Why the VR plugins enabled by default for non-vr projects?

I have turned off the OVRService and turned the Oculus App off as well, yet a non-VR project is always attempt to load up the Oculus App when i press the Play button (PIE).

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Here i press the Close button, yet the window will appear 2-3 more times before finally giving up it’s startup sequence. The OVRService will remain turned off.

Later when i open a non vr project in editor, the Steam VR is trying to load up, however it is unable to even detect the existence of a HMD in my system.

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I believe this is a bug in the engine plugins forcing the use of HMD whether it is available in a system or not. This makes no sense.

The Plugins should be aware of the capabilities of the system and only run the necessary VR apps when there is a demand by the project and the equipment.

I also have noticed this numerous times that cooked projects are also suffer from unnecessary plugins packed in, like the oculus vr suite which was not required for non vr related projects. I haven’t had a VR installed on my system back then.

These plugins should only be enabled for projects actually using VR, which by default is the VR template project only. Anybody who wish to extend their projects with VR capabilities can enable these plugins on demand.

This would not only keep the packaged executables on smaller file sizes, but non VR projects will never try to run unnecessary background services, thus allowing better overall system management.

Please consider to disable these plugins by default, since they cause confusion both on the developer and user ends.

Note that VR template =/= VR project, there is so diversions like that in projects, you can use VR in any of them and you don’t need VR template in VR project to make it work, it is free choose for you to use it as a start up. Same as choosing to use first person template does not mean it gonna not use third person… or VR, maybe deweloper would want to use first person template and then add VR support to it.

I’m not sure why they make it enabled by default, but i assume to make VR work out of the box and it’s definitely not a bug as UE4 can’t sens if you going to use VR in your project or not. Generally as developer you should check what plugins are enabled and disable once that are not needed for project.

But you got valid argument with services (i noticed how they are annoying when i got VR), maybe good fix would have a option to enable VR plugins (maybe some other things) on project creation process.

Yes, my point exactly. VR template (TP_VirtualRealityBP.uproject) can have this by default to enable these necessary VR related plugins. But, other templates are not qualify as VR templates regardless of whether they support VR as an optional feature or not.

These plugins should be disabled by default and only the developer can opt in to use them when required.

Thanks for agreeing with me on this matter, hopefully Epic will pick up on this issue and take into consideration.

PS: Yes i also agree on the fact that there are many other plugins enabled by default that have nothing to do with a general project, and they usually spam the logs with errors and warnings which is quite an annoyance. Stuff like IOS, Android, Google etc related packages and services should not be considered as default content, but optional features only.