OVERVIEW
VAIL and LIV are working together to provide VR content creators with a set of tools to take any VAIL footage to the next level. These tools include a variety of functionality which this document will explain.
While the LIV app also supports the ability to add IRL Mixed Reality capture, Avatar overlays, and a standalone First Person Stabilizer that works for most OpenVR Games: We have limited it to only work with Vails game camera and the viewfinder will be disabled until we can add a more holistic anti cheat.
Please tag us on our socials @LIV and @PlayVailVR with #VAIL and #PoweredByLIV if you post! We’d love to signal boost across our socials too :)
VAIL Cam
We wanted to highlight some special integration sauce that we’ve worked on together.
In short: We are using VAIL game data to drive the LIV spectator camera, allowing us to create really dynamic content live.
To activate this mode:
-
Start the LIV app & navigate to Avatars and press “Launch PCVR Avatars”
-
Launch Vail from the LIV app using Sync & Launch
- Open the LIV menu at your feet by hovering the green LIV laser pointer over it until it fills up
- If you are on the public_beta branch - To open the LIV menu you will need to open the SteamVR dashboard by pressing the system button on the controller. Then click on the LIV icon on the SteamVR dashboard toolbar
- Disable the LIV Avatar by going to Avatar -> Left hand panel -> uncheck “Avatar” under “Visibility”
-
You can now head into your VAIL hand tablet menu (B button on your controller) and change the LIV Camera behavior under Spectator LIV Camera Mode
See explanation for the 3 different modes below:
VAIL Supports 3 LIV Camera Modes
- First Person mode automatically stabilizes/smooths all content from a player’’s view. This is especially helpful in maintaining an easy viewer experience when a player aims down their sights. Example
- Mixed mode takes the best of both the previous cameras! It will stay in third person view as default, but whenever a player pulls up a gun to aim, the camera will automatically zoom into First Person. Example
- Third Person stays in Third Person the entire time – we added it as an option but don’t recommend it for VAIL currently.
IVRL Integrity
To protect the integrity of the competitive matches in VAIL for tournaments such as IVLR, we have made some automatic changes to ensure everyone is playing fairly:
- The in-game Viewfinder is disabled until further notice so people cannot see behind walls in third person
- First person mode will only be available in official IVRL matches
- The automatic profile created in LIV is not able to be tweaked until we develop a better anti-cheat system
IMPORTANT TO READ
LIV costs extra performance to run – roughly the cost of an additional camera. We highly recommend turning your SteamVR render resolution back to 100% or lower, and lowering the in-game graphics settings. The big areas of improvement come from lowering texture quality, shadows and anti aliasing.
Please let us know how performance is for you on Discord, your feedback helps us build the best streaming tools for VR.
FIRST TIME SETUP WITH LIV
https://help.liv.tv/hc/en-us/sections/360004620060-LIV-Avatars
STRUGGLING WITH PERFORMANCE?
https://help.liv.tv/hc/en-us/articles/360016871619-How-To-Improve-Performance-With-LIV
WHERE IS THE GENERAL HELP DESK?
https://help.liv.tv/hc/en-us or on our Discord