Hello there, stranger.

I'll assume that you're another unfortunate soul that bought this game. Probably because you'd really like to play X4 in VR, but there's no official support, Egosoft adamantly refuses to implement it, arguing on official forums has no effect, so you grabbed this title on sale. After all, how bad it could be?

Then you realized that the game thinks you have Vive controllers and there's no way to make it think otherwise. And now you, perhaps, found this guide while considering whether you should refund this game or not.

The good news are that motion controls actually sort of works, the bad news are that you probably wouldn't want to use them.

The game was made in the time when Pico 4 did not exist, VR was even more niche than it is now, There was no Oculus Quest, no "Metaverse" hype, etc. There also were no standard APIs in many things. Rebirth VR was an experiment. Back then Egosoft pretty much almost made a killer VR space game, but at last moment gutted a good chunk of it, and never revisited it since. Though one can assume that portions of this work (and rebirth) went into what later became X4.

This means, effectively, that the game believes that only Oculus and Vive controllers exist, and any other controller type is an unthinkable heresy. If you had an Oculus headset, you could launch it from Oculus Home and see Oculus Control scheme, but that does't work with Pico 4. The game also will firmly reject your attempts to use "oculus" version of the software and will default to Vive no matter what you do. Even if you use virtual desktop.

The recommended way to play this game is with XBox gamepad or equivalent, while keeping mouse within arm's reach. The reason for that is that gamepads suffer from severe lack of buttons for a spacesim, and the control scheme isn't as thorough as it was in Elite Dangerous. The game has a map, and while you can use it with gamepad as is, to move it around and click it you'll need mouse. This is necessary if you want to order a ship to go to specific map point, for example. That's the only point of the game where you'd really want a pointer.

The game switches controllers on the fly. If you move mouse, it'll switch to mouse, if you wave sticks, it'll switch to sticks, and if you move sticks on the gamepad, it'll switch to gamepad.

When you boot up the game, you'll have following configuration:

RB --> Missile
RT --> Primary Weapon
LB --> Brake and Reverse
LT --> Throttle
LS --> Strafe
RS --> Turn
Back --> Main menu
Start --> System Menu
X --> Quick Menu
Y --> Abilities Menu
A --> Interact Menu
B --> ???
LS Press/L3 --> Boost
RS Press/R3 --> Cargo Magnet.
DPad Left --> Next Missile
DPad Right --> Next Weapon
DPad Up --> Unbound
DPad Down --> Select Closest Enemy

You'll also immediately notice that you target things by looking at them, which is nice and works quite well.

This is usable scheme setup in such way that if you play this after Elite Dangerous, you can start off your journey in space on a positive note by accidentally blowing someone up right in the tutorial. Well, you start without missiles, but the risk is there.

The default layout has a few problems.

First, for some reason throttle is pressure sensitive. Meaning you can control ship forward speed by pressing it stronger, which is not very useful. It also means that you'll need to hold left trigger to continue going forward.

Second problem is that you can't roll. As one of the devs explained, "there aren't enough buttons". You could sacrifice a strafing axis on LS, and replace it with yaw, or replace yaw axis on RS with roll, of course, but this is not convenient in practice. X Rebirth is a game where you'll want to strafe often to avoid incoming fire from the brain-dead AI, and unlike Elite ships don't exactly roll quickly. So Roll/Pitch/Roll maneuver is not efficient, and you could have issues in very first dogfights with more durable enemies, like Xenon P.

I've experimented a bit, and settled on this (changed settings marked in bold):

RB --> Roll Right
RT --> Fire Weapon
LB --> Roll Left
LT --> Fire Missile
LS --> Strafe
RS --> Turn (RS Horizontal --> Yaw, RS Vertical --> Pitch)
Back --> Main menu
Start --> System Menu
X --> Quick Menu
Y --> Abilities Menu
A --> Interact Menu
B --> Toggle Target Lock
LS Press/L3 --> Boost
RS Press/R3 --> Cargo Magnet.
DPad Left --> Next Missile
DPad Right --> Next Weapon
DPad Up --> Throttle Up
DPad Down --> Throttle Down

To remap, you press "Start" to go to main menu which pauses the game, then settings --> General Input. Note that Roll Left/Right are under digital control, and same goes for Throttle.

