streakeagle

I had not updated my software or firmware in a while since everything has been working exactly the way I wanted it to work. But on a whim, I started up SimAppPro and updated everything: stick, throttle, combat panel, and takeoff panel. I immediately noticed the difference: the ability to assign an axis as an axis, buttons, or combined. I had already programmed my VKB MCG Pro to have a center depress rather than a toggle between analog and buttons, which gave me both. It is a feature that gives me flexibility and in the case of the VKB, gives me one more button that can be mapped to game functions. A typical problem for me is the spring to center radar elevation wheel on the throttle grip. In some cases, I prefer the analog axis and in others I prefer to have it configured as buttons. Now I can have both as required rather than having to choose just one way or use SimAppPro to set my flavor of the week. Also new, but less useful to me is the ability to configure hats to act as an analog. In theory, this is great for analog trim applications where return to center axes can't do the job. But since most sims have trim controls that also work with buttons, I never use this function. Nice to have to maximize options, but I haven't ever used it and don't anticipate ever needing it. Aside from one lighted pushbutton having its label crack and peel off, all of my hardware has been working perfectly despite being used extensively almost every day. The only part I don't use is the stick, because I prefer the VKB MCG Ultimate. Overall, I thoroughly enjoy flying with the Winwing hardware even in VR. Getting new extremely useful features for free is just icing on the cake.

When I upgraded from the Rift S to the Reverb G2 before building a new PC, I expected to have performance issues. Instead, I was able to keep the same or better quality settings and still maintain 45 fps in most situations. Then I built a new PC. I chose the AMD 5800X on an X570 motherboard. I didn't really gain any fps, but what I did gain was stability. My old PC with 4-cores was pegged out trying to keep up with SimShaker, VR, DCS, SRS, and VoiceAttack/Vaicom Pro. With the new PC, my cpu was handling the load really well, practically idling since it appears to be gpu bound (particuarly by the 8 GB of VRAM). Then ED released a patch (not long after switching to 2.7/new clouds). Now, the only way I can get the performance I was getting is to fly in environments with little no clouds like Nevada missions. If I fly my usual MP servers with clouds, I have to downgrade the G2 to 60 fps base and force 30 fps motion smoothing to get stable frame rates, and even then under some conditions it drops into the 20s and gets difficult to fly. For the record, I am stuck on a regular 1080. I am sure I would be doing a little bit better on a 1080 Ti. I am not going to buy the current overpriced gpus I need. If my performance gets any worse, I will simply stop playing DCS. I have better things to do with my time and money than to spend 2 or 3K on a new top of the line gpu, install it in a nearly top of the line pc and struggle to maintain playable frame rates and image quality. ED's answer is buy better hardware. When I am already just a gpu purchase away from top notch hardware, my answer is go back to my other hobbies that cost less and make me happier.

I don't know what aircraft you guys are flying or where you calibrate your head to be at in VR. I try to line up my head and shoulders with the VR pilot. Many of the aircraft I fly have canopies that are close to the pilot's head. If you move your head much at all, you go through the glass. The aircraft that are the worst for this are the ones that look like they have bubble canopies, but between the seat and the small canopy, there isn't much room to look behind you. I don't use any kind of check 6 cheats. I physically strain to look over my shoulder from one side to the other while scissoring to shake an opponent. I sit in a mock up of an F-4 ejection seat. The most annoying aspect of going through the glass is the sound. I fly other air combat sims, and in those sims I cannot go through the glass and I don't get motion sickness. So, my suggestion is for DCS to implement optional constraints similar to competitor's sims. Key word optional: if you don't like it don't use it. I prefer head constraints. Most TrackIR games had head constraints. You could only move you head so much no matter how far you physically moved your head. You could not use TrackIR to stick your head through the glass to look behind you. Right now, the MiG-15 essentially has as good a visibility out o f its cockpit as the F-86 in VR, because there is nothing keeping you from turning around and looking straight back even though the real cockpit didn't have the room to do this. For the sake of fairness/realism in multiplayer it would be worth it to limit head movement in VR.

