Repeated problems with all physics-enabled hair and clothing disappearing (is SteamVR starting desktop vam?)

[justahat]

Hi, I run VAM on an Ampere A4000 equipped cloud box over Virtual Desktop. I have a recurring problem where upon starting up VAM any hair and physics enabled clothing will simply not render in any of my scenes. If I toggle soft-body physics on or off, the scene's hair/clothes will briefly appear without physics applied and then disappear. Same if I select a new hair or clothing item in a person's control UI.

The first time I had this problem I could not resolve it even with a reinstall, and ultimately I reinstalled my GPU drivers and the problem went away. The next couple times the issue cropped up, just restarting VAM fixed the issue.

I just had this issue come up again today, and now restarting VAM or my cloud VM hasn't made a difference.

I have a hunch this is related to SteamVR. If I start VAM from the Desktop bat shortcut and use it in desktop mode, my scenes all load fine. I also observed that after having this problem come up again, SteamVR is launching itself whenever I load from the bat shortcut, and it's adding a new duplicate 'vam' entry to my steamvr library. Is SteamVR for some reason launching the desktop version of VAM when I attempt to load it in VR? Any suggestions on how to fix this are much appreciated. I would really rather not need to reinstall my GPU drivers randomly every month or so.

 

[justahat]

So, after rebooting again and then connecting to my VM’s desktop and launching desktop VAM, loading a scene, exiting, and then connecting my headset and launching the OpenVR batch shortcut from within SteamVR, the issue is fixed again. VAM is also running as the correct shortcut in SteamVR instead of a duplicate.

Still wondering if anyone could decipher why this happens but at least if anyone else has this issue and finds the thread, try that