Today we are adding some more games on Steam for Vive developers to play.

One is an old favorite, the original Cloudhead Demo for GDC – The Gallery. They recently debuted their next steps for the title at PAX, so no Blink[www.thegallerygame.com] in this one but it does feature some great interactive elements.

Alongside them, fellow Canadians or at least people living in Canada for the next few days – Northway Games and Radial games are making Fantastic Contraption available. This puzzle game just premiered its VR version at PAX Prime. It is a great example of room scale gaming, Warning on that 4th puzzle – the one where a cart won’t solve it? Brains will explode when the eureka moment hits.

Not to be left out, the other new game premiered at PAX – Final Approach by Phaser Lock Interactive is now also available. This game came from our Austin game jam and puts you smack dab in the middle of an airport landing planes and helicopters, while putting out fires and more.

As we continue on to launch, developers should let us know when they have new content to either premiere at shows, or share so other developers so they can learn and be inspired and you can get feedback. Just let us know you are ready and we will add it to Steam via the VR Demo package. You can post a thread here to solicit feedback - http://steamproxy.com/app/358720/discussions/1/

We also wanted to call out - The latest Steam Client beta brings with it some changes to the way VR applications are represented and exposed to OpenVR. You will need to set up your VR application to have Steam deal with it correctly. Check out this post for more information on how to correctly configure you VR App & let us know what you would like to see changed or added.

SteamVR has been updated. This publishes the latest beta build (1438035413) to everyone.

VR Monitor:

• Will not flag chaperone problems until tracking is working.
  
• Add option under diagnostic menu to record tracking data if requested by Valve.
  
• Changed VR Monitor so that Quit will now cause a Quit event to be sent to all running OpenVR applications. Applications should respond to that event by either exiting or by calling VR_Shutdown. Applications that don’t quit after five seconds are killed. This behavior can be removed by adding -nomaster to the command line options for SteamVR in the properties.
  
• Added iconography to colored status indicators, for colorblind users.
  
• Improved Room Setup window, which can now be zoomed, panned and rotated, and can now measure distances and toggle visibility of certain elements.
  
• Changed <More Help> in the Status Report to link to a real website, but there is no content yet.
  
• Added logging files to System Report.

Lighthouse:

• Improved tracking (and increased sanity check limits) for “Frisbee like” motions with the controller.
  
• Improved tracking when controllers physically collide with objects.
  
• Fixed one cause of the tracking universe and chaperone bounds shifting over time.
  
• Reduced CPU consumption of lighthouse related threads by 50%.

Dashboard:

• Added the Dashboard, a system-level interface designed for quick access and simple interaction while in VR. Press the System Button on a SteamVR controller to activate it. (That’s the tiny black button on Vive Developer Edition hardware.)
  
• Added automatic activation of the SteamVR Overlay when VRMonitor starts, for presentation in the Dashboard. (This requires the next Steam Client Beta which will be available later this week.)
  
• Applications will now get the event VREvent_InputFocusCaptured when the Dashboard is made visible and VREvent_InputFocusReleased when it is hidden. Applications can also call IVROverlay:: IsDashboardVisible() to see if the Dashboard is active. When it is, application developers are encouraged to hide anything they are drawing that is attached to the controllers to avoid conflicting with the controllers that are drawn by the Dashboard itself. If appropriate, games should also pause gameplay (but not rendering) while the Dashboard is visible.
  
• Note: Dashboard activation is currently limited to Vive Developer Edition hardware. Support for activating and controlling the dashboard from Oculus devices is in the works.

Compositor:

• Fixed scene rendering upside down on some apps.

Room Setup:

• Updated Safe-Zone to include a choice of 3 specific sizes: 4x3ft, 6x4.5ft, and 8x6ft. Room Setup visuals show that this is a walking bound while including a 2ft horizontal reaching buffer on each side above waist height. Size can be cycled by pressing the pad or using the main menu button.
  
• Changed Reset to default the Safe-Zone to the smallest size and set hard bounds 2ft away from each edge.

API:

• Fixed TrackedDevicePose_t vVelocity and vAngularVelocity to have the correct values. (Previously they were reporting 0,0,0).