A folf's plans for 2026

I thought instead of doing resolutions or wishes, I should make a TODO list for myself, so here’s what I want to (finally) get done in 2026!

Getting hand estimation into Monado

A draft PR I made for adding action set priorities to xrizer is now almost a year old, and that’s really sad! This change would fix a lot of games that currently have input issues when running on a FOSS XR stack, so why can it not be merged yet?

The problem comes down to the way OpenVR/SteamVR works. SteamVR always gives the VR application a hand skeleton that is based on controller inputs, even when the hardware does not offer real hand tracking. This is different from how things work in OpenXR, where hand tracking is entirely separate from controllers for the most part, and in Monado the only controllers that also come with hand tracking data are ones that use the steamvr_lh driver. This means that xrizer has to create its own estimated hand skeleton that is based on what buttons are pressed on the controller, and action set priorities throw a wrench into that, because the application could (and would) override the inputs used by xrizer for this estimation. I’ve explored some workarounds, like launching another OpenXR session, but because that requires a separate process it would make building and deploying this a nightmare.

Aside from other difficult or annoying workarounds, this leaves adding hand estimation directly into Monado for every supported controller! It will require creating an API for interpolating hand poses, with at least the same possibilities as SteamVR offers (but I’m planning to make it more robust). This will unblock action set priorities in xrizer, and I think it’s also important for the future of OpenXR, as it deduplicates effort that would otherwise be wasted by game developers. It’s also a better experience for users, because the OpenXR runtime has a better ability to match the actual hardware present or future than game developers collectively do.

libmpv ao driver and video players in Renderite.Godot

Last year I put quite a lot of effort into Renderite.Godot, which is a fun project to create a custom godot-based renderer for Resonite. It comes after “the splittening”, which was an update that split FrooxEngine and the Unity renderer it uses into separate processes that now communicate over IPC, allowing the main engine to run on modern .NET. This was a performance update, but having an exposed IPC layer like that also brings great opportunities to modders like me.

It came further along than I ever expected (largely thanks to other folks working on it with me, I’m not a graphics programmer myself and would struggle to get here on my own), and this means I get to implement one of the more cursed features - video players! I actually thought this wouldn’t be too bad, I saw there were a couple of extensions for Godot that added video players, one even using libvlc, which is the same backend that Resonite’s unity renderer uses.

But, I tried every single one of them, and they all suffered either from lack of maintenance, lack of features, lack of platform support, or did not work on the latest Godot version. There was also the issue of audio, since that has to be sent back to FrooxEngine over IPC so it can be processed and spatialized.

After taking a look at the API and some promising comments about it, I decided libmpv was gonna be the backend I’d use for a custom video player implementation in Godot. This comes with some challenges, first I have to actually interface with libmpv in some way, which also requires me to set up OpenGL and somehow use the texture in Godot. Since there was another group building their own custom renderer in zig, and they managed to create a zig version of interprocess (the library used by Resonite for IPC between the engine and renderer), I decided to also write the video player backend in zig, which would allow it to run as an entirely separate process from the renderer, and also directly communicate with frooxengine for audio. Another cool benefit of this is that the video player backend can crash, even segfault, and the renderer doesn’t care, it can then be restarted as if nothing happened!

As of now I can already play most videos within Renderite.Godot as seen in the screenshot above, and I managed to get the audio to work, which required writing a libmpv audio driver in mpv itself, since it did not have one yet. This year I want to finish my work on that ao driver and get it upstreamed, and also work on sharing textures between the video player process and Godot to avoid doing a copy on the CPU (which is terrible for anything over 1080p60). In the future I also want to spin this off into a standalone video player plugin for Godot to fix the issue that led me down this path in the first place for everyone!

Steam Frame Monado edition?

Once that thing comes out, and I get my paws on it, I probably won’t be able to stop myself from attempting to port Monado to it. Who knows how it’s gonna go, I’ve never written drivers for Monado, but there has to be a first!

This device is so cool… ARM64 Linux PC, on your head, not locked to a facebook account?! In 2026??? With user-replaceable batteries everywhere??????

More Renderite.Godot work

After I’m done with video players and all the other distractions of the year, I really want to start learning a bit more and doing more work on materials and blendshapes, which are currently the biggest missing piece for it being an actually usable project. There’s also render textures and cameras, which I have a basic implementation of working already, but it’s missing features that are difficult or in some cases impossible to support on Godot, so this might lead me down on another rabbit hole, this time messing with Godot’s internals.

There’s also OpenXR support, which is a thing already, but only a few basic things are hooked up for now. This should be a fairly straight forward project with some tedious bits to do.

Various Linux XR contributions

I want to ramp up my work on misc projects in this space, I’ve done some bugfixes here and there, as well as work on OC and then xrizer, but I also want to focus on quality of life and polishing up the rough edges for new users for the rest of the stack. I see a lot of people still being stuck on Windows due to VR, and with Windows becoming so much worse over the last years they all deserve a way to escape.

Cursed side project: PCIe and USB 3.0 on the phone server

The phone server, which runs among other things this website and a few game servers has a storage and network problem!

The Poco F1 despite having the necessary pins on the SoC only supports USB 2.0 on the type C port, it’s really shameful. That’s sadly what the network has to go through, which means I cannot even reach 1Gbps on it. What’s worse is that I’m also very limited with storage, I only have 64 GB of internal UFS, and a 128 GB microSD, which is too slow to run anything serious, I mostly have my matrix media cache and rustypaste on it.

I have thankfully found some confidential PDFs containing the pinout of the SoC, and if I’m somehow able to get to those damn pins I could get access to up to two PCIe lanes, as well as USB 3.0, which would be really cool and funny, but it is one hell of a BGA soldering job, and I rate my chances of success as less than 10% even with the help of my coworker who is much better than me, which means I won’t risk it on the actual phone.

My plan is to look for a sacrificial board that is cheap enough, and attempt it on that, and if all goes well just swap in the modified board. Does this make economic or practical sense in the slightest? No, but it’s so funny!

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