As mentioned most recently here, and in numerous other threads, SteamVR will launch whenever you’re playing or testing games through Play Solo / Start Player in ROBLOX. ROBLOX is unable to offer a solution because this is a SteamVR bug, and unfortunately there’s been no luck with getting them to resolve the issue.
This is particularly annoying, so those of us using SteamVR have been looking for a workaround. The obvious suggestion was to uninstall SteamVR when you weren’t using it, but that would also be a pain. However, @Sharksie recently suggested renaming SteamVR’s installation folder to more easily work around the issue. To make this as painless to do as possible, I created a small program to do this:
While useful for preventing SteamVR from opening when a headset isn’t plugged in, you may also find this useful in the event you have a headset plugged in but don’t want games to use it. The program does not need to be open all the time – it can be opened only when you want to toggle SteamVR off/on and closed when you’re done, but it’s very lightweight so there’s no downside to leaving it open in your system tray / opening it on boot if you’d prefer to do that.
To make the program standalone without any sort of loose files, I packaged the icons inside the exe. AHK doesn’t support that, so I injected them after compilation – you’ll need to do that as well whenever you make edits and recompile the program (instructions on github readme page)
That being said, I definitely see custom install directories being common, and you shouldn’t have to recompile the program just for that. I just made an update so that you can pass your custom install directory as a parameter to the executable. I have more detailed instructions on the Github readme, but if you create a shortcut to program and set the target as "..\SteamVR Fix.exe" "D:\Steam\steamapps\common\SteamVR" (and replace ..\ with the program’s install location), it’ll use your custom install directory.
Thank you so very much for this, it’s been driving me insane for months unplugging and plugging in my headset. When the headset wasn’t plugged in for Studio it would slow down the framerate like crazy. I was worried the connected would wear out on my headset.
What headset do you have? I have a Vive and SteamVR never opens for me unless I plug my headset in, even when I have VR turned on in my Roblox settings.
