shadowborn

Today's patch change log for the AH-64D says: "Game Flight Mode disabled." Anyone know what this means? Was it an optional arcade mode that's been removed? If so ... why? Or is it just some pun on making the sim flight model harder?

Thanks! Not the answer I was hoping for lol, but good things take time.

Hey. I like to hop onto multiplayer servers for some "PvE" helicopter training. Any servers I tried, I can only select AH-64D without FCR. Do the server operators need to change something, or can I enable it? I read somewhere that it supposedly comes with the rearm and refuel-dialog, but I can't see an option there to mount the FCR ...? Thanks!

Photo Credit: Author (original post).

That's great news! I'm in Germany, too. Wrote to them about six months ago inquiring about shipping from inside EU, but they pretty much only responded "no we don't". So it's good to see they made that decision after all.

Oh, quite on the contrary: Since he also bundled two desk clamps and an MFD, he included way too many hex keys. Suspect there might possibly be even extra ones from the odd IKEA furniture item. "Too many" presented the same issues with proper hex key identification as "too few" though

Wow - thank you all so much!! You must be psychic or something I truly believed it was engaging, but it was the wrong hex key indeed. Tried a slightly bigger one, took some poking around but I can now perfectly adjust the tension. Also very glad to hear about the speed brake switch, this makes sense. I'm very happy now that the purchase does not have any defect - thanks!

Hey everyone. I sourced myself a (very lightly used) Winwing Orion 2 throttle with F/A-18 grip, and a joystick base with F16 grip (with shake kit and extra button attachment). Price was okay, but more importantly, it was already in the country - I really wished Winwing would ship from inside Europe, then I'd have bought from them directly. The devices feel great, the stick is precise and all is hefty, marked improvement over my Titanwolf and Thrustmaster 16000 combo. Just two issues. Maybe someone can advise. The throttle grip seemingly has a three-position, thumb-operated mode switch. It arrests in the forward position, but not in the backward position. The backward position just snaps back to the middle. This isn't intended, I assume? Does anyone have experience with such issues and Winwing, is there support? The unit is still in warranty according to the seller, was purchased in 2023. Even more significant to me, the tension adjustment does nothing. I get the hex wrench to engage with the two screws (one for left throttle, one for right). Alas, these screws seem to spin entirely freely. There is no tension change, the screws seem to "wobble" a bit in the holes, and I can turn the screws both into either direction for many, many turns with no resistance whatsoever. I would have assumed they "bite" into something and eventually tighten? I find the tension on the throttle too high, would like to have it move more lightly, especially for helicopter use. Has anyone opened up an Orion 2 throttle base to take a look inside, or even has insight into this specific issue? Is it reasonably safe to open up the throttle base, or will I be showered with small bits and springs that require the simultaneous action of nine hands to put back together? Thanks!!

Oh, also this: VR is AMAZING. Before you try VR, you THINK you know how it will be. It's so much more. I sat in the cockpit of my F14 / F18 / AH-64 etc. for (taken all together) hours gawking at the incredible graphics. The texture of a radar screen that now for a first time looked like actual glass, complete with layers of smear or fingerprints. I almost fell of my chair, awkwardly twisted while reading the label on the side of a headrest of an ejection seat. And by that point I wasn't even flying yet. VR is pretty epic

Hi. This is a quick "war story", maybe it can help someone. I ran DCS about a year ago with a HP Reverb G2 Rev. 2. DCS crashed a lot. At the time this had two reasons, which made diagnosis cumbersome: One, the cable shipped with the G2 (even the Rev. 2 purchased directly from HP) was still faulty. HP shipped me a new one, this resolved my issues with OTHER games in VR. Not with DCS. The DCS crashes only subsided when created a Windows page file (I had initially operated under the assumption that "32 GB ought to be enough for everyone" (miss-quoting a certain MS founder here), and that no swap would be needed. My DCS demanded an extra 10-20 GB of swap or so. Then it ran, in VR, mostly fine. Some days ago the crashes came back. What had changed? I had begun to fly in VR and multi-player. It would appear (my) DCS demanded more than 50 GB of total virtual memory to be the sole, single player on a Nevada map with a handful of AI assets. Madness? I ordered another 32GB of RAM (more RAM to the airplane gods!). Alas, in between the order and the shipment arriving, I solved the problem. I had custom graphics settings set initially for the PC screen and my RTX3080. These were set not THAT high. Alas, when I switched to VR, I left them in place as is. Before the RAM arrived, I did one thing: Reset my graphics settings to the "VR" preset. That solved my problems, the multiplayer Nevada mission now runs fine on 32G plus some swap (and possibly doesn't even need swap, I haven't checked). What changed? Good question. Unfortunately I haven't logged the old settings. I think terrain textures went down one step. My preload range was already set pretty low, I reduced it and the tree cover a bit more. That is all I can identify. Alas, if you have crashes in VR, or excessive RAM usage, the lesson here is to reset the FX settings to the preset, not leave them on "seemed reasonable for flat screen" settings - even if that gave more than 90 frames/sec even in VR. Over and out.

