streakeagle

I have an IPD of 62-63, so I don't have to worry about the problem of mechanical versus virtual IPD adjustment. The Rift S was an incredible improvement in visual quality/performance over the CV1. But there were drawbacks: 1) Inferior built-in audio. The open ear headset wastes power spreading it out in all directions, so you need higher volume settings with lower fidelity to hear well. If you just cup your hands over your ears, you can see how much better it could sound. My mic won't stay active. So, I end up wearing a full headset to get a good mic and audio at a cost of comfort and weight. 2) Lower fps with 40/80 instead of CV1's 45/90. If I could fly DCS at 80 fps, this wouldn't matter as much, but the difference between 40 and 45 is noticeable to me. But if I have to pay 5 fps to get both smoother and higher quality visuals, so be it. I can actually see clearly enough in most cockpits with the Rift S, not so with the CV1. 3) While I seldom have problems with the inside-out tracking while wearing the headset, I frequently have problems when I take it off to get a drink or go to the desktop for a moment. It loses track in such a way that it requires recalibration of the floor level. I normally leave the batteries out of the touch controllers. But I have to stop whatever I am doing, put a battery in a controller, then work through the recalibration pop-ups to go back to flying. If I forget to take the battery out, I end up with another dead battery.

I recently got a winwing HOTAS. I got the package that came with the desk mounts for the throttle and stick. This has proven to be instrumental in making progress on my F-4 throttle, because now the left console has been replaced by the desk mounted throttle pulled out of service to install the real throttle quadrant. But it just hit me: I can do the same for the stick. I can adapt the desk mount to my VKB GF base so that I can remount the F-4 stick back on the wood platform with the ejection seat. I have a spare Warthog stick base I can easily use to provide the pitch axis. I hope I can figure out a way to use the same base for the roll axis. If not, I have another base available that can be mounted as necessary to mechanically connect to the roll. I can also disassemble the extra warthog grip and wire my f-4 stick buttons to it, plus have several spares left over for other functions... say a tail hook lever? ejection handle? Whatever I need that won't get in the way of anything else. I intend to use the Warthog throttle to receive the real throttle lever inputs. I haven't decided whether I am going to use the throttle to provide the button inputs or use my old BU0836X board. I don't know when I will get around to putting this all together. I need a day or two just to get the real throttle mounted at the right position/height to fit with the surrounding panels I previously installed. I think I already have all the materials I need to do this out in the garage: wood, lengths of angled aluminum that can be cut to make mounting brackets and/or braces as required. I have a clear vision of where I am trying to go. I now have a clear vision of how I am going to get there. Now, I just need to carve out the time to execute the plan. I recently got TM TPR pedals in preparation for completing my F-4 cockpit. They are a reasonable representation of the physical appearance and mechanical action of F-4 rudder pedals. I still have my old Saitek rudder pedals, but I would only use them again as a last resort. I am thinking I need a set of Slaw pedals for the modern/generic desk pit and dedicate the TPR pedals to my F-4 sim pit. The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades B) Now, if ED or one of the third parties would give me a DCS F-4. I have tried flying the very well modeled F-4s from Milviz and Simworks in P3d, but I can't stand the FSX/P3d platform compared to dedicated combat flight sims. By default, the Thirdwire Strike Fighters series remains the best combat sim for flying F-4s, but it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the FSX/P3d side. DCS sits in the middle with more or less the same combat simulation capabilities of the SF series and at the same time all the eye candy and systems modeling of P3d. I would hope that Heatblur would do a Naval F-4 variant due to their experience with the very similar F-14A/B: two seat all-weather fleet defense interceptor. I would love any variant flown by the USN VFs: F-4B/N or F-4J/S series. I don't know how ED will approach the long-delayed F-4E. They don't have any two-seaters unless you count the helicopters, which don't have anything close to Jester AI. My experience in P3d is that modern HOTAS controls provide more than enough for me to operate the radar from the front seat. I just need a moment in the back seat for making detailed search mode selections, but can change the range scale and lock onto targets just fine from the front seat thanks to HOTAS analog ministicks and countless buttons that are free to assign because the F-4 had only very basic HOTAS switches.

When Rift first came out, you could disable the oculus app from starting and still play DCS. But they patched that capability away. I have been experimenting with the Ultraleap Leap Motion VR hand tracking and it won't work with Oculus, so I have to force SteamVR to see my hands in-game. So now I have not one, but two VR apps running plus the leap motion driver and if I use DCSLeap, then I have four things running just while playing DCS World. I would love it if VR was more like a mouse, monitor, or HOTAS where you don't need any interposing apps to use them. But the VR people need to market their games and Oculus is kind of the Apple of VR: they want you in their environment using their software not just selling you the hardware.

