How To Use UEVR To Play Unreal Engine Games in Virtual Reality

UEVR is a fantastic new mod from the talented Flatscreen to Virtual Reality modder praydog.

They have made many VR mods over the years such as the popular REFramework that allows some Resident Evil games such as Resident Evil 8 to be played comfortably on PCVR.

Though it is praydog’s most recent flatscreen to Virtual Reality mod that has taken the VR community by storm, the UEVR injector mod.

UEVR allows you to “inject” 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) VR controls and head tracking into practically any game made with Unreal Engine, a game engine used to make many indie and AAA titles.

Using UEVR allows you to use your VR headset to experience full 360 degree immersion in Virtual Reality in a huge new catalog of games that were previously only available to play traditionally on a monitor. Though unfortunately older Unreal Engine games still won’t work, the mod will only work with games using Unreal Engine 4 or later versions.

Of course to use this fantastic mod you’ll need to be able to connect your headset to a PC to run PCVR games, which is completely possible even if you’re using an Oculus Quest 3 or Oculus Quest 2 device.

So if you want to get access to a whole new suite of VR games using the UEVR mod, then you’ve come to the right place. Here I’ll show you how to use the UEVR mod to play Unreal Engine games in VR. Here’s how to play Unreal Engine games in Virtual Reality with UEVR.

Download UEVR

First things first, to use UEVR you’re going to need to download it.

This is easy, just head over to the UEVR github page and click on the latest release in the “Releases” section on the right.

Go to the Releases section to download UEVR

There should be a link at the top of the page for the release, right next to “Just looking for the download? Here:”. Click that link and a UEVR.zip file will be downloaded to your computer’s downloads folder.

Go to your Downloads folder, or whichever folder you have configured your browser to download files to, and find the UEVR.zip folder you just downloaded. All you’ve got to do is uncompress the .zip file into a regular folder by right clicking on it and selecting “Extract All…” and confirming the name of the folder to extract to. Leave it at the default name “UEVR” to avoid confusion.

Run A Game In UEVR

Now you’ve got a folder named UEVR, and inside it is an application called “UEVRInjector”. That’s what you’ll be running to play Unreal Engine games in VR.

Run UEVRInjector.exe as an administrator by right clicking on it and selecting “Run as administrator”. You’ll get a prompt asking you to confirm this, hit Yes.

Now you’ve started UEVR, let’s get a game to work in it.

A freshly launched UEVR instance, make sure to run it as an Administrator

To give you an example of a game that we can now play in Virtual Reality with UEVR, we’ll be using the SWAT tactical shooting game Ready Or Not.

First Person Shooter games like Ready Or Not are generally easier and more straightforward to get working in UEVR, as you won’t have to mess around with the HMD settings too much to get your headset view to align with your character in the game, since the game is already in the first person.

If you’re wondering what games work in UEVR and how well, then you should check out this list of games rated on how well they function with the UEVR mod.

Now that we’ve got UEVR running go ahead and connect your VR headset to your PC. You can do this even with a wireless standalone quest device by using Oculus Airlink or Virtual Desktop or an Oculus Link Cable. Steam Link also works with UEVR, provided you are running the Unreal Engine game through Steam.

Once your headset is connected to your PC run the game you want to play in VR using UEVR. It doesn’t matter which platform you are using to run the game, whether it’s through Steam, Epic Games, GOG, or itch.io. Once the game is launched go back to the UEVR application and select the game in the dropdown near the top.

Don’t worry about this popup

Once the game is selected you might get a popup saying something about plugins, don’t worry about this popup and just click “OK”. If another popup asks you if you want to view the plugins directory then don’t worry about it and hit No.

Now that your game is selected in the drop down then select the “Inject” button. If you don’t see the game in the drop down then it may be because the game is a Multiplayer game with an Anti-Cheat client. We’ll talk more about that in the troubleshooting section further down in this article.

Once the game is selected you can mess with some options before hitting “Inject” to start the game in Virtual Reality

Once you hit the inject button put your headset on and wait for a moment. If you’re running a game through Steam you may see the Steam VR client appear first, but shortly the game should appear in front of you in VR.

If it doesn’t then make sure that you have the game opened on your Desktop, and click inside of it to make sure it is the active application. Once UEVR has done its injecting thing you should see something like this.

Press “Insert” to enable or disable this menu

Congratulations! You’ve successfully run the game in VR using UEVR. You can look around with your VR headset and move the mouse using your usual mouse and keyboard but you might be wondering how you really play the game now.

Configure and Use UEVR

I’m going to continue to use Ready Or Not as an example, but keep in mind that some things might be different depending on which game you are trying to run.

