ToastconcernandClaude Opus 4.8
546d6767f6
The PC compositor-layer work (the Direct3D 11 proxy, its installer, its notes) now lives in pc-streaming/, clearly separate and marked experimental, so the main project is the Steam Frame build and the fixes that help it. The PC layer can't change the Steam Frame's home (the Steam Frame renders it on the headset), and this keeps it from crowding the Steam Frame release while preserving it for a tethered PC headset. The shared Windows renderer support (src/, behind #ifdef _WIN32 / FRAME_HOME_PC) stays put: it only compiles into a PC build and never touches the Steam Frame build. Build and README references updated to the new paths. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PC streaming environments (experimental — not for the Steam Frame)
This folder holds Frame Home's PC-side attempt to make your environments SteamVR's environment on a desktop PC, separate from the Steam Frame build. It is kept apart on purpose: it does not work for the Steam Frame, and the main project ships without it.
What's here
| File | What |
|---|---|
frame_home_layer_d3d11.cpp |
A proxy d3d11.dll that wraps SteamVR's Windows compositor and draws the home where it draws Aurora — the Direct3D 11 counterpart of the Steam Frame's Vulkan layer (../layer/frame_home_layer.cpp). |
d3d11_proxy.def |
The proxy's exports: D3D11CreateDevice is ours, every other export forwards to the real d3d11.dll. |
install-frame-home-pc.ps1, *.bat |
The Windows installer that places the layer beside SteamVR's compositor. |
pc-steamvr.md |
Notes on how it was meant to work. |
The renderer's Windows support (importing the compositor's textures, the named-pipe hand-over, the --system path)
lives in the shared sources under src/ behind #ifdef _WIN32 / the FRAME_HOME_PC CMake option, so it only
compiles into a PC build and never affects the Steam Frame build.
Why it's set aside
The compositor layer is the right design for a tethered PC headset (Index, Vive, Reverb), and likely for standard streaming (e.g. a Quest over Steam Link), where the PC renders the SteamVR environment. It was never confirmed on such hardware.
It cannot work for the Steam Frame. Tracing every PC process showed the Steam Frame renders its home
environment on the headset itself — vrcompositor.exe draws nothing and the vrlink streaming driver makes none
of the environment's shaders; only game video is streamed. So there is nothing on the PC to replace. The home on the
Steam Frame belongs to the headset-side Frame Home (the Vulkan layer in ../layer/), which runs inside the Steam
Frame's own compositor.
Building it
With the main project configured for a PC (FRAME_HOME_PC=ON, the default on Windows/x86-64), the frame-home-d3d11
target builds d3d11.dll from this folder. install-frame-home-pc.ps1 installs it.