WARNING for Oculus 1.18!
Today Egosoft releases X Rebirth VR Edition Update 4.21. This update will bring a large set of bug fixes and improvements for the Virtual Reality UI, the tutorials and the XR VR-specific missions. With this update, the game will now also be able to detect VR controllers like the Oculus Touch or the VIVE wand live during gameplay.
Warning - XR VR crashes on Oculus unless correctly updated
There will be some technical problems with X Rebirth VR Edition in relation to the next Oculus Home update (1.18), which is currently in "Public testing". This may lead to our game not running on your system for a few days!
Being on the cutting edge of a new graphic technology API has advantages, but unfortunately also comes with some downsides: Due to a change in one of the Vulkan extensions, Oculus needs to change their handling of Vulkan apps with API version 1.18, which in turn affects our game. As the only game currently released on the Oculus Rift that also uses the Vulkan API, our game will need to be updated together with the Oculus 1.18 runtime.
Today's big update of X Rebirth VR Edition is therefore timed to be released with the next release of Oculus Home, but if one is updated while the other is not, problems can occur. More precisely:
X Rebirth Version 4.20 & Oculus API 1.17 ---> Runs (this is the current situation)
X Rebirth Version 4.20 & Oculus API 1.18 ---> CRASH
X Rebirth Version 4.21 & Oculus API 1.17 ---> CRASH
X Rebirth Version 4.21 & Oculus API 1.18 ---> Runs (this is how it should be after the UPDATE!)
Note that this may even affect people who bought the game on Steam, if they are running the Oculus version of the game! (VIVE version should be unaffected, but will of course also receive the 4.21 update).
Additionally, the update also
requires the very latest graphics drivers. For NVidia cards this is currently version 385.41, for AMD you have to update to 17.9.1!
You can get the Oculus Home Update 1.18 earlier by opting into the Oculus public test channel before Tuesday the 12th, at which point Oculus should have updated all users to 1.18 anyway!