Aapje

And the active armor sold and replaced by bricks. Even if they would put new T-90's in storage, I wonder how many parts would be stripped and sold, and how much maintenance left undone. They claim to develop cutting edge tech, but a lot of it seems to be very exaggerated or straight up lies. And like you say, they make it in such small numbers that most of their nicer stuff was off the battle field very quickly. And with such little actual usage, there is a lack of feedback, which is crucial to learn what actually works. I also think that the US is way, way, way, way better positioned than Russia to take advantage of the drone revolution. The US already invested heavily in systems integration. The obvious next step is that the drones will detect targets and local commanders can immediately verify the finding and use the appropriate weapons system to take out the target. Local decision making has historically been very advantageous with regard to reaction time, so you can actually take advantage of opportunities and not allow the enemy to prepare. The downside is a lack of coordination with other units. Strong systems integration can give you the best of both worlds. In contrast, Russia has a top-down culture, and a lack of trust in the chain of command, and between units. So aside from probably being unable to develop this technology at the same level, I don't think that they can use it effectively. And the US has Palmer Lucky, who has a combination of insight and force of will to make things happen. And the US is taking advantage of that with ABMS and whatever the project is called that they do for SOCOM. And with advanced systems integration, you actually need less munitions, because if the drone sends the exact coordinates directly to the artillery gun(s), it can be a one salvo or even one shot kill most of the time. It seems obvious to me that the US has written off Russia as a true conventional threat and only sees China as such a threat. That is why they try to starve China of high-end computing, which the US seems to consider crucial for next gen weaponry.

MRTV and his pal seem very happy with the current state of the Super:

I do think that in a full on war between the US and one of the potential adversaries, the US would benefit a lot from being able to take a lot of high quality planes, ships, etc out of the running. Even back in WW 2, it did take quite a long time to produce ships. Of the 19 Essex-class carriers ordered after the US declaration of war, only 2 saw active service. Having too few missiles for the planes you have, and aircraft-carriers that can't do a lot of sorties due to ammo shortages, is still a lot better than not having those planes and carriers at all. It's still a lot easier to produce ammunition than weapon systems. But I agree that the obsession with low cost and efficiency is not a good idea. Ideally, you have munitions factories that are too large for what they produce, and have too many machines (and spares for those machines), and those are constantly running at a level that keeps a solid workforce at work, who can then be used to train up people for the excess capacity relatively quickly if need be. Yeah, but the Soviet war machine has mostly stagnated since the cold war ended. They just kept the big old stocks, but don't seem to have been adding meaningfully to that anymore (especially if you factor in them selling stuff off to other nations), and develop relatively little new technology. Technology still matters, and the bigger the technology gap, the bigger the numbers have to be to make up for it. And satellite photo analysis suggests that they've been depleting a lot of their old Soviet stock of vehicles. The only way for them to have a big superiority in numbers is for them to keep production relatively high for quite a while, and to start stocking up a lot. But after the current conflict is over, is that likely to happen? I think not. PS. Don't forget about corruption either.

In that case it is indeed possible to find such a performance difference, but also utterly meaningless for gaming with a discrete GPU.

That's not what the other person said, nor is it true. I think that you are confused. The Bigscreen Beyond is currently a SteamVR headset, and does not natively support OpenXR. However, SteamVR is an OpenXR runtime, so the games can talk to SteamVR with OpenXR, but then SteamVR talks to the Beyond with their own protocol, not with OpenXR. You can compare it to buying something in China, where you (= the game in this analogy) speak only English and the vendor (= the headset) only speaks Chinese. Then you need an English - Chinese translator to be able to communicate. If you bring a translator, you can talk to the vendor, but that doesn't mean that the vendor speaks English natively. And similarly, you can't claim that the Beyond natively supports OpenXR, when SteamVR is translating the OpenXR API that the game is using, to the SteamVR API when communicating with the headset. I just saw that Bigscreen is claiming to develop an OpenXR integration, so they seem to be doing exactly what I am saying they should do: "Planned development Foveated rendering for improved VR performance and integrations with SteamVR and OpenXR are under development in 2025." This text comes from the homepage of the Bigscreen website. So clearly their engineers agree with me That's just your opinion. It took them quite a while to optimize SteamVR and for a long time people were extremely happy that they could use mbucchia's OpenVR to OpenXR translation software to greatly improve their performance, by getting rid of SteamVR. Even today you still gain some FPS if you don't use SteamVR. If those games were built for the OpenXR-standard in the first place, instead of the SteamVR-specific API, it would be far easier to switch runtime, less buggy due to not requiring a translation layer, and wouldn't be dependent on the very hard and unpaid work by mbucchia. But with the Bigscreen Beyond you are locked into SteamVR right now, so you simply don't have any other option. You are completely ignoring one of the main points I made, which is that a dependency on SteamVR means that you are at the mercy of whatever Valve does in the future. Even if you are happy with what Valve did in the past, that provides absolutely no guarantee for the future. Reverb G2 buyers also didn't imagine that the WMR-runtime would be removed with no alternative, yet it happened.

