The details

Directive 47 in your headset, drawn over Elite in your own cockpit.

It sits alongside the game rather than replacing it. It never hooks Elite, never touches its process, and never takes over the frame — it is an overlay, the same way SteamVR’s own dashboard is.

Ask for it

“is the headset working” “headset overlay off” “mini panel” “full panel”

The order does not matter

SteamVR first, Directive 47 first, SteamVR restarted halfway through the evening — none of that is something you should have to think about. Directive 47 looks for a headset every few seconds and builds everything the moment one appears.

It attaches to SteamVR rather than starting it. If SteamVR is not running, or your headset is switched off, Directive 47 waits and tells you which of the two it is waiting for:

SteamVR is not running. D47 will attach when you start it.

No headset is switched on. D47 will attach when one appears.

Nothing here starts SteamVR on your behalf. Launching it uninvited on a machine whose headset is off takes over your desktop for no reason.

What you get

Two things float in front of you.

The panel — the same panel as on the desktop, not a picture of it. It is the same app drawn a second time, so the windowed version can never do something the headset version cannot.

A Settings row that opens a window is refused, and the panel says so. Some Settings rows open a second window over the desktop panel: what Directive 47 remembers, the directions it has drafted, your notes, the logbook, the audio recorder, the coverage list, your own ship cores, macros, switches, and the arrow that clears a stored key. A window cannot appear in a headset at all, so a ray press on one of those says “Not currently supported in VR” over the panel and opens nothing. Everything else on the page is pressed as usual.

Captions — everything Directive 47 says, written underneath. They place themselves and clear themselves, and there is nothing to drag them somewhere you would not see them. You choose which of two places they sit — in your view, or low in the cockpit — and Directive 47 works out the rest.

Moving it about

Say where you want it. The panel moves a step at a time, in whichever direction you name:

“move the panel left” / “move the panel right” / “move the panel up” / “move the panel down” “move the panel closer” / “move the panel further away” “turn the panel left” / “turn the panel right” “tilt the panel up” / “tilt the panel down”

One step is 5 cm, or 5 degrees for a turn or a tilt. Say it again for another step. Turning swings the panel’s face towards that side; tilting up leans it back towards your eyes, which is what a panel sitting below them wants.

It acts on whichever panel is on screen — big or mini — and each keeps its own place. If the panel was still riding your head when you asked, Directive 47 puts it down in front of you first and then moves it, exactly as picking it up with a controller used to.

No model is needed for any of this. The phrases above are matched by name, so they work with no provider configured.

Motion controllers are off out of the box — see below for why, and for what turning them back on gets you.

With them on, point a controller at the panel, pull the trigger, and it comes with you — position and angle together, so it feels attached rather than dragged. Let go and it stays.

While a ray is on the panel, Directive 47 asks SteamVR for the trigger and grip of that controller at overlay priority, and gives them back the moment the ray leaves. On a default SteamVR install that changes nothing you would notice: taking inputs away from other applications needs SteamVR’s Enable global input from overlays developer setting, which is off unless you turned it on, and without it the game, Virtual Desktop and the dashboard keep the trigger while Directive 47 reads it too. With it on, the hand-back is what returns the trigger — 0.48.6 meant to do that on every path and did not, because SteamVR refused the call it made and said so only in d47’s log; 0.52.2 does, and its log says when the controllers are claimed and given back, and “headset overlay off” then “headset overlay on” still frees a controller on an older build. A controller that stops answering everything some way into a session is a different fault, open as #1.

Nothing turns it to face you while you hold it. A panel forced upright and square cannot be tilted to read from below or angled to sit beside you, which is most of what moving one is for.

Picking it up makes it world-locked, because picking something up and putting it down is what world-locked means. Directive 47 does not then argue with you about the setting.

If Elite’s own recenter moves your cockpit out from under a panel you had placed, put it back by switching that panel’s lock to head, which brings it to your face, and then nudging it — the first nudge sets a head-locked panel down in front of you, at knee height, before it moves. Two steps where re-anchoring was one; that command was retired in 0.94.0.

Settings

Show Directive 47 in the headset

On by default, which costs nothing if you have no headset — it looks, finds nothing, and says so. Turn it off if you use SteamVR for other things and would rather Directive 47 stayed out of it.

“headset overlay on” / “headset overlay off”

Panel content

Full or mini. Mini is the same panel showing less — the gear, the banners and the ask box go, the transcript stays. It is also drawn smaller, so it can sit at the edge of vision.

Mini out of the box. The full panel is 1.1 m across — close to fifty degrees of view — which is a lot to meet before you know it can be moved or shrunk. Switch to full whenever you want it.

Ask for either by name, in whichever words come out:

“big panel” / “large panel” / “full panel” “small panel” / “little panel” / “minimal panel” / “mini panel”

The two keep their own placements, so parking mini out to one side while the full panel stays in front of you works the way you would expect.

Mini carries no controls, only what they were showing you. It is 512 pixels wide, chosen so the text is readable rather than so there is room — every button on it would be space taken from the thing you opened it for. So a page’s own bar goes: the checklist’s filter, its ordering, its import, its Goals tick. What stays is the list itself, including the tick beside each line, so you can still mark work done from the headset. The big panel keeps the whole bar, and that is the one headset surface where a controller can genuinely press it.

