Uploaded February 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
TLDR: Star Wars: X-wing Alliance fully playable with just a VR headset and pair of motion controllers, courtesy of the local warlocks (Blue Max and M0rgg) over at the XWA Upgrade Project.
The Deets: The Active Cockpit portion of the mod enables the player to point and click on elements within the cockpit to issue commands. A beta update released January 16th, 2024, added the ability to use motion controllers to do the pointing and clicking. Additionally, when the grip button is held down, it will emulate joystick control through your hand motion. This works even if the cockpit doesn't have Active Cockpit or diegetic elements such as the Azzameen's YT-1300 Sapra or YT-2000 Otana.
I'm showcasing the X-wing here as its cockpit has most everything you need available on its panels. For everything else, you are able to spawn a holographic keyboard and place it somewhere in the environment (a proper godsend for the family transports).
What you will need:
A copy of Star Wars X-Wing: Alliance (This is the GoG version here)
The XWAU 2024 Main Patch: xwaupgrade.com/index.php?action=downloads
After installing the patch, you can use the Babu Frik's configurator program accessible through the launcher to enable VR and set a whole bunch of other stuff.
Enable VR head tracking, Steam VR, Active Cockpit
If you want to use motion controls:
Enable VR Joystick / Throttle Emulation
(Optional) You may want to download Blue Max's Effects Beta version 2 for the latest fixes and/or breaks. Drag and drop the contents into the base XWA folder.
(Optional) Modify these lines in the Active_Cockpit.cfg file to set the VR joystick behavior:
joystick_emul_mode =
joystick_range_x =
joystick_range_z =
joystick_dead_zone =
throttle_range =
Not mentioned in the Readme but I found out myself:
In SSAO.cfg
Verify shadow_mapping_enable = 1 (The gloves will not render otherwise. Spaghetti coding at its finest).
A CPU with good single threaded performance - A 25-year-old game engine propped up by black magic ain't doing wonders on the hardware utilization front. There have been recent improvements with pushing the work to the GPU but if you noticed, I've basically kneecapped all the eye-candy effects to save on frames. This is with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 3090.
It does run better in the actual headset than what you see here as I think the Steam VR mirror is frame-capped and my recording method is jank on top of jank. A necessary concession for recording as the actual XWA game window is horrifically smooshed when in VR.
TLDR: Star Wars: X-wing Alliance fully playable with just a VR headset and pair of motion controllers, courtesy of the local warlocks (Blue Max and M0rgg) over at the XWA Upgrade Project.
The Deets: The Active Cockpit portion of the mod enables the player to point and click on elements within the cockpit to issue commands. A beta update released January 16th, 2024, added the ability to use motion controllers to do the pointing and clicking. Additionally, when the grip button is held down, it will emulate joystick control through your hand motion. This works even if the cockpit doesn't have Active Cockpit or diegetic elements such as the Azzameen's YT-1300 Sapra or YT-2000 Otana.
I'm showcasing the X-wing here as its cockpit has most everything you need available on its panels. For everything else, you are able to spawn a holographic keyboard and place it somewhere in the environment (a proper godsend for the family transports).
What you will need:
A copy of Star Wars X-Wing: Alliance (This is the GoG version here)
The XWAU 2024 Main Patch: xwaupgrade.com/index.php?action=downloads
After installing the patch, you can use the Babu Frik's configurator program accessible through the launcher to enable VR and set a whole bunch of other stuff.
Enable VR head tracking, Steam VR, Active Cockpit
If you want to use motion controls:
Enable VR Joystick / Throttle Emulation
(Optional) You may want to download Blue Max's Effects Beta version 2 for the latest fixes and/or breaks. Drag and drop the contents into the base XWA folder.
(Optional) Modify these lines in the Active_Cockpit.cfg file to set the VR joystick behavior:
joystick_emul_mode =
joystick_range_x =
joystick_range_z =
joystick_dead_zone =
throttle_range =
Not mentioned in the Readme but I found out myself:
In SSAO.cfg
Verify shadow_mapping_enable = 1 (The gloves will not render otherwise. Spaghetti coding at its finest).
A CPU with good single threaded performance - A 25-year-old game engine propped up by black magic ain't doing wonders on the hardware utilization front. There have been recent improvements with pushing the work to the GPU but if you noticed, I've basically kneecapped all the eye-candy effects to save on frames. This is with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 3090.
It does run better in the actual headset than what you see here as I think the Steam VR mirror is frame-capped and my recording method is jank on top of jank. A necessary concession for recording as the actual XWA game window is horrifically smooshed when in VR.