The benefit is that you are not at the mercy of support by an individual vendor. Look at what happened to the WMR headsets, once MS lost interest. Bye bye WMR. Who knows if Valve is going to stay interested? Perhaps the Valve Deckard will be a flop and they'll just give up on VR or do the very minimum to keep existing things going, but not improving things. That is the risk that you are taking by getting a headset that is linked to a company. It's pretty clear that the market is moving to the sensible choice: OpenXR. That way, the software and hardware is not dependent on a single company that may lose interest, or may want to abuse their power, but they base their API on the work of a neutral consortium that is not dependent on a single company. In the chain of OpenXR Headset - OpenXR Runtime - OpenXR Game Engine VR driver, you can swap out any of these elements without impacting the other ones. And this in turn keeps the companies honest, since they can't just get away with crappy quality because people are bound to their software. You say that you are happy with the performance of SteamVR today, but that wasn't the case in the past. What if it becomes bad again? What if SteamVR is slow to implement a feature that is present in another runtime? What if Valve gets into a conflict with Bigscreen and 'accidentally' breaks the integration with the Beyond? What if Valve decides that they want to be a console company, and restricts the API to their own hardware? In any case, it seems pretty clear to me that Valve lost a lot of money on VR and the only reason why they stick with it is because Gabe believes in it. But he's 62. That's an age where a lot of risks start to increase. The risk of him retiring. Health issues. Age related mental decline. Etc. Gabe is obviously a very good person, and someone who (currently) believes in VR, but what happens when someone else becomes in charge of Valve? Even a very decent successor who merely decides to cut the unprofitable parts of Valve may be the end of SteamVR.

Bigscreen needs to switch to OpenXR. That is the future and foveated rendering is part of that standard, so they can then implement it in a way that works for everything.

That's obviously jargon. Corporate "around the end of March" means 'April 31st' in normal language.

Why pick that picture when there is a car that came with a joystick from the factory? https://old.reddit.com/r/acecombat/comments/bbmjhp/flashback_to_the_time_saab_thougt_it_was_a_good/

That's not great, since with the shifter function, some people may want to switch between a joystick and shifter regularly.

Yeah, it looks like a perfect storm of immense hubris, failure to execute and AMD closing the gap (FSR 4 mainly). If one of these things wouldn't have been true, customers would probably not think of switching en mass.

In the past AMD took a long time to fix VR, so if they fix it so soon, that is a good sign. In a way it seems that AMD and Nvidia switched places when it comes to driver development.

Yeah, the Virpil sale and the racing car shifting feature were tempting me, but I see so many issues, including full bricking of the device, that I'll pass for now. Still hard for me to look past Moza, given the desktop mounting options and racing sim possibilities, but they seem to need at least 6 more months to get the software in order.

You do realize that this is just a lobby report? The EU has not done anything about this.

My main suggestion is to wait a month or two, since we already see indications that things are improving (dropping prices and more availability). Other than that, I agree with @LucShep suggestion, and especially to look at your local prices, since it can very much differ per country what the prices are.

Is that a collective or are you happy to see me?

Yeah, the review I saw didn't make me regret getting a STECS. @SharpeXB I also prefer 'fantasy' controllers that are made to be jacks of all trade, masters of none, so it works well for many games and types of airplanes.

Magnetic detents too. And the metal throttle body will probably appeal to many.

Moza just announced new products. A throttle and panel for flight simming. And a new force feedback yoke. They also introduced a shifter-mode for the AB9 base, so that adds a lot of value to those who do both flight and race simming. Then you can use the same base for both. @NineLine @BIGNEWY Please made a separate section for Moza. We already see a lot of Moza-topics littering the hardware-forum, and it will only get worse with the new hardware.

From how they presented it, this seems like an early prototype that may not be released on 2025. So even if you figure out the dimensions of this version, there is a good chance that it'll change before release.