This configuration is also not perfect, and throttling with D-Pad is not common. But this way you can strafe, roll and throttle simultaneously. Would be great if xbox gamepad had at least 4 more buttons, or you could map key combinations onto commands, like in Elite, of course. But this is better than default.

There is still going to be an issue:

The game does not auto-target enemies that shoot you. Your "Radar" is not incredibly useful because it has difficulty showing things behind you, so the moment you're shot at, you'll be awkwardly looking around trying to figure out where did the attack come from. Now, you could map "Target nearest" to B, but then there will be a problem. "Target nearest" locks the target, so once you press it, you won't be able to target another enemy by looking at it, or target anything else, really. So I decided to trade instant lock on for ability to lock target I can see. This is not ideal, but this works.

I've spent couple of hours with this configuration, and it is usable. Technically, you don't really even need to map anything to "B", but ability to lock current target is better than having nothing on this button.

Motion controls, however, almost work. They work in an awful way that probably can't be remapped. Finding that they work is the reason for writing this guide. The scheme works like this.

• To click things with control wands, you click the right stick.
  
• Left wand has two menus, that can be done by clicking and moving left stick.
  
• You hold left stick, move it to the left, release --> That'll bring up Quick menu.
  
• You hold left stick, move it forward, release --> Abilities menu.

Yes, this is awful. Basically for every movement where Vive user would click the trackpad, you have to click stick, which is not convenient.

Now, ship cabin is actually clickable. To switch weapons, you click (with the right stick) those small screens that display weapons and missiles. That cycles through available weapons. THere are two more screens with pictograms (one look like table, other like a map), those are actually clickable. One will bring up quick menu, the other will bring up abilities menu. Interestingly, you can also click those elements with mouse.

When you try to use wands, the ship will shoot where you point with your right wand. Left Trigger is forward thrust, Left grip is reverse thrust. Right trigger is main weapon, and Right grip is cargo scoop. It is highly likely you found it before, but didn't figure out how to steer (because I didn't).

To steer, you need to press "B" (upper button on right wand), which will activate gesture movement control Now your left hand will act as a virtual flight stick. Tilting your wrist front/back/left/right steers the ship, and if you twist invisible "flightstick", you'll roll. Just like playing an air guitar.

That is not very comfortable, however, and that's the reason why I recommend gamepad (and nearby mouse) instead. The other reason why I recommend XBox Gamepad is because with this control scheme, where you use oculus-style Pico wands and the game thinks you have Vive controllers... you still won't be able to strafe. And like I mentioned, strafing is very important in this game.

Perhaps for the purposes of optimization, but some of the Rebirth content was removed in VR version. It is also said that Rebirth VR uses its own universe, which is different from non-VR version.

The most obvious change you'll instantly notice would be that station doors do not open. In flatscreen version you can wander around station and chat with NPCs using awful smalltalk minigame, but here, you can't enter the station interior beyond landing pad, unless you're on a mission. There are missions that give you station access for about 15 minutes, for a small fee.

I have no idea why this was never fixed, though.

If you want to try restoring the content, see egosoft forums here: "[XRVR MODS] X-R Vanilla Recall Collection [Update 2017-09-11]"[forum.egosoft.com]

I wish the studio revisits the title one day and restores content officially, as it would be a great game if someone fixes it a little and advertises it. There is, however, not much hope of this happening.

As of now, both Rebirth and Rebirth VR are extremely difficult to get into, to the point of being outright hostile to the player trying to enjoy them. This guide is based on my own experience with the game and problems I had.

I hope it will be useful for someone.

Good luck and have fun.