I would love to try one. If I liked it, I would buy it.

Twist grip would be the bomb. I can't wait to see everything you will have for sale in your shop. It is good to see you didn't give up and are on the verge of releasing really cool stuff for us combat flight sim addicts!

Paper specs look nice, but how does well does it play DCS? and how much do the various models cost?

It is working a lot better than the last time I used it. Part of that might be the SteamVR driver modifications referenced in an earlier post that got the controllers/hands aligned more correctly. I have a lot of difficulty getting a response to pulling the trigger or pinching. When I show hands, I can see the correct gesture, but it won't "click"... but then while I am struggling to get it working, it will click... and on the wrong thing. It is partially a function of what area I am trying to work (left/center/right and high/center/low) and the size of the trigger areas for that particular switch/button/lever. Some controls I can operate perfectly and others I have to struggle long and hard to move the switch/turn the knob. I still find the gloved VR hand controllers built in to DCS World VR settings a lot smoother and more intuitive. I can be much more precise and can easily tell whether my hands are being recognized correctly or not. But neither one is reliable enough for me to use regularly. Too much time trying to move small switches/buttons that I can hit instantly using a mouse. Too many accidental switch/button presses while struggling to press the right one or while simply looking around while my hands are on the stick and throttle. I need something that doesn't lose track and clicks exactly where and when I want it to click. I had my VR hands gut stuck holding the stick. They wouldn't move the stick, but they wouldn't let go either. Not sure what I did, but I got my left hand stuck while unsticking my right hand. Some gesture/position got me stuck and some other gesture/position got me unstuck.

I got overwhelmed by the new patch yesterday: P-47, channel terrain, and MiG-21 updates. I spent most of the night playing with the P-47. Maybe tonight I will have time to try this out again.

If you want to see the pressure indicate correctly, put the flaps lever to neutral before you start pumping. From a cold start, the flaps are drooping all the way down. With the lever in the "up" position, the flaps will be soaking up all that hydraulic pressure. With flap lever placed in the neutral position, the pressure charges up and you can move the cowl flaps.

This aircraft is so frustrating. I got the Wingwing Hornet throttle and have a 3-position switch assigned to the landing lights, but it doesn't work. Back to using the toggle function I was stuck with on the Warthog throttle. Patches don't improve the MiG-21bis, they at best change what is broken :(

I downloaded and installed it, but it is too late for me to play with it tonight. I will try it out tomorrow and provide feedback.

I hate using key mapping because it can result in conflicts. That is one reason I never used Target. There were never enough dx buttons available to cover the virtual combined stick/throttle controller and pushing different buttons with key maps could result in unwanted behavior. The VKB configurations software works the way I would prefer: I make the changes I would like using the full range of available DX button assignments, then burn it into the firmware of the stick, so no software additional software needs to be running to utilize my custom configurations. I haven't played with the SimAppPro to see what I can do, but I am guessing it needs to be running to use its custom configuration options?

Nice setup!

It is really nice to have dx buttons triggered by the off or center positions of switches. Much more flexible than the Warthog throttle when dealing with the random switch mapping strategies of the different DCS aircraft modules. There are a couple of areas where I don't get a dx button indication but would have liked one: 1) the idle finger lifts. It's only use is to animate them in the game, but they did so for the friction lever, so why not the finger lifts? The DCS Hornet has inputs mapped for them. 2) the idle cutoff switches. When you go to idle, you get a button, but when you leave idle, there is not dx button for this "off" position. Some aircraft need a button that tells it the throttle is no longer in idle, some even have two positions other than idle stop. In many cases, I can use an LUA script to make the single button cause the desired action when it turns off. But if I simply had a dx button that went high when the throttle is not at cutoff, that would be one less script I would have to update after every patch. The only other thing I might ask for are two buttons reporting the opened/closed status of the generator switch cover that has been discussed quite a bit in its own topic. The Wingwing throttle out of the box without using any software is everything I would have hoped it would be. The above two complaints only arise out of seeing what they already did with all of the other switches, knobs, etc. There is a small penalty for swapping to out the Warthog throttle for the Hornet throttle: the available controls and their physical arrangement on the grips are substantially different. The only way to really solve this would be to have multiple sets of throttle grips depending on the aircraft type, much as I have been able to do with the stick grips.

