Subnautica won't play on desktop after playing in vr!

ToastyAstronaut

^ a video of what happens if I press play.

After playing in vr for about an hour, I took a break and decided to play the desktop version. It won't work. It only works in vr. Mind you, I deleted steamvr and changed the settings of oculus so it won't be able to play games that aren't in the oculus store.

I have no idea what to do.

zhouij

There's already a thread tracking this issue: https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/145065/keeps-launching-to-vr-mode

Edit: After watching the video, it looks like the game refuses to launch at all. So it's kind of a different behavior than the other post.

ToastyAstronaut

soooo....

do you have any suggestions for what I should do?

narfblat

I've seen threads before of people playing subnautica in VR and then not being able to play it in normal mode. Unfortunately, these players haven't found a fix yet. Oddly you have a new addition, the game running in background.
I have 2 guesses for the cause:
1. A game related file kept somewhere other than in the steamapps folder, and not deleted on uninstall; the only one I can find is at C:\Users\[username]\AppData\LocalLow\Unknown Worlds (and to make it harder, appdata is a "hidden" folder, easiest to find it with a search). Try renaming that folder to Unknown Worlds.bak, and delete or move any files that may remain in the steam subnautica folder, before reinstalling.
2. A registry setting might be stuck at "vr mode". Make sure to make a restore point before you do anything there.

ToastyAstronaut

Thanks, I'll be sure to check those out.

garath

Sometimes when I have odd issues with Steam Games, I'll try uninstalling and re-installing the game to see if that will clear out some settings file that might have a bad setting in it that keeps the game from loading. I think it would be a real pain if you had to uninstall and reinstall the game every time you switched from VR to PC. But it is something to try. (I don't play the VR version so this is just a random suggestion in case it might help.)

0x6A7232

You could use Process Monitor (procexp.exe or procexp64.exe) from the SysInternals Suite: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx

This should allow you to see what files Subnautica is accessing, and perhaps discern what the config files are and where they are located.

Side note: There's a whole crapton of good tools in that suite, so even if you're not trying to figure this out, I'd grab it (SysInternals made a free set of Windows sysadmin tools that was so good that Microsoft acquired them and hired the authors.