KLR Rico

I've always loved planes. Flight simming is just another way to enjoy them, and I've been playing one or another for nearly 30 years now.

Because that's what bugs do? :dunno: Where can we find them? I just spent the last 3 hours messing around with graphics.lua and really didn't get anywhere. PS, can we get a VR subforum? There's all kinds of topics relevant for both the Rift and Vive, and this megathread isn't really cutting it. ;)

It seems I can't go a day without being super excited about some upcoming thing. :D

^ If it's not working, try entering the comms menu ( \ ) and seeing if it changes the FFB behavior, that usually works for me when it's acting up.

I think a VR squadron is a great idea. :thumbup:

No cockpit mods, it's stock. I think I had one for the standalone A-10C when that was a thing, but I'm pretty sure it never made it to DCSW or open beta. The FPS counter is in game. It's pretty sweet because it's up along the top of the FOV, but large and clear. It's pretty much what they need to do to the radio menus too, because they're currently stuffed up in the corner and impossible to read.

Just punched out of a jet... that was a trip. It was really surreal to be standing on the ground among the trees, watching the dogfight still going on overhead.

If you're even thinking about it, do it. :thumbup:

Guess we'll have to wait for ED to get some of that tuning done to really get the most out of our rigs. LOL, I'm not going to be surprised if I need a Motrin in the morning. Flying like this doesn't help a whole lot either: :P

I just did refueling with the A-10, and it's incredible! I've been on the tanker side of an AR in real life and one of the things that struck me the most is how close the receiver is. You just don't get the impression in pictures or video, but in the rift I had the same feeling. I mean, it seems obvious that it should, but it still got me by surprise. :D Oh yeah, and it *is* easier to do refueling with the rift. It's a lot easier to pick up on those small cues to help keep things under control.

Same here, I think it's just 1.5 right now

My first impression was that it felt screwey, but I got used to it pretty quick. I didn't have any problem using the P-51's sight in A2A or A2G. I only briefly tried the 109 and it didn't seem too bad either. The one thing that is messed up is the Ka-50's helmet mounted designator. Both eyes get the reticle at the same time. It doesn't make much of a difference at long ranges, but if you look around in the cockpit it gets doubled. I'm really going to have to set that up one of these days. Inside the aircraft the audio seems perfect. Wind, buffeting, airframe, engine... it all sounds really good and in 3d space. However, it doesn't go as far as echoing off buildings, or sounding much different if you lean out of the cockpit. YES! This. The CPU and GPU are both being underutilized for some reason and it's killing the potential framerates. And now for y'all that wanted a video. I don't know why you do, but here it is. You can sort of see that the hud is quite readable and the tracking is good, but it really gives no sense of FOV and the image is a lot worse in the video as far as distortion and focus. Sorry about the portrait view, it's the only way my phone fits in there. e3KXY-oF6ug

I only noticed this after Warthog Farmer pointed it out, and I still only notice it when I'm looking for it. There's something about the optics that makes barely illegible text, barely legible at certain angles, I see it when I tilt my head down and look through the top of the lens. I'm talking like a 10% difference, it shouldn't be anything for anyone to worry about. ;) Unless there's a setting I'm missing to enable it, it's not quite there yet, IMO. It doesn't appear to follow the surface of whatever you're hovering over, and I think it's kind of fidgety. On the plus side, the mouse is kept bound within the display when DCS is the foreground. Loosing the mouse somewhere on another monitor was something that annoyed me with FlyInside. Currently the 2d menus are all just virtual desktop style. I'd say I'd like them to be bigger. In VR you can make a virtual desktop look like an imax theater, but in DCS they're like regular monitor size and distance. From what wags said I guess this is an area of future improvement. First and foremost, ATW is amazing. Even if you're running at 30 FPS head tracking and everything is still smooth as butter. The only thing I really notice at lower framerates is that the ground moves by in a steplike fasion, or the slight stutter when rolling, stuff like that. Still, I went tweaking looking for that 90 fps lock. Specs are i5-4670k at 4.5ghz w/16gb ram and a Gigabyte G1 GTX970 with factory OC. Going into this, I had DCS set up for a reliable 60fps on 1080p monitor (most settings high). I didn't change anything at first, and saw frame rates of 45 to 60. I put all settings at low and still couldn't break 60. Turned off v-sync, tweaked all kinds of other crap and then finally I realized that I had capped DCS at 60fps in the text editor. (d'oh) Going back into it, I'm still having some strange performance issues. For the most part I'm seeing 45 or 90fps, but occasionally 30. On the good side, it jumps between them without being very noticeable, and they're all factors of 90 so there's minimal judder. Now the strange part is that I'm not seeing much change in performance between low and high settings, either way it's either 45 or 90, and if AI aircraft, smoke, explosions and what not are in view, it's almost guaranteed to be 45. Like I said, even on low settings, the same thing happens. What also has me confused is that my CPU utilization is pretty low. All 4 cores are hovering around 50%, but without the rift I'd usually see one or two of them near 100% and the others around 50 (which makes sense to me), also the GPU is hardly breaking a sweat here, about 60% for the most part, even with MSAA at 16xQ and a lot of the other post processing up pretty high. Still need to do some tinkering here. I have no idea how much of it is DCS itself, and how much is something within my control. Mostly good. The in cockpit shadows are immersive as ever, and outside they're generally pretty good. Sometimes a bit of flicker though, and the tree shadows are flickering a lot. I haven't tried disabling them yet. There's a great deal of variation here. Some of the A-10C switches are legible from a normal position, and almost all of them can be read if you lean closer. The Ka-50 also has good, readable, labeling. On the other hand, I could read basically nothing in the MiG-21, even while trying to look closely. Also, the weapons panel in the P-51 was particularly hard. There's other good/bad ones, but those stood out to me. Really though, if DCS is going to be completely playable, we need a magnifier tool and/or binocular view like in FlyInside. Make the rift your default playback device. Most of the aircraft are doing this. Press numpad 5 to recenter. Sorry, can't help you here. I haven't seen this one yet. Overall impression The DK1/2 users already know all of this, so it's mainly for those who haven't tried VR: I don't see myself going back to another display for simming ever again. There is a lot of room for improvement, in both the hardware and software, but the "OMG I'm flying a plane" is unbelievable. I also have the benefit of a G-Seat and FFB HOTAS, so the complete experience is ridiculous, although the rift is 90% of that. Flying the Huey at 120kts down the street and cranking between full size buildings is incredible. Hovering and spot landing is much much easier. Autorotations are also a lot of fun. Dogfighting in the P-51 was a blast. Spotting within normal dogfighting distances was no problem (I'm also using model enlargement). I mapped labels on/off to HOTAS, but I didn't need them at all. Despite the physical difficulty of checking 6 with the 1:1 tracking, my overall situation awareness was better than with TIR. Also, I felt I had a much better sense of the aircraft's energy state. The sense of speed and altitude really helped with that. You're really flying and fighting in 3d space. I'd say those experiences really summarize what's so great about flying in the rift. Yes, there's room for improvement in the image quality, and there's more to be done on the software side, but the tracking and depth/scale is perfect and the impression of flight is incredible.

