Troubleshooting Playground Loading Issues in VEXcode VR

In VEXcode VR, sometimes a Playground window may get stuck on the loading screen and fail to load. 

Loading a Playground may get stuck because:

• The files for the Playground being loaded are still downloading on a slow internet connection (each Playground on average is 7MB - 15MB in size)
• The devices loading the Playground may be an older or slower device 
• There may be a setting to change on your graphics card

This article will discuss how to use tools built into VEXcode VR to resolve Playground loading issues.

If VEXcode VR seems incredibly slow or fails to run code properly when using Google Chrome, your computer may not be using its Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to help display the Playground environment.

Ensure that the "Hardware Acceleration" feature is turned on in Google Chrome:

• Type chrome://settings/system into the address bar in Google Chrome
• Under the System category, set "Use hardware acceleration when available" to the On setting, which should be the default value
• For more information, see this article

If you receive this message popup when loading VEXcode VR, you may have an older graphics card on your device and need to change some settings. 

First, ensure that your Chrome browser is up to date. You can do this by opening the settings in Chrome and selecting "About Chrome."

Your browser will check to make sure that Chrome is up to date.

If it is not, update Chrome and then load VEXcode VR again.

If your browser is up to date, move to the next step.

If using a Windows machine, you may need to update your graphics drivers. You can do this by following the steps below. 

In the search box on the taskbar, enter device manager, then select Device Manager.

• Select a category to see names of devices, then right-click (or press and hold) the one you’d like to update
• Select Update Driver

Then restart your computer and load VEXcode VR again.

If that does not solve the issue, try the following steps to update a graphics setting.

Go to chrome://flags/ by typing this into the address bar of your Chrome web-browser.

Search for the "Choose ANGLE graphics backend" experiment by searching "angle" as shown here.

Open the dropdown to the right, and select "D3D11" or "D3D11on12."

Then close all Chrome tabs and windows, reopen Chrome, and load VEXcode VR again.

If either of those options are not available, select "OpenGL."

Then close all Chrome tabs and windows, reopen Chrome, and load VEXcode VR again.