Yeah ... being an IT Administrator by trade, that discussion is probably as old as man, no matter the platform. I don't subscribe to the "double the RAM" in 2023 (and in fact, not anymore for many years). There's the school of thought that says we can abandon that altogether with sufficient physical RAM (I subscribe to that one), and the school that says "make a small paging file nonetheless to please the paging algorithm because that works better". I don't really want a paging file. I have only SSD, and while a paging file is not as SSD-murdering as some make it out to be, it's not great, especially with consumer level SSD and the reduced writing life cycles of triple and quad level cells. I will nevertheless happily check if a 64GB paging file makes any difference and report back. However, I do believe that technically, the remainder of 32 GB of RAM, about 25 GB or whatever after the OS had it's share, should be sufficient for DCS, no?

> What's your page file setup like? Initially none, recently tried 1GB (initial) to 2GB (max) on the M2 SSD. Didn't help. Machine has 32 GB, so no to small page file should be fine.

Hey. Okay, I can now say with confidence after some Skyrim VR, The Forest etc. that the new cable (from HP) fixed all my VR problems except the memory leak with DCS. I don't believe the beach house is causing that, but yes, I was running the bare-bones "space platform" that Microsoft offers as well. But no way does the beach house (or the space platform) consume that much excess RAM.

> Moved to win 11 recently and havent noticed it. Thanks for the input! I am however on Windows 11 already Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22621.963] Plus, that seems to happen with Intel HD Graphics. I have an Nvidia 3080 though.

Nah. It's not just beta AH-64. I tried the MI-24, got a crash during loading, and this: "The Windows Error Reporting Service service terminated with the following error: The paging file is too small for this operation to complete." I tried the KA-50 V3 again and this time: Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: DCS.exe (12232) consumed 15559917568 bytes, dwm.exe (18200) consumed 2276089856 bytes, and WUDFHost.exe (5680) consumed 571375616 bytes. Further evidence of a memory leak in VR? It would seem so to me. The KA-50 V2 worked once (but crashed on ending the flight). Another, minor finding that can be worked around for now: The mouse (with "mouse enabled" in settings) works about 50% of the time inside VR, i.e. I can move the "little white ball". The other 50% I can use the mouse to make menu selections on my screen when I take the headset off. It appears "wear detection" has to report that I am not wearing the headset for the mouse to work on screen in those cases, if I wear the headset, the mouse cursor won't move even a single pixel ...

Hey. OP here with some new findings, confirming some sort of memory leak it appears. HP shipped me the new cable. It looks JUST like the "old" cable that came with the Rev. B. headset, and also has the little "Rev. A" flag/sticker on it. But lo behold, it appears (pending further scientific testing) to resolve a lot of issues EXCEPT, sadly, for those with DCS I don't own many VR titles. But the following worked flawlessly (apart from occasional view centering issues) now, and didn't before: - IL2 Sturmovik - Titanic VR Experience - Elite: Dangerous Currently still downloading Skyrim VR, which I just bought for more testing. HOWEVER DCS still crashes, and it is, as I suspected, seemingly a memory leak. Many times there is nothing at all in the event log, but one time I got this: Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: DCS.exe (9808) consumed 20684664832 bytes, dwm.exe (10372) consumed 1494360064 bytes, and vrcompositor.exe (3436) consumed 648605696 bytes. That's 20GB of RAM for dcs.exe, 15GB for dwm (Windows Display Manager), and negligible for vrcompositor.exe. My machine has 32GB, but this confirms to me that the Out-of-Memory killer mechanism is responsible for killing the various processes I observed being killed over the last days whenever DCS VR initializes. This is with DCS Open Beta 2.8.1.34667 and AH-64D. I have at times loaded successfully into the Viggen (twice), the KA-50 V3 (once) and the F-18 (once), but with various crashes in between. I will now keep trying with other aircraft to see if the new cable helps and maybe this is an AH-64 problem now.

> Still wondering if your usb output has enough power... maybe you can try an additional usb card (see picture) make sure it has additional power. This Solved all my problems Thanks - I will consider this if the new cable doesn't work. But I have it connected to an USB 3.0 port directly on the back plate of a (rather recent) main board, I would (carefully) assume that this should provide sufficient power, if anything does?