The D-9 (mid to late 1944 service entry date) was a high altitude fighter relative to Antons, but not compared to P-51Bs and P-47Ds from a year earlier. They closed the gap significantly compared to the Anton, but within a few months, the monster P-47M came online. The Luftwaffe needed the Ta-152 in 1943, not the D-9 in 1944. Of course, the Me262 would have been the real solution to the bomber threat.

The D-9 was better than the Anton at higher altitudes, but it is only strong against the P-51 from sea level to 20,000 feet. Above 24,000 feet, the P-51 becomes dominant. The story is pretty much the same with the P-47. I would not call a D-9 a high altitude fighter. Whereas the Ta-152 is less than useful below 25,000 feet, but becomes an absolute monster above that it.

Even with boost, the A-8 lacks the power to compete in air-to-air with any contemporary aircraft. The D-9 within lower altitudes is the Fw answer to US late war fighters. The Ta-152 was meant to be the high altitude option. The A-5 was better than the A-8 at ACM by every measure. As I prefer air-to-air combat, I would much rather have the A-5 than the A-8. I enjoy flying the A-8, but it is very difficult to win against any other flyable WW2 fighter in DCS World.

Go to F10 view, click on aircraft of interest, then click F2.

Another solution is to try PointCTRL. It is kind of like TrackIR, except that you wear the sensor and your fingers have the LEDs. It works as a mouse, but you just point your finger to move the mouse cursor. You lose the tactile feel of pressing real buttons, but it is by far the best VR control solution I have tried for DCS since you can use either hand as required and get nearly the precision and speed of using a mouse. When it is calibrated properly, you still feel like you are putting your finger on the virtual controls, so it feels like you are using VR even though you are really just tracking one of your fingers in 2D as a mouse cursor. There are disadvantages: 1) Currently, the IR sensor is very sensitive, so any bright IR sources (namely sunlight) entering the room can cause issues with tracking. The sensitivity may become adjustable in the future. 2) You have to wear the led/button assemblies on the index finger of both hands. 3) The finger controllers are battery powered. They have a long life, but you still have to worry about keeping them charged. 4) The IR sensor requires a USB cable. If your headset has a cable, as most PC headsets do, no problem. But if you are using wireless with a Quest 2, you probably don't want to add a cable. 5) Most important of all (the others are relatively minor), you have to look towards the direction of the control you want to operate so that the mouse cursor can reach it and it is within the sensor's field of view limits. Once PointCTRL becomes 2nd nature, you won't want to fly without it. But I use it in parallel with my physical controls. There are still times when the physical controllers are the way to go, such as when you need to toggle a switch/press a button without taking your eyes off of a target or in the rare case where you have to operate two controls at the same time, such as the flight control system test for the F/A-18 (for that one, I press the button on my Cougar MFD and use PointCTRL to toggle the switch on the right side of the cockpit).

I have used the voice controls to great benefit. Using the flashlight/passthrough is the best way to find my drink without spilling it. Being able to adjust volume with verbal commands is great, as well as being able to access the desktop while in-game without using any controls. However, just typing on my keyboard gets recognized as a "select" command and while using voice chat with online multiplayer, the voice commands inadvertently recognize the speech as valid commands causing all kinds of mayhem, including causing DCS or SteamVR to crash. These problems happened so often, I was forced to disable it. If there was an easy way to enable/disable voice commands with a directx button or even a verbal command, I would go back to using it. If I could select which commands are available and suppress the ones causing problems, I would go back to using it. But there are no good options, so I live without voice commands, losing the flashlight, volume, and desktop. I can use the keyboard, which is better than having to grab a VR controller, but voice commands are so much more convenient when they work.

I got my cable today: as above: I can now use my MB's built in USB C port and will have to use it a couple of weeks to assess stability improvements.

I have had the leap motion for some time now. Making it native to DCS World simplified installation and use, but others who have recently tried it confirm what I just proved: it really hasn't improved much since I first got it. I have a new PC with a strong CPU, so I don't suffer any performance penalties for using it. But the single camera cannot accurately maintain track of the hands, especially down low and to the sides. Even when it does track accurately, it is too sloppy to operate controls. I do like the above idea of using it solely to track hand position for use of sim pits while in VR, but it still needs more than one camera and possibly some gloves with reflectors or leds to make sure the position of the hands and fingers are accurately tracked at all times. Leap Motion is fun to try, but it was wasted money for me.