I used my TM Warthog stick and throttle without Target. The only thing missing were off positions of two way and three way toggle switches. I used LUA edits to solve that for modules that didn't provide mappings that supported the Warthog's throttle switches. The Wingwing Hornet throttle and startup panels have dx buttons for nearly every single thing. There are more than 32 buttons, so you can't see them all in the windows game controller tool. But DCS World sees everything. What SimAppPro gives you are a lot of options in case you want things different than default. You can do all kinds of crazy customization with it. It is about as powerful/useful of writing your own Target scripts. I did't need Target and so far I don't need this. You can get some idea about the kinds of things people are doing/problems they are solving by using SimAppPro by reading some of the posts withing this forum. A good case is the lack of a switch to sense the position of the generator switch cover. The game won't let you move the switch until you open the cover. So it is important for the game to know that you want the cover open so that you can use the switch at will without having to press a key or use the mouse. With a little work, SimAppPro can be used to generate the inputs needed to have the cover open and close automatically when you move the generator toggle switch.

Still doesn't solve the problem of where to put them. They do need a line of sight. I have a large TV for a monitor and the positions to either side get obstructed by the TV. Positions to the rear get obstructed by my mock-up of an F-4 ejection seat. The inside out cameras cause me zero problems... unless I put the headset somewhere where it can't see and it decides it need to reset the floor level. Base stations also chew up communication bandwidth. With the Rift S: one USB connection and one display port connection. If the Galaxy matched the performance and quality of the Rift S, I would use it since Oculus is maxing out there development efforts on improving the Galaxy, including the recent adoption of hand tracking... which base stations won't do. If the Rift S had the mic and earphones of the CV1 and get the hand tracking of the galaxy, it would keep my happy for awhile. As it stands, I have a headset that fits over the Rift S with good audio and a nice mic and Leap Motion hand tracking that is working remarkably well for being shoe-horned in with modded SteamVR drivers. Give me a VR headset that has better resolution, wider field of view, runs a steady 80-90 fps in DCS World with existing hardware, and a price under $1,000, and I will buy it. But it doesn't exist.

That is an awesome setup. I hope to approach this quality level at some point over the next few years.

Despite the requirement for good lighting, I much prefer the camera tracking as opposed to having to find good locations for the base stations and trying not to bump them. I have an upstairs bonus room with an otherwise 1-story home, so I can keep the light at bright as I want. Whereas, bright light coming in the windows from the sun would mess up my TrackIR and even possibly interfere with the CV1 tracking. So, I am very happy with inside out tracking. As for the mic, mine works after you unplug and re-plug in the USB cable, but stops working shortly after using any application that uses the mic. Every now and then it will work for a long time until the next firmware update resets it back to the "normal" behavior. The CV1 never gave me any trouble with the mic. Overall, I much preferred the audio on the CV1. With the Rift S, I have to wear a headset to get both the good stereo sound and a stable mic. Oculus' fixation on the Galaxy and ignoring the needs of PC gamers, particularly flight simmers like us has me looking elsewhere for my next headset. But it won't do me any good to buy a better headset until cpus and gpus make some kind of performance jump. I am trying to be patient and get a good return on my money.

I am 100% with you one this. CaptoGlove would be in my home right now if I saw others had it working correctly. I would have worked overtime to buy it. As it stands, I have Ultraleap/Leap Motion now and have most of the capability CaptoGlove promised minus the virtual hands being connected to the virtual pilot's arms at a fraction of the price. I have a Rift S. I don't see a reason to buy anything better because there isn't a PC out there that can give me a better experience no matter how much better the VR headset is than the Rift S. The Varjo promises to deliver the kind of image quality I would love, but it comes with three big costs: 1) A lot of money 2) It will run like a slide show with even the best hardware available if you try to use that quality with DCS World 3) The field of view is far from impressive for that price tag. I want to see VR get the pixels per degree up so high that it is considered a "retina display". I want to see VR get a field of view so wide that it matches or exceeds my peripheral vision so that I don't fee like I am looking through a tube. I want to see the hardware, drivers, and other assisting tech like eye tracking reach a point where I can have the first two items and still have a stable frame rate at 90fps or better. I want to see all of this available at a price the average consumer can afford so that VR becomes as big a deal as it would be if all of the above were true. In the mean time, a $6,000 head set that will look no better than my Rift S if I lower my settings enough to get playable frame rates is not happening for me.

SimAppPro has been stable and worked fined for me, but it has two problems that keep me from using it: 1) It wants to startup up with Windows no matter what I set the preference to, so I had to disable startup through the Windows task manager... no biggie, but annoying. 2) It wants to phone home. Why on earth would I need a joystick configuration program that wants to be online 24/7? Checking for updates and having the option to scope out cloud profiles is nice, but it doesn't require a continuous connection to the internet. Combined with the always starts with windows problem, it leaves me somewhat suspicious. I have run DCS World with and without SimAppPro. If the only difference is whether the APU light turns on and off when flying the Hornet, I can live without it. I don't need any fancy macros. I tend to edit DCS input LUA files when I need customization. So it is a cool looking app and can do a lot, but I simply don't need it to enjoy my throttle and startup panel.

I will try it out. If capto gloves were working correctly, I would have bought them... especially since they had the option to connect to the arms of the virtual pilot. But Leap Motion (now known as Ultraleap) is working fairly well and more practical. But without haptic feedback to let you know when you are in proximity of a switch, it can be very dangerous. Accidently dropping the landing gear at high speed or other such fun inadvertent button/lever pushes. <edit>These modified drivers work a lot better. I can see my hands in SteamVR and they work fairly well in DCS World. It definitely takes some practice to get used to the limitations of the field of view of the leap motion sensor and its ability to see your hands well enough when looking down and to the sides. I inadvertently was moving the radio volume knob on the MiG-21bis. It is on the right hand side near the switches I was turning on during startup. While experimenting with the knob trying to perfect setting it at minimum, mid-range, and maximum, I hit the canopy jettison control... oops! I quickly got pretty good at toggling switches, but pushing buttons that need to be held in for a few seconds is a little trickier. I got the MiG-21bis started up 100% using VR hands, got permission to takeoff and was just about to push the throttle forward when DCS crashed. Running SteamVR on top of Oculus with LeapMotion as well has having VoiceAttack/Vaicom Pro and SimShaker (vibrating seat) running in parallel is a bit much on the system. It seemed like it crashed when I glanced down. Leap motion doesn't seem to like my looking anywhere but mostly straight ahead and level, whereas lowering my head, especially to the sides where I have physical barriers, gives it trouble seeing and recognizing the hand position and shape.

In the VR settings for DCS World, you can enable VR hands for VR controllers. I am forcing SteamVR and using the drivers I installed to support DCSLeap, so Leap Motion makes my hands show up as HTC Vive Controllers in SteamVR. So: I have Leap Motion and SteamVR running, but not DCSLeap, then I enable hands in the DCS World VR settings, I see the same hands I would see if I was running Oculus with Touch Controllers. Only the hands follow my hands and the index finger follows my index finger. The VR hands do not quite match the orientation of my real hands, but it is more than close enough. The nice thing is if my hands go out of view of the leap motion sensor, they disappear from the screen. This makes it easier to manage: i.e. avoid bumping switches/levers while using the HOTAS or the mouse. It would be cool if the hands could be turned on and off at will, like a PTT button. So that when I don't want them floating around bumping things, they are invisible. Imagine a toggle function: when you have a pilot body visible, you press a key or button and the hands rest on the throttle and stick. Bump the key/button again, and the hands follow your real hands. That is what I would love to see. What I have right now is pretty close minus the connection to the virtual pilot's arms/hands. What you lose by not running DCSLeap are the gestures and the simplified capability of the DCS hands that have trouble doing much more than toggling switches and pushing buttons. If I could have the virtual hands AND the gestures along with a single toggle function to turn both on/off, that would be awesome.

I tried using the DCS World VR hands instead of DCLeap. I found it much easier to use, no tuning necessary. I could push buttons with my fingertips and use the palm-up/palm-down to switch between left and right mouse button. I was in an F-14 and was able to reach around and flip the ejection seat switch using my left finger to push it. The experience was very close to what I would have wanted with capto-gloves. If I could just connect the virtual pilot to my VR hands, it would really be cool. I also could use the mouse without having to <CTRL><ESC> to shut down DCSLeap, and then could transition back to virtual hands at my leisure.

I have the in-game cursor more-or-less following my hand, but I need to tune the settings to get it smooth and predictable. Right now, I struggle to move the switch/lever I am targeting, but bump all kinds of things accidently while looking around. It is sad and disappointing to see how well my hands are tracked in the leap motion visualizer but all I can do in the game is mouse emulation... much like TrackIR in mouse emulation mode, close but no cigar. DCS needs native support for Leap Motion. It could work really well with what was intended for capto gloves.

Leap Motion has my hands show up as controllers in SteamVR and I can show hands. But once I start DCSLeap, the mouse cursor mainly reacts to my head position, not my hands. I have zero control. It overrides my real mouse, so the only way I can do anything is to use the oculus controller to kill steamvr to give me back mouse control. Of course Oculus decides to send an update on the night I get my Leap Motion control.