A non first person game might have a different camera that you need to play with to get looking right in VR, or a different control scheme that might work better or worse. Though when in doubt just using your mouse and keyboard as you normally would is a solid way to get reliable controls.

So first thing first, you’ve got this big menu in front of your face. Get rid of it by hitting the “Insert” key. We’ll be coming back to this menu, and you can always get it back by hitting the “Insert” key on your keyboard again.

In Ready Or Not the main menu is very far away from where your head is by default, this can be fixed by messing with the camera controls as we’ll see later, but you can also just squint at the menu options and use your mouse to select one, like a Singleplayer practice mission.

The Ready Or Not main menu in UEVR

After starting a mission we get our hands on some weaponry and actually start to play the game… but you might notice that the weapon you see in your character’s hands doesn’t exactly line up with where you’re looking.

Luckily UEVR gives you some easy to use Camera tools that let you adjust your VR view in the game. Here in Ready Or Not the camera is already focused in first person, but to tweak it just a little bit so that the gunsights align with your eyes you just have to hit “Insert” to bring up the UEVR ingame menu, click on the Camera tab, and then click “Set Standing Height”, “Set Standing Origin”, and finally “Recenter View.”

The camera menu gives you a lot of options for changing your view of the game

This pretty reliably sets the position of the camera to your current head height, making aiming down the sights much easier. Always keep in mind that in UEVR there are also a ton of options to make the game look, run, and feel different. Way too many for us to cover completely here. So if something doesn’t feel right, experiment.

For instance you can also manually change the camera position in this screen with a number of sliders in the “Camera” menu. With this you can even turn Ready Or Not into a Third Person Shooter instead of a first person one.

Virtual Reality makes everything more intense

There are an absolute ton of options in the UEVR options menu, but what we’ve outlined here will get a first person shooter working fairly well with your mouse and keyboard and VR headset.

Of course you can also use different control schemes when playing an Unreal Engine game with the UEVR mod. It’s possible to use your touch controllers, and also to aim and look around with your headset, so that your cursor in the game follows where you look.

I’d recommend trying and messing around with these in the “Input” tab of the UEVR menu. Some games might not work at all with some of these options, and some might work better or worse. You can change the controls by changing the “Type” dropdown under “Aim Method.” in the Input menu.

There’s no guarantee that your touch controls will work smoothly with a game running in UEVR, this is a mod after all.

Try changing the input options, they’re a lot of fun

That’s all you need to know to play an FPS game in UEVR. There are still a lot of options to play around with to make your setup optimal, and so I’ll leave you with a few troubleshooting tips just in case you run into problems.

UEVR Troubleshooting

The first potential issue with your UEVR setup that you’ll probably notice is a big warning in the UEVR screen stating that you might want to disable Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.

Doing so makes things run a little more smoothly in UEVR, at least in general. So if you’re having performance issues then you should disable Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.

Keep in mind that even when doing this you might still have performance troubles depending on the PC that you’re running the game on. VR is very intense for a computer, since it has to render everything twice instead of once, and so games that you can normally run just fine on the flatscreen might have stutters or other performance issues in VR.

So you might also want to turn down the graphical settings on whatever game you are playing in addition to this.

Anyway to turn off Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling press Windows Key + i to open windows settings, and then navigate to System, then Display, and then Graphics.

The Change default graphics settings link

Once you’re in the graphics menu click the “Change default graphics settings” link as circled above.

This menu lets you turn off Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling

Finally turn off Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling in the Default graphics settings screen and restart your PC for the change to take effect.

You also might notice that certain games won’t appear in the injection dropdown menu when they’re running, for instance the multiplayer military shooter Squad.

While not all Unreal Engine 4 or later games are guaranteed to work, most do, and in the case of those like Squad they may not appear due to the Anti-Cheat client that runs with the game. Anti-Cheats common to multiplayer games like Squad will block the detection and execution of UEVR.

This isn’t a bad thing really, because you could easily be permanently banned from one of these games for suspected cheating by these anti-cheat clients when using UEVR. Though if you really want to run one of them then go to the game’s folder in Steam and run the game application directly, which will run the game with no anti-cheat.

For instance with Squad you’d want to run it from: (Path to your Steam installation)/steamapps/common/Squad/SquadGame/Binaries/Win64/SquadGame.exe. To get the game to show up in the UEVR injector.

This will make playing a Multiplayer game awfully hard, but you can at least mess around in the firing range.

Another day on the firing range

If you’re still having problems running a game in UEVR or getting it work properly then also check out the official UEVR documentation.

There are still a lot of things that might not work as expected, and always keep in mind that this is a mod that covers a lot of games, and so some weirdness is to be expected from time to time.

Whatever Unreal Engine game you decide to try in Virtual Reality with the UEVR mod you should be ready to tackle it now. Enjoy!