Hey everyone!
What’s Happening?
SteamVR now shows the dashboard on startup of itself (sometimes with a delay of a few seconds), which breaks most Unity content out there. The reason for this is an old bug in the SteamVR plugin for Unity, which gets confused and stuck in a state that is equivalent of being in the dashboard still, despite your users closing it. The result of it is that the content won’t render the controller render models. Input (button presses etc.) will be ignored, too. (The whole idea there is that the dashboard takes over input exclusively, the content is just stuck thinking the dashboard is still visible.)
This issue can be reproduced without SpringboardVR. Home users are unlikely to encounter this due to the way they normally start content (plus they are OK with just restarting content to fix it). We’ve reported a bug to Valve, explaining that this new behavior itself isn’t a bug, but that it triggers this issue.
Workaround
As a workaround you could ensure to start SteamVR without any other application running, including our Desktop Client. Once you waited for let’s say a safe duration of 10 seconds you can then start anything else, as SteamVR will once again go back to its other behavior of automatically closing the dashboard before content starts up. (Which is something that doesn’t seem to happen at all on that first startup, depending on the timing, see above for an explanation.)
Alternatively you can just restart the content that is giving issues, while ensuring the dashboard is hidden at that moment.
New Build Available
Good news! I believe we have a working workaround now, though! As we don’t want to deploy any changes before or on a weekend (as that’s when most of you are crazy busy 😃) we’re aiming for a release in the next few days instead. You can test that upcoming build early if you want to:
- Download the new build’s setup via this link.
- Stop your current Desktop Client by choosing “Quit” from its tray icon.
- Just run the setup you downloaded earlier now. Do NOT uninstall the previous desktop client - there is no need to. (This way you’ll continue with the same settings and one-click content keeps being installed.)
- Run SpringboardVR as you would normally and keep me posted: Mail us at support@springboardvr.com and mention that you’re running this early build and my name (Chris).
Rolling Back
If you encounter any issues you can roll back to the current production build by following the above steps, just using the setup from here instead (this is the same link you can always find via your operator panel’s home page in the top right).