@Dragon1-1 I think that it was a combination of things, with the biggest factor being the general decline in flight simming, which caused a huge drop in demand for controllers. All these big and small companies that used to release new joysticks and such, either left the market or stopped innovating and kept selling products that became more and more obsolescent. We saw only some niche companies that kept innovating, and these companies clearly didn't aim for a mass market. We can see this by them avoiding the regular retail channel and selling direct to customer, which is a good move for niche products with a small but motivated consumer base, that will find the products even if they are not in local stores. And this way they kept costs relatively low, despite not manufacturing in very large numbers. But these niche companies like Virpil and VKB couldn't afford to make big gambles. A small company like VKB clearly has their hands full simply to develop relatively traditional products like the STECS, which has some very nice innovative features, but which is not really a revolutionary design. I think that sim racing actually saw a big decline in customers too (although less than flight simming), but the benefit of FFB is so enormous on the racing side (or rather, non-FFB racing wheels are so bad) that customers simply wouldn't accept anything less, while many flight simmers were happy with decent mechanical bases. But even there we saw that the big companies stagnated, suggesting that demand went down so much that they didn't want to invest in R&D anymore, and we saw innovation by small companies that no longer exist like LeoBodnar and OSW, and then a mid-sized company (Fanatec) pushing that innovation more into the mainstream with direct drive steering wheels. Note that these patents, which were not actually owned by MS, but by Immersion Corp, never held back FFB on the racing sim side. In general, patents only have value if you either can stop people from competing with your product, or have them pay licensing fees. There is no benefit to doing nothing with the patents. So companies probably just thought there was too little interest in FFB sticks anymore to even keep selling the same FFB sticks, let alone innovate. However, one of the biggest downsides of patents is that they can stifle very small innovators that never sell in large numbers. It's generally not worth the effort by patent holders to license their patent to these people, but it can be a risk to their patent to not send a cease and desist. A possibility is that the VPForce and FFBeast guys, who are basically just a guy in a shed, felt hindered by the patents, and only really got going once the patents expired. And it's often very passionate people like that, who take gambles that established companies won't make, and then prove the viability of those innovations. Then bigger companies notice that and copy it. And often not the biggest companies, but the mid-sized companies that are looking for a way to take down the leader(s). This is why we see Moza and Winwing adopt FFB for flight simming, and not Thrustmaster and Logitech. And we see the same on the racing sim side, where Fanatec/Simagic/Moza/etc adopted direct drive way before Thrustmaster and Turtle Beach. And because the established companies jumped in so late, their products are often underwhelming. You actually see the same with the Thrustmaster AVA, which is also quite meh. It simply takes time to built up expertise, and you also need passionate people who actually want to push for quality. It seems to me that Thrustmaster and Logitech have too many bean counters in charge, and those people never have to passion to push for anything more than 'barely good enough'*. * This is why a proven technique to innovate in large companies that sell lots of products that require little innovation, and where bean counters do good work for those product lines, is to create a start-up-like structure. Then the people who work there need to be the innovative types, and the bean counters and their rules have to be kept far away.

For now, yes, unless you buy a second-hand MS FFB2. Big motors take a lot of space, and everything else has to be beefy too, to cope with the forces. But it would be possible to make a much weaker desktop version, although it would also not be as nice as the bigger bases. In theory you could make a low desktop version with lots of power by more or less putting the Winwing base on its side, or even by switching to pneumatic motors with an external air supply, but it's doubtful that these would sell. And you would need to clamp it down very well. A big draw of desktop devices is that you can just plonk it on a desk and go fly.

The issue is that they stopped making them for a long time, so most of the expertise disappeared, and the products did not evolve along with new technology. So things mostly have to be build up from scratch (both hardware and drivers). There are only some benefits to the older FFB sticks, like there being a market of older dudes who remember it fondly and who are eager to buy them and who advocate for it, and directFFB support in some games, although that was made for the crappy sticks of the past, and is not really up to snuff for the much better hardware of today. It makes little sense to make a lower-end option, until the drivers are worked out and people figure out what hardware solutions are best, and software like MSFS and DCS add/improve support for FFB. Lower-end customers are often more demanding than the higher end customers, when it comes to having a perfected experience, and there is also less room to experiment on the low-end, since it needs high volumes to make a lower-end offering work out financially.

We are still early in the life cycle of these products. Only one proper company has made one and they are still doing a lot of development on it. Others don't have their hardware out yet, let alone have a mature solution. Only once the expensive bases start to mature, can you expect a move towards lower end solutions.

@propeler As we can see elsewhere on this forum, they very much cheap out on such things as support and following consumer law. And they are also undercutting the competition quite a bit when it comes to their other products, like the Ursa Minor, and their panels. So I think that it is safe to say that they are indeed fighting a price war with the competition. So in the case of Winwing, I would definitely suggest: caveat emptor. However, the big upside is that their products seem to generally be fairly solidly designed and the assembly is not too bad. So that puts them far ahead of Logitech/Saitek and the cheaper Trustmaster stuff in my opinion. But I would demand better price/performance to choose a Winwing product over one of the more reputable brands. But when it comes to FFB, we only have Moza, which has a rather mediocre reputation, at least to me, and the Rhino/Beast, which are rather costly, as they don't seem to benefit from optimized factory methods. As I think I said before to you, I think that your lack of experience with higher-volume factory methods (and cheap Chinese labor), leads you to consistently overestimate how expensive things have to be. But ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, so we'll have to see how the Cyber Taurus performs in practice. I do think that with my comment above, I have figured out at least in part why the 20 Nm version is so cheap and why the 16 Nm version is much more expensive, but we need customer testimony to see whether we pay a price for the gearing solution in terms of quality and if so, how much so. Especially since @Dogmanbird correctly remarks that Chinese marketing is not the most honest (then again, US marketing often isn't either).