With like 3 minutes of flying under my belt... Did a guns fight in the M2000. All HUD text and symbolgy is 100% readable, absolutely no problem there. Then again, the M2K has pretty big HUD text. Need more time to tell, but targets within a few NM aren't hard to see at all. What *was* much harder than I expected was checking 6 with the 1:1 tracking. Checking one side to the other and over the top and everything else in a close in dogfight is a lot of work and stretching. I also kept breaking the canopy bounds which is was kind of immersion breaking, but what are you going to do? I suppose you could build a frame to knock your head against. :D First impressions are definite thumbs up. Now I gotta get my toddler to his nap so I can go back at it. ;) I'm off work for another week, so lots of flying to be done still!

Yes! I can't wait to try this. It has been *years* of anticipation.

Nothing in the newsletter today. :(

Rift owners will let y'all know how it works just as soon as ED updates to the 1.3 runtime needed to use the CV1. ;)

For real, too. It's the closest thing to a holodeck. I'm excited for the future and the improvements that will come, but the future is also here.

I haven't been following people's impressions about the Vive too much, but as far as everything we're saying about the Rift, we're really nitpicking here. I wouldn't give it up for big 4K (and the GPU's I'd need to run it), much less any other display out there. Oh for sure I have no expectations at all of being able to make out switch labeling. With FlyInside I have to use tooltips or binocular view to make out any of the switches, I expect DCS will be the same. I'm hoping everything on the HUD will be readable (perhaps with a mod) No 1.3 support yet. :cry: We're commenting about CV1 being sim-ready based on using it on other simulators. There's no reason to expect that the ability to read gauges and text are going to be any different in one sim to the other.

Aside from the slight effect of text sharpening at the edge of FOV, I think the focus across the entire FOV is pretty even. Personally I don't notice much distortion or variation of focus across the whole FOV, unless I'm really looking for it. The lack of peripheral vision is noticeable though, it's pretty much like wearing a scuba mask.

It also happens for me with FlyInside/P3D.

The way I understand the diagram, is that each wedge is the same angular size, but the wedges on the far left/right cover a larger area of the line (i.e., display). I also noticed the same sort of sweet spot behavior. There's like a 2 mm tolerance to get the absolute best image, but like 5-10mm where it's acceptable. That brings up my next point, I'm kind of on the fence on how comfortable this thing is. If I want to keep it on that super fine sweet spot I end up making it fairly tight, but then it gets kind of uncomfortable so then I loosen it back up some. Then it eventually moves out of position, and so I wind up fiddling with the damn thing every 30 seconds. #earlyadopterproblems :D

Judging from the diagram, the PPI (or in this case, pixels per degree) is highest at the edges. No?

My subjective opinion on it is that it's not really "blurry" in the center, just a little softer, but it is indeed easier to read text at the edges of the FOV. I'm thinking it's a side effect of the distortion techniques used to match the display and lenses, since the pixel density won't be the same across the whole image. EDIT: Something like this, there's more pixels per degree at the edges than the center. This thread has a discussion on VR distortion techniques: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=15417 (and it's where I stole this picture) I'm still drinking my coffee so I can't wrap my head around all of it yet, but I think it's on the right track to understanding the issue.

The oculus store/app needs to be running anytime the rift is being used, but it doesn't prevent you from opening and running other apps. (as long as you allow unknown sources in the settings)