My cable is supposed to arrive tomorrow. I could live with it as it was, but if this eliminates some of the random crashes and allows me to use the native usb c port without the usb adapter, it will be worth the wait and money. It is a shame I had to pay for something that it should have had from original delivery. The price I pay for being an early adopter. Right now, you get the G2 for at least $150 cheaper and it will come with the new cable or will get it upgraded for free.

Apparently, the warranty no longer applies to my headset, so I have to order it. $169.00 plus shipping. Not a cheap upgrade, but absolutely necessary for my AMD motherboard.

Is this a free warranty replacement? Or do I need to order it? I am using an AMD X570 board (Asus Dark Hero VIII), which would benefit from this new power supply cable. I should eliminate some of the glitches I am seeing and also permit me to use my native USB-C port, which presently does not work with the G2. So, whether it is free or not, I want to get this as soon as possible.

It is quite a bit annoying that the gunsight hasn't been at the level of accuracy it should be at despite ED having been provided the cause and solution to the problem some time ago. But it is far from a show-stopper does not keep me from enjoying the F-86. I find the fact that the in-cockpit sound randomly cuts out and can only fixed by spawning in another F-86 to be far more annoying, yet this problem has been around quite some time as well and ED says it can't reproduce it, so they aren't going to fix it.

My new PC is running a Ryzen 5800x. I am currently using a tower air cooler that lets me average 4.6 GHz turbo boost. I am going to get a radiator to see if I can get my performance up to 5 GHz. I am stuck with a baseline 1080, though it is an MSI "Duke", whatever that means. I don't want to spend $1,000 on a gpu, much less 2 or 3k. Either prices are going to come back to reality, or I am going to go back to building model airplanes. My old i5-4690K that I built in 2014 petty much runs DCS just as well as my new pc... which is sad.

The big strike against the 3080 is the VRAM. If I end up buying a 3090, it will be for the VRAM since it is both fast and huge. But I am leaning toward either a 6800 XT or 6900 XT depending on how the prices fall. Right now, 6900 XTs on eBay are by far the best deal out of the 3080/3090/6800/6900 cards, almost down to MSRP. My only problem with the 6800/6900 series is the slower VRAM, but they also have stronger rasterization performance, which is exactly what I need for DCS. Why can't one card have it all: brute rasterization performance, fast and plenty of VRAM?

The irony. Even though this bug was identified right away, it not only survived several beta patches, but made it to the stable release. "Fixed internally" implies the next beta patch will fix the bug. People on the stable release trying to avoid annoying bugs stuck may be stuck with this one for awhile.

I have the Rift S, the Quest 2, and currently fly DCS with the Quest 2. Recent patches have killed my DCS performance in VR. I used to be able to fly the G2 locked at 45 fps by forcing motion reprojection on. Without forcing it, the frame rate was inconsistent between 45 and 90 which looked and played bad. But the latest 2.7 releases crippled my performance. I can still get 45 fps if I fly basic instant action missions with no clouds. But to fly the same Korea and Vietnam multiplayer servers I have been flying for many months, I had to lower my DCS graphic settings and lower my G2 from 90 Hz to 60 Hz to attempt to lock my frame rate at 30 fps. Unfortunately, I can't always maintain 30 fps and the game starts stuttering despite displaying 30 fps or shows drops to the 20s and even teens at times. I have been following the forums and it seems the DCS components of my problem are a combination of the clouds (which weren't a problem until after the patch that "fixed" the cloud jitter in VR) and new canopy reflections. But it also seems there may have been a recent Windows 10 patch that has caused some PCs to have performance issues leading Microsoft to offer a rollback app to try to help those affected. I am currently running a Ryzen 5800x with 128 GB of PC3200 RAM, so it is possible something in the AMD drivers isn't playing well with DCS and/or the G2. I need to do some testing with the Quest 2 and Rift S to see if I have the same problems. When I am in game at 30 fps (or less when it gets bad), none of my cpu cores are at 100% capacity and my gpu shows about 50 to 60% capacity with the 8 GB of VRAM pegged to the limit. when I go back to 90 Hz with a locked 45 fps, my GPU starts running between 80-90%. I haven't really been able to get my VRAM to anything less than 8GB and I won't go below medium textures (low makes many cockpits too blurry, even in VR). As soon as new GPUs start showing up at MSRP or used ones at a discounted price, I intend to get either a 3090 RTX or a 6900 XT. The VRAM on the 3090 is very attractive: fast and large. The 6900 XT has better raster performance at the cost of slower and less VRAM. If 6800 XT's show up at a good price, I might settle for one of those due to cost effectiveness over the 6900 XT while still having the same VRAM size and speed.