Motion controllers

Off out of the box, and that is a withdrawal rather than a preference. A controller put down while Directive 47 was connected to SteamVR, that then went to standby, never woke up on its own — every time. Put down while Directive 47 was not connected, it always did. That is #1, and it is not understood.

Directive 47 read your controllers’ positions about ninety times a second for the whole session, whether or not you were pointing at anything — around 350,000 times in one hour-long session in which no ray ever touched the panel. A read like that running across the moment SteamVR puts a controller to sleep is the one interaction the evidence points at, and turning it off is the only way to test it.

What you lose while it is off. Nothing on the panel can be pressed in the headset: no buttons, no toggles, no checklist ticks, no combo boxes, no on-panel keyboard, no scrollbar dragging, no grip-to-go-back, and no Settings tab. You cannot grab the panel and carry it.

What still works. Everything by voice: moving between tabs, going back, scrolling, answering a question the panel is already asking, and placing the panel — see Moving it about above, which is the replacement for the carry.

It is not forever. Turn it back on and everything above returns, exactly as it was. A session with it on and a session with it off are the experiment; if the fault comes back with it on, that is the answer, and if it happens anyway with it off, the controller was never the cause.

The row wears a warning badge, and the advice on it is deliberate: when you finish trying it on, turn it back off and restart Directive 47. Turning it off mid-session stops the pose reads, but the session has already touched the controllers by then — the restart is what puts you back in a session that never did, which is the state the evidence above calls safe.

“motion controllers on” / “motion controllers off”

Placing a surface

Five settings each, and the mini panel has its own copies of all five. The big panel has a sixth.

Ask for a change and it lands on the panel you are looking at. The two surfaces keep their own numbers — that is the point of mini, which exists to sit smaller and further out of the way — so “move it closer” means the one currently on screen, and the other one does not move. Both are on this page in full, so setting mini up while the big panel is in front of you is a thing you can do here whenever you like.

“Size” and “Scale” are different questions and it is worth knowing which you want. Size is how big the panel itself is, in metres across — the edges move. Scale is how big the writing and the controls on it are drawn, without the edges moving. Wanting bigger text on a panel that is already the right size is Scale.

Opacity is one knob for both

How solid the panel is, from 0.1 to 1 — and one setting, not one per panel. Everything in the table above is genuinely per-surface: mini exists to be smaller and further out of the way, so its distance, size and drop have to be able to differ. How see-through the glass is does not. It is one preference about how much cockpit shows through Directive 47, and asking for it at half never means half, in one of the two modes.

It used to be two, and that is exactly how it went wrong: “set the opacity to 0.5” landed on the big panel’s copy while the mini panel was the one in front of the Commander, so the number they could see never moved and nothing was broken. A value already set on either panel is carried up to the shared one the first time this version runs, so nobody has to set it again.

Three levers, and they do different things

Size, Scale and Resolution all sound like “how big”, and keeping them apart is worth a minute.

• Resolution decides how much the image can hold. More pixels, more room for rows.
• Size decides how big it looks in the room. Metres across, at whatever distance you put it.
• Scale decides how much layout those pixels carry. It re-measures and rewraps rather than simply magnifying, so it is a density control: at 75% the default panel presents 1365x853 worth of layout and a whole ship’s slots fit; at 200% it presents 512x320 and you can read it from across the cockpit.

Every resolution is the same shape, so changing it never changes the proportions of the thing in front of you — only how much detail is in it. More pixels cost more to render, every frame, and past the point where the panel covers what your headset can actually resolve they buy you nothing. Pick by looking at it, not by picking the biggest number.

Head-locked is what you want for something you glance at; world-locked for something that lives in a particular corner of the cockpit.

World-locked out of the box, and put down for you the first time Directive 47 runs in your headset: about a metre ahead of wherever you are facing, low enough that the top of the panel sits around knee height, and tilted back so it faces you rather than the ceiling. A panel that follows your gaze is in the way of whatever you turned to look at, which is the one thing a companion beside a flight sim should never be.

That first position is worked out from where your head actually is — the floor comes from your room setup, and the height of the panel from its width and proportions — so it is not a number picked for somebody else’s height or somebody else’s panel size. Move it once and it is yours; Directive 47 never places it again.

Scale and mini are different things, and the difference is the point: scale changes how big everything on the panel is, mini changes how much of it there is. Zooming a panel you cannot read makes it readable; switching to mini gives you less to read.

The mini rows work the same way: locking, distance, size, curvature and scale — but not opacity, which both panels share. The mini panel defaults to 0.34 m across — it is meant to sit at the edge of vision — against 1.1 m for the full one.

Captions

They follow the broadcast closed-caption standard rather than anyone’s preference:

42 characters   the most on one line
 2 lines        the most for one thing said
 2 lines        the most on screen at once
20 per second   reading speed, which decides how long one stays up
5/6 s .. 7 s    the shortest and longest a caption lingers

A caption stays up timed from when the speech ends, not when it starts. Nobody reads along with a voice they can hear; they catch the last line after it has gone.

