Guess Facebook destroys everything it touches. A post I made on the VR subreddit.
read moreThis is a partial rant, partial warning to others not to invest in Oculus-backed devices. This is my experience after regular use for 2.5 weeks. I'm a technical user (programmer by day) with plenty of debugging experience, but apparently I am of no match to the Oculus software suite.
I got the Rift S as a holdover until the G2 comes out. Been enjoying VR, a lot, but the Oculus software has been nothing but painful, repeatedly and abruptly pulling me out, or not letting me enter, a VR session. I'm a patient person when it comes to debugging and technical setup, but once I have a setup working, barring software updates or configuration tweaks, I expect it to continue working with only the occasional hiccup. But between restarts, between days, sometimes even between hours: what was once working in VR (specifically the part of which Oculus controls; I've had no issues with Steam) no longer does. This includes small annoyances, like having to unplug and replug my Rift's cable each time I reboot my computer for it to recognize the headset, the guardian bounds being "lost" and asking me to redraw them even though a restart of Oculus restores the bounds, etc.
As of tonight, my headset is a paperweight. Open the Oculus app, the App Status screen comes up, spins for 60 seconds, then says it can't connect to the Oculus Service. The Oculus service status page does not show any outage. "Repaired" the app, which was simply a full re-install. Same issue. Multiple computer reboots. Multiple unplugs of the headset. Tried starting the Oculus-server.exe in the runtime folder; I'm able to start the app at least, but the display in the headset doesn't turn on. Things were working perfectly fine no more than 2 hours ago; no Windows updates or other VR-related changes in the interim. I've still got another 22 days to bring this contraption back from whence it came for a full refund. No doubt I'll do so.
Would love to know why a server connection is required for using a VR headset that's connected to compute by a 6 foot cable. /u/OculusSupport if you're going make such a strong requirement on the client side, you better be sure your server uptimes are near perfect. If there's one thing you can count on being unpredictable, it's the network.
Edit: 14 hours later, magically, everything works fine again. Since I made the post, I checked three times. Once 6 hours ago, once 3 hours ago, and once now. No software changes. I didn't even unplug/replug the headset in the last 14 hours. I just powered on my PC/woke it from sleep to see if I could launch Oculus each time and then put it back to sleep. If I know two things are true, they're "Oculus' software sucks" and "third time's a charm".