The Rennsport open beta is with us, and while we found it pretty easy to just jump straight into the car and start racing, what if you have a VR headset? There is nothing obvious in the menus that lets you take the gorgeous looking race sim and attach it directly in front of your face, but you can, it’s ace and we are going to show you exactly how to do it right here, right now.
Play Rennsport in virtual reality
First things first if you haven’t already you are going to need to head to Epic Games Store, find Rennsport, and add it to your library it’s totally free to play although you can add some extra goodies if you buy one of the three available editions in-game, and you can find out all about those in our previous Rennsport article.
Once you have it installed – it comes in just under 30GB so it’s not a small download, you will need to sign up for a Rennsport account by linking your email, setting up a username, having to re-enter it again because you were stupid enough to put a capital letter at the beginning of your username, verify the email address and then log in via the client.
If it is your first time playing you will need to set up your controls and it is definitely better to do this in flat before trying to jump into VR.
Chances are you will be playing with a wheel and pedals so go ahead and calibrate those, but not, check everything is working with your game controller.
One useful button to bind is the ResetVRPosition which can be found in the Camera Options. Set it to something easy for you to remember that you can just tap with your headset on. I used Spacebar. This will make it easy to realign in game if anything goes weird.
If you have used any VR previously you will more than likely have SteamVR installed already no matter whether you are using something like a Pimax Crystal or a Quest 3. Whatever headset you use, just make sure SteamVR is your runtime. You can do this in the setting, and chances are if you have played any PCVR before it will be, but best to check.
Now we need to tell Rennsport to play nicely with virtual reality so go to your Epic Game Store library where you installed Rennsport and click the three dots to bring up its options.
Now click on Manahe and then Launch Options and flick it on. Now you will get a box and all you need to yupe into this box is -vr.
This will force the executable to run in native VR – don’t forget, if you want to play flat again, you need to pop back in and delete this bit.
The devs suggest changing the “cockpit viewing distance” for an optimal look. This is something you should do before going into VR and can be found under Gameplay, Gameplay Camerasa, and then Distance in the settings.
This will likely change for each car and it is purely a personal preference thing.
At this stage of the game in Open beta expect a rough ride and a lot of bugs, especially in VR but the more data the devs get from people playing, the better and quicker things should progress.
