Slime Watch 3: rebuilt from scratch, a brand-new watch and much smoother

It's been a while, and for a good reason: Slime Watch has been rebuilt from the ground up. New code from A to Z, a new watch, a new laser, new scrolling, and panels that are finally truly smooth. Here's everything that changes.

At a glance

A fully rewritten Slime Watch

The whole program was rewritten from scratch, with an architecture designed for today's VR:

• One SLIMEWATCH_VR.exe. It starts itself a second time for the interface. If the interface crashes or freezes, your overlays and your watch stay on screen, and it restarts on its own.
• No network port opened anymore. The old little local server is gone: panels talk to the program directly, and no web page can send commands to Slime Watch.
• One capture method for monitors and windows: Windows Graphics Capture. If a window is protected (DRM video), a clear message explains it instead of a black screen.
• JSON settings in your user folder, and size-limited logs.
• Nothing hangs: every wait has a time limit, and Slime Watch closes cleanly with SteamVR.

A brand-new watch

The watch was redesigned to be readable and practical in VR:

• A big clock and the date, with two large buttons always there: Add (a monitor or a window) and Keyboard.
• An action bar above it: Overlays, Tools, Clock, Move and Settings. Show or hide it with an arrow, like the Windows taskbar.
• Collapsible rows: current overlay, music, performance (CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM) and batteries (headset, controllers, trackers). Each row shows or hides with its small icon under the clock, and the watch remembers your choice. Hide everything to keep only the time.
• 8 themes (Slime, Ocean, Grape, Sunset, Sakura, Mono, Ember, Daylight), applied to every panel.
• Time and batteries keep updating even when the SteamVR dashboard is closed.

Placing the watch and windows: just pull twice

• Press Move: the watch follows your other hand. Pull the trigger twice and it stays in place, saved. No more aiming at a button while holding the watch.
• Same for your overlays: no need to hold the button while moving them, a double trigger pull drops them.

A brand-new laser

• A crosshair: a small glowing dot lands exactly where you aim, with a dark outline so it stays visible on light and dark backgrounds.
• Accurate aiming: hover and click land right where the beam points, on the watch, the panels and your windows.
• A beam visible from every angle, slightly thicker.
• Your games keep every button: Slime Watch blocks nothing, even while you point at the watch.
• Rebindable buttons in the standard SteamVR interface (Settings › Controllers › Slime Watch), with default bindings for common controllers.

Scrolling that finally works

Slime Watch reads your joystick directly (or the trackpad on Vive): push up or down while pointing at a page or a window to scroll.

Much, much smoother

Before, every frame of a panel was saved as a PNG and read back, which took time on every click. Now panels are captured straight on the graphics card, and a new frame arrives as soon as the page changes. Buttons react instantly. If your PC doesn't support this method, Slime Watch falls back to the old one on its own.

In the SteamVR menu

The Slime Watch tab of the SteamVR dashboard shows a clean bar to manage all your overlays: a menu per overlay that stays open, adding a monitor or a window right from the bar, and "Add your first overlay" when the list is empty.

A new tutorial

• The welcome screen and tutorial were redone in the style of the new watch, in all 7 languages.
• One step shows how to hide parts of the watch to keep only the essentials, then how to show them again.
• If you already played Slime Watch, the welcome screen and tutorial show up once so you can discover the new watch. You can skip it at any time.

Everything else, better

• Overlay properties: width from 5 cm to 8 m, curve, opacity, brightness, 7 anchors (room, follow me, seated, dashboard, headset, left hand, right hand), fine offsets, monitor shown, laser and floating bar. They never change an overlay just by opening anymore.
• Floating bar under the overlay you point at: Move, Closer, Farther, Adjust, Hide.
• VR keyboard: QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ, accents and symbols sent whatever your Windows language.
• Media, Stats and Hub: clean, readable and movable. The old performance overlay is replaced by the Stats panel.
• Space Drag rewritten: arrows on the watch, rotation, recenter, and speed, deadzone, smoothing and fling settings.
• Settings in 5 categories (Interface, Watch, Playspace, Pointer, About), with only settings that actually work.
• Profiles, Discord status, tray icon: still there.

What you keep

• Your settings and overlays are imported automatically on first launch, with a backup copy.
• Your Steam achievements are kept.
• Slime Watch still starts automatically with SteamVR if you had enabled it.
• If the old third-party "websocket_trackers" driver is installed, Slime Watch offers to remove it, never without your consent.

Thanks for your patience. Try the new watch and tell us what you think in the reviews or on the forums! 💚

- Nyxeira, Sole Developer & Creator of Slime Watch