As for graphics driver, I'm already on 527.56, which is the latest. And for event log, there's all sorts of crashes (WUDFHost.exe, vrwebhelper.exe, svchost.exe_wlidsvc, Microsoft Sign-In Assistant, dwm.exe, OpenVRSettingsUX.exe). They can't all crash due to the actual root cause, so I'm still betting on either RAM exhaustion or something central like, yes, a graphics driver crash. There's also: "A problem has occurred with one or more user-mode drivers and the hosting process has been terminated. This may temporarily interrupt your ability to access the devices." and "The device HP Reverb Virtual Reality Headset G2 (location 0004.0000.0000.001.002.001.000.000.000) is offline due to a user-mode driver crash. Windows will attempt to restart the device 5 more times. Please contact the device manufacturer for more information about this problem." But I'll try the new cable first before digging further into this.

> Thats a display driver crash and partial recovery and you will see it in your System Event Viewer. Thanks! I just had a call with HP, to talk about returning the headset within the EU mandated 14 days, or else. They assure me that the problems will be solved with a new cable, and that these days, many customers call in with issues and a new cable is always the solution. This is EVEN THOUGH I specifically ordered the "Revision B" of the Reverb, while reportedly only the Rev. A's cable had problems (and to my knowledge only with ATI graphics cards though). Also, I found that while the box says "Rev. B", a tiny sticker on the cable itself actually says "Rev. A". So maybe HP is shipping "Rev. B" glasses with "Rev. A" cables? Exciting. I shall receive a new cable within three working days, we'll see how what goes.

As for the question about hardware specs, here goes: ASRock Z690M Phantom Gaming RIPTIDE/D5 Intel Core i5-13600K MSI GeForce RTX 3080 VENTUS 3X PLUS 10G GIGABYTE AORUS 32GB DDR5 (2x16GB) 5200-40 Kingston SSD NV2 NVMe 2TB EVGA 750 GQ 80+ Gold

Hm. There is something iffy with this headset. I got it to load into DCS twice tonight, and once it runs, it's great. But then I select "fly again" and DCS crashes (as do other VR apps, too). For what it's worth, for one crash I got this: I also got a Blue Screen and OTHER programs crashing (e.g. Wargaming game center crashed over an attempt to start VR, which is really puzzling as the only explanation for this would be WMR or Steam gobbling up all the RAM). I have also seen browser pages and Steam pages (which are browser pages, too) fail to render after such VR crash, so I currently suspect there's an unchecked memory allocation running wild in the VR chain somewhere, somehow. Puzzled. Still trying things, will run a RAM test and (again) a video RAM test. Will report back again.

Thanks for the many helpful replies! It will take me a few days until I have time to dabble with this again, but there is already a lot of useful info here, especially with the re-centering. I will report back in time! If I don't manage before, have a great new year fellow pilots!

Hey. I bought a HP Reverb G2 Rev. B specifically for flying DCS. I can't get it to work. I have a fresh Windows 11 install with DCS beta. Here's what happens: - 70% of the time I get the DCS menu to launch in VR. About half of the time then, the menu is waaaay down in VR (like, the floor is meters below me). Half of the time, I have no mouse control in VR in the menu. - 90% of the time, the menu and the loading screens flicker like crazy - I have managed ONCE to get into a cockpit in VR. Every other time, like 30 attempts, the VR view turns black, Windows makes that "ding dong, the witch is dead ... I mean, the USB device is dead" sound. I got a DCS error reporter once, but most of the time it just crashes with no message whatsoever. I once got a "tasklist.exe has crashed" dialog. Often, it reports SteamVR has crashed also. I tried SteamVR regular and beta, Windows Mixed Reality for Steam lkr_release branch, and something called "OpenComposite", all with no luck. So ... is VR with DCS really THAT fickle at this time, or is my experience "special"? Thanks! p.s. also when VR just for once doesn't crash, when I exit and shut down the VR headset, Windows Mixed Reality takes over and makes it so my regular screen is all black, and I can not get out of that. No alt-tab, no ctrl-alt-del, nothing works short of rebooting.

Hey. I have finally ordered a new PC, and once it arrives I want to order a VR headset. I'm assuming the HP Reverb G2 Version 2 is still one of the best choices for people who mainly want to use it for simulations. Would this be a fair or correct assessment for 2022 still? Also, I'm a "VR noob". I read or saw that the switches in high fidelity cockpits can be operated by using one's fingers in the virtual space. That's what I want - I want to "naturally" or "organically" be able to press buttons and switches in the cockpit in VR, instead of mapping them all to joysticks or the keyboard. Can someone with VR experience, ideally with the HP headset, enlighten me: How, and how well, does this work? Do I need the controllers for it, or can I order the headset without controllers and still have this functionality? If one needs the controllers, does that mean one is constantly picking up the controllers and switching back to the flight stick, "blind folded", or is there a better way? Thanks!! edit: I did stumble over PointCTRL but the original thread is five years old? One can seemingly order kits, but they look like prototypes. Anyone know of any status for this, or any alternative products? edit (2): also, p.s., any truth to this reddit post claiming that "gaze control" (I'm assuming that is, have a virtual mouse pointer where you look, then use a HOTAS button to click) is broken or removed?