Shaders are programs that run while drawing the game’s graphics to the screen (or screens, in VR). Mad God’s Overhaul uses Community Shaders (specifically, Community Shaders (Unofficial Fork)), a plugin with advanced graphical features that vanilla Skyrim does not support. This is what makes MGO’s dramatic visuals possible.
Community Shaders (CS) keeps its own cache of pre-compiled shaders on disk to speed up the game’s startup time… except for the very first time you run it.
Remember...
When you launch MGO for the first time after installation (or after certain actions, like clearing your Overwrite folder or otherwise invalidating the cache), Community Shaders will begin compiling. If you can see the Skyrim VR window on your desktop, you should see a progress bar. The bar should also remain visible once you properly enter VR.
Compiling shaders can take anywhere from 5 minutes1 on a high-end PC to almost 30 minutes. If the progress bar isn’t moving, and it’s been 30 minutes, something may be wrong.
Keep Moving
You may need to keep your headset awake and active while CS is compiling shaders. Personally, I switch to desktop view in my headset and keep myself busy with other tasks* using my physical mouse and keyboard. That seems to be good enough.
On Virtual Desktop, hold the Menu button on your controller to switch to the desktop view, and press Menu again to bring up the VD sidebar, where you can switch back to VR.
*That sounds like a perfect time to browse this documentation!
While you wait (or any time later), you can open the in-game settings overlay to tune what Community Shaders does. See the Community Shaders page in the Performance chapter for how, along with recommended settings.
When it finishes—and it will finish—it’s time to play!
Even on a high-end PC, CS may estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 minutes for compiling shaders, but that’s likely to be a very high estimate. ↩︎