A long sentence arrives as several captions, not as its last two lines. Anything that wraps past two lines is shown two at a time, each staying up for as long as your reading speed says it takes to read, until the sentence has been shown in full — which is what a caption track does with a long line. If Directive 47 starts saying something new while an earlier sentence is still being shown, the new one takes over: a caption still working through something the voice finished with is no longer captioning.

Sounds that mean something are captioned too. The warning tone that plays a moment before an urgent callout is written in brackets — [interdiction alert], [attack alarm], [heat alarm] — so a Commander reading captions gets the same head start a Commander hearing them does. The loop tones are not captioned, because the panel already shows the loop state; ambience, music and the thinking bed are not, because they are continuous and say nothing.

And a caption says who is talking when it is not Directive 47. Your carrier’s tower and its captain are different people in different voices, and a crew member you address by name answers in theirs — so those lines open with [Tower], [Carrier] or the crew member’s own name. Directive 47’s own lines carry no name: it is the voice the caption band belongs to, and putting a label on every line would be noise. In-game messages from other Commanders are not captioned at all — they are already written out in full, with their sender, in the Transcript’s Journal File reading.

Captions follow what is actually audible rather than what was generated, so if you say “stop” the captions stop with the voice. A caption still sitting there after a silence command is Directive 47 visibly not having stopped.

They stay level with the horizon, not with your head. Head-locked captions follow where you are looking — turn or look down and they come with you — but they ignore how far your head is tilted, so the text runs along the same line the cockpit does instead of along your eyeline. Tilt your head twenty degrees and the captions stay put and level while your view rolls around them. There is no tilt dial and deliberately so: a caption is either level or it is wrong, and an angle you have to trim by hand is a way of shipping it wrong.

If your captions look level but the cockpit does not, that is Elite’s own recenter having been taken with your head tilted — recenter again with your head straight, and both agree.

Caption position

head or world. Two positions, both worked out for you, and nothing else about where captions go is settable — there is no distance, no curvature and nothing to reach out and drag.

head is the default. The band hangs a little below the middle of your view, 1.6 m out, and goes where you go. It is always readable, which is the one thing a caption has to be.

world puts it in the cockpit instead, in a fixed strip between the console and your feet: 0.8 m ahead of where you sit and 0.67 m below your eyeline, so it covers the band from about 37° to 43° down. It stays there while you look around, the way the cockpit does.

Why you might want that: a head-locked caption is the only thing in the headset that does not move when you turn your head. Your eyes report a band holding perfectly still while your inner ear reports a turn, and that disagreement is what motion sickness is made of — so a band that sits in the room instead of on your face is the more comfortable of the two for anyone it bothers. World- locked is also that little bit steadier when you move your head fast: head-locked captions are put level again every time the overlay is served, and the headset carries them rigidly in between, so a quick roll tilts them until the next frame. A strip sitting in the cockpit is not being carried, so there is nothing to catch up.

What it costs, plainly: you have to glance down for it. Head-locked is always in front of you and world-locked is somewhere you look. That trade is yours, which is why this is a row and not a ruling.

The strip is measured from your seated position, not dropped where you happened to be looking, so it cannot drift and there is nothing to put back. If it ever sits wrong, it is your seated position that has moved: use SteamVR’s own Reset Seated Position with your head straight and the band comes with it.

Text is the same size either way. The strip is nearer than the head-locked band, so it is correspondingly narrower — both cover the same 30° of view, and caption size means the same thing in both.

Caption size

small, medium or large. Three sizes rather than a number, because a caption is either legible at a glance or it is not, and there is nothing useful between two adjacent values.

Caption background

How solid the box behind the text is.

A caption sits over a starfield, a station’s floodlights and your own instruments. Text with nothing behind it is unreadable against half of those — which is why broadcast captions have always sat on a box, and why the box is not fully solid, since one you cannot see through is a hole cut in your cockpit. The text stays fully opaque whatever you set; only the box fades.

Reading speed

Characters a second. 20 is the standard’s adult rate, 17 its children’s rate, and 12 is there because reading speed is the one thing about a caption that is a property of the reader rather than of the caption.

Headset

Not a setting but a state, shown next to the switch — because switched off and SteamVR is not running look identical from the outside unless something says which.

{"type":"object","properties":{},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}

{"type":"object","properties":{"on":{"type":"boolean","description":"True to show D47 in the headset, false to leave SteamVR alone."}},"required":["on"],"additionalProperties":false}

{"type":"object","properties":{"direction":{"type":"string","description":"Which way. turn-left and turn-right swing the face of the panel towards that side; tilt-up leans it back to face the Commander.","enum":["left","right","up","down","nearer","further","turn-left","turn-right","tilt-up","tilt-down"]},"steps":{"type":"integer","description":"How many steps, 1 to 20. One step is 5 cm or 5 degrees. Defaults to one."}},"required":["direction"],"additionalProperties":false}

full       1024 x 640 px   at 1.10 m wide
mini         512 x 280 px   at 0.34 m wide
captions    1600 x 340 px   at 0.90 m head-locked, 0.57 m world-locked