The previous FW does not trigger this alarm. False or not, something is different about it and windows 10 doesn't like it.

For them to be useful, they need to work identically to PointCTRL: the VR interface is only active for a limited time when you call for it. No matter how well the hand tracking is implemented, if the hands are always active, you will bump controls. In some cockpits, canopy jettison handles and other similar controls are very close to commonly used controls. It is no fun to have your canopy jettison or engine stop or some other catastrophic failure due to the limitations of VR hand tracking. I haven't tried LeapMotion since it was recently integrated, but I used it for a few weeks using the SteamVR implementation. I also tried DCLeap, which does work a lot more like PointCTRL. But whether I used VR hands or DCLeap, the controls were too sloppy/inconsistent, especially when using controls that were low or on the side. Depending on the angles, it would be a struggle getting a particular gesture to be recognized correctly. If you keep your hands high up in front, it works fairly well, but that isn't where most controls are located. To date, PointCTRL is the only one that works well enough for me to endorse it because it was designed explicitly for DCS by someone that actually spends a lot of time playing DCS. Even with PointCTRL, you have to generally look at the control to operate it. If you are in a dogfight, it is much easier to reach blindly for a real-world switch than to take your eyes off of the situation to look at some control you need to operate. My LeapMotion has spent most of its time in a drawer. I might get it out to see how well the new implementation works. But past experience tells me to have low expectations.

Up until very recently, I was flying DCS in VR with a Reverb G2 on an i5 4690K overclocked to 4.4 GHz with a GTX 1080 (8GB of RAM). I could pretty much lock my frame rate at 45 fps. I built a new PC with a 5800X cpu and 128 GB of 3200 RAM, but due to supply and pricing, I am still using the GTX 1080 gpu. The new PC didn't buy me even 1 fps, but it did make my system far more stable with me running SRS, Voice Attack/Vaicom Pro, Discord, and a Simshaker jetseat. After a recent patch, I have had to dramatically reduce my graphics settings and lock my frame rate to 30 fps by choosing the 60 fps setting and forcing motion reprojection. Add in the Marianas map, and my fps drops to 25 and lower. I own every aircraft and terrain except the JF-17. But if this is the future of DCS, I am out of here. I don't need a game that runs like crap on a near top of the line system. I don't even think a better gpu will make much of a difference other than getting more VRAM. It is a sad day for me when FS2020 looks and runs better than DCS in VR on a Reverb G2. I have other games/sims that run fantastic with my system both in VR and on the flat panel monitor. FS2020 is a fairly heavy load, but DCS is the only game/sim that tanks my system. If this is their idea of futureproofing their game, they need to understand that it still needs to be playable in the short term.

Hopefully this isn't a permanent performance drop. I just built a new fast rig and it doesn't really perform any faster than my very old rig, and now it performs even worse.

It seems to be related to the clouds, particularly after the patch that helped reduce the clouds flickering in VR. If I play a mission with no clouds, my system runs as it did before, 45 - 90 fps.

So I have been performing tests all night and found a partial solution. If I drop my base frame rate to 60 Hz and force motion reprojection to lock it at 30 Hz, my frame rate is a solid, stable 30 Hz and I can crank up all of the other quality settings back up to where they were or even a little bit better. Before, I could lock at 45 Hz, which is quite a bit smoother and useful for precision gunnery in dogfights. But the smooth, steady 30 Hz looks a lot better than a jumpy 45 Hz.