Day 3 with the HTC Vive: Climbing Everest, Putting out Fires, and Restarting Everything

Today is Day 3 with the HTC Vive. To be honest, I didn’t think I would get to it today. I had to prep my speech for Toastmasters this afternoon (which I’ll be posting a blog on soon). I had to get work done that involved lots of typing. Which, unfortunately, VR HMDs are not optimal for.

I finally got to the Vive in the evening. I planned to use it to destress from the day. Of course, It didn’t go that smoothly.

I opened my laptop to this lovely error:

Missing Files SteamVR

I’m not sure why SteamVR would have missing files since it has been working just fine the past two days. I went through the following steps.

Refreshed SteamVR from Settings. That didn’t work.
Unplugged the HTC Vive headset and restarted the computer.
Booted Steam and SteamVR back up. No error messages! Yay!

It is time to play Everest VR. I downloaded the game two days ago and was excited to play it. I have a morbid fasination with the mountain climbing movies like Everest and this documentary about K2.

everest_basecamp — Screenshot from Everest VR.

EverestVR took forever to load. To all VR developers out there, please play some jokes or something during loading screens. In a HMD, you can’t just walk away to get a drink or pet the dog like when waiting on a console game. Standing in the dark is super boring.

Once the game finally loaded I opened the Steam menu to adjust the sound. Doing so, I accidently exited the game. This froze the EverestVR. I had to take off my headphones and Vive to fix the problem from my laptop. I closed the game from my laptop but it was still showing up as “exiting” in the Vive. Not good.

I had to close Steam and SteamVR on my laptop to clear the Vive. I also un-plugged and re-plugged it back in just to be safe.

Round 2 with Everest

Everest is the most challenging mountain to climb, right? Not everyone does it on their first try. I opened EverestVR from my Steam Library inside the Vive. The “exiting” screen appeared in front of me.

I restarted Steam (again) and loaded Everest VR (again). I could hear the music for the game as if it was loading but it seemed frozen still. I couldn’t move my hands and when I turned my head the graphics didn’t move.

I took off the HMD to come back to this error report on my laptop:

crash report EverestVR
I don’t believe this is the Vive’s fault. I think it’s the game. It doesn’t have very good reviews for this reason. It’s a shame because I really enjoyed the 2 minutes I played the game for. There is nothing more annoying than having to take on and off a HMD to play a game.