just making a lot of wild guesses.

 

Also requires the game to have 2 cameras per camera node positioned slightly different for each eye. Also, CRASHING in VR: vomit central.

 

Yeah, having to have two different rendered images/cameras is as i'm concerned the most worrying part. If that would be so easy to implement we would already have a rear mirror or maybe even splitscreen. What interests me mostly is if there is no way around to rewrite significant parts of the graphics engine for having that? I mean for an official implemtation this would make sense. But maybe there are more hacky solutions like some kind of injector which already would do the job good enough as a modding solution.

Also with crashing in vr i dont see a big problem. I had in VR now several crashes in other simulators and while not always pleasant it never made me sick. Yes, for the 30% of people who are more prone to motionsickness this wouldnt be great, but the same goes for every other game.

 

The problem is that the physics is tied to the FPS, if the FPS is lower than 20, the physics will slow down to below 2000Hz. This is an inherited flaw. If you have a very beefy computer, and just load grid map, then use the FPS limiter slider, to limit FPS to 10, then the physics will slow down but the CPU load is NOT reduced. You can't calculate physics and render graphic separately.
Therefore implement rendering more than one camera, is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

 

Well, with 20FPS VR and tbh also monitor gaming is pretty much unuseable either way. That shouldnt be the problem. And i dont think a second rendered image has such a severe impact on fps.