Sgt_Baker

You're greedy.

What you don't know, Holton181, is that I've been homeless for the entire duration of uMFCD's development. And had been dragged off to a psych institution "by mistake", according to the institution itself. So perhaps appreciate my irritation when you arbitrarily request a person such as myself, with no money to spare whatsoever, spend $XYZ on your gaming whim.

Do they come with a BV? Otherwise... you know... problems. ;) Looks great!

Now fixed. Included in next release.

Something like that, although I'm leaning more in the direction of a basic/advanced model where you would still have access to the basic feature set for free after a trial period of the full feature set. This of course, will make more sense once the two "big" features in development are revealed. --Baker

Only some changes to the language of the messages I receive in the diagnostics packages, so not the sort of thing that would cause a crash. What were you doing when the crash occurs? Just flying around? Had everything started up as expected? Edit: Yeah, logs and screenies, as always, would be great.

It would just so happen that I'm in the middle of making that happen.

That's good to know. It was always supposed to be something that makes a difference, as opposed to being a flashy gimmick. How's the TEWS behaving, by the way?

Well... I'm presently working on a plan to monetise uMFCD without completely ruining things for people who don't want to pay. Just make it "very compelling", as you say, to hand over a tenner. Once the cash flow is there then things like the Rift are much easier to justify.

Yep, exactly as I indented. :)

What's better than a kneeboard? Two kneeboards. (I'm cheating by leaving the old implementation in place.)

Go go gadget fixing-the-oldest-bug-on-the-books.

Once the fix is implemented, the DCS kneeboard will behave just like any other uMFCD export, and should be available from all aircraft regardless of whether other display exports are implemented for said module.

The fix for this is rather trivial. The reason I've not got around to it yet concerns my mammalian brain. If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. :D

Hi Dan, Yes, it is out intention to support all aircraft. However, I need to drop $300 just to start work on the current unimplemented modules alone, an thus have to look at ways of making uMFCD pay for itself. To put it even more succinctly, the baseline expenses (excluding time and effort) of implementing features requested hitherto is well in the the multiple $1000s. Definitely non-trivial! :) --Baker

Thanks bouncerj21, Owing to human nature, people are far more likely get in touch when there's a problem. I do sometimes wonder whether things are going catastrophically wrong on a broad scale and people are just keeping quiet about it. :) --Baker

Ah yes, I keep meaning to fix this one. What are you using the kneeboard for, out of interest? You are aware that uMFCD comes with a bare-bones implementation of a clickable/draggable kneeboard with all the airport charts? --Baker

Hey Sobe, Still seeing inexplicable strange behaviour, although that was the most comprehensive diagnostic pack generated hitherto. UltraMFCD needs to read a bunch of DCS's files in order to function, yet in your case is simply not reading/seeing some or all of them, seemingly at random. Your DCS log does contain some errors and warning relating to DCS and not uMFCD that we don't usually see from other users. While it's super-invasive, all I can think of at this point is to disable all mods, repair DCS and see whether that works, then reintroduce other mods until something breaks. --Baker

Our eyes look around within the headset, so you'd still need fovea-level resolution within the entire visual frustum presented by the hardware. ;) I know what you mean regarding oldskool VR sims, although I didn't work with those in terms of the sim software. We were an R&D lab working on Gen++++ stereoscopic display hardware, so concentrating much more on the physical and physiological aspects of things.

In other