MAVR

MA VR

Version 1.0.0 — Beta Made by J_axon

Full virtual reality support for Mage Arena. Room-scale head and hand tracking, a real body you can look down at, motion controls, look-based aiming, and networking that lets VR and flatscreen players see each other move properly.

Client-side only. Your friends do not need it, and a lobby with one VR player and five flatscreen players works fine.

Runs on OpenVR — SteamVR must be running before you launch the game. Not OpenXR. See Why OpenVR and not OpenXR if you want the reasoning. Any headset SteamVR supports will work.

Contents

• Requirements
• Installing
• Why OpenVR and not OpenXR
• Choosing VR or Flatscreen
• Controls
• Look-based actions
• The VR settings panel
• Your body
• Menus and the laser pointer
• Multiplayer and player tags
• Spell effects and the pipe smoke
• Why the lighting looks the way it does
• Why it may look softer than you expect
• Configuration
• Reporting a problem
• Known limitations
• Roadmap
• Troubleshooting
• Disclaimer

Requirements

• Mage Arena on PC
• BepInEx 5.4.2305 (x64, Mono) — this exact pack. The mod uses a preloader patcher as well as a plugin, and BepInEx 6 is a different architecture that will not load it.
• SteamVR — required, and it must already be running when you launch the game. This is not optional or a convenience: the mod renders through the OpenVR runtime, and the OpenVR compositor is SteamVR. Without it there is nothing to hand frames to, and the mod will load, log the failure, and leave you on the desktop.
• A PC VR headset. Developed and tested on a Meta Quest 3 over Virtual Desktop. Anything SteamVR drives should work — Quest over Link, Air Link, Steam Link or Virtual Desktop, Index, Vive, Pico, and WMR headsets through SteamVR.

Installing

Mod manager

Install through your mod manager. The BepInEx dependency is handled for you, and the OpenVR runtime is put in place automatically the first time you launch. Nothing else to do.

Manual

If you are not using a mod manager:

1. Install BepInEx 5.4.2305 x64 Mono into your Mage Arena folder, then launch the game once and close it so BepInEx generates its folders.
2. Copy the BepInEx folder from this package into your Mage Arena folder, merging with the one already there. You should end up with:

Mage Arena/
└─ BepInEx/
   ├─ plugins/MageArenaVR/MageArenaVR.dll
   └─ patchers/MageArenaVR/
      ├─ MageArenaVR.Preload.dll
      └─ openvr_api.dll

1. Start SteamVR.
2. Launch the game.

You do not need to place openvr_api.dll anywhere yourself. It ships next to the patcher, and the patcher installs it into the game's native plugin folder at startup — before anything tries to use it. If it cannot write there (a Program Files install without permission, for example) it loads the file straight from the mod folder instead, so either way it works.

Why OpenVR and not OpenXR

Short version: Mage Arena is not built with VR support, and OpenVR is the only runtime that can be added to a game like that from the outside without fighting the engine.

OpenXR is the newer standard and would normally be the right choice. But in Unity it is not just a library you call — it is an XR plugin, and Unity wires those in at engine startup, before any mod code runs. Adding one to a shipped non-VR game means:

• writing a UnitySubsystemsManifest.json into the game's data folder,
• deploying UnityOpenXR.dll and openxr_loader.dll beside the engine's own natives,
• and persuading Unity to register and initialise a display subsystem the build was never compiled to expect.

This mod did work that way early on, and it was fragile in exactly the way you would expect from injecting files into someone else's engine startup. When the display subsystem did initialise, it took over the render loop on its own terms; when it did not, the failure came from inside the engine with nothing useful to report.

OpenVR needs none of that. openvr_api.dll is an ordinary native library. The mod calls it from a normal plugin, renders each eye itself into a render texture, and hands the result to the SteamVR compositor with Submit(). No manifest, no loader DLLs, no engine XR registration — nothing touches Unity's startup path at all. Everything the mod does to the game is done from managed code, at runtime, where it can be inspected and undone.

That control is what makes the rest of this mod possible: rendering each eye by hand is what lets it fix per-eye lighting, give each eye its own camera, and hand every override back to the game when you leave a match.

The trade is the one stated above — SteamVR has to be running. Given SteamVR drives essentially every PC headset, including Quest through Link, Steam Link or Virtual Desktop, that costs almost nothing in practice.

If you are curious what this looks like in the log, the mod reports the runtime it loaded on startup:

[MageArenaVR.Preload] OpenVR runtime loaded from '...\MageArena_Data\Plugins\x86_64\openvr_api.dll'.

Old OpenXR files from pre-1.0 installs are deleted automatically, so a leftover UnityOpenXR.dll cannot register a display the mod does not use.

Choosing VR or Flatscreen

When the game starts, a Windows dialog asks how you want to play:

• Yes — Virtual Reality. Full VR. Requires a headset with SteamVR running.
• No — Flatscreen. Normal keyboard and mouse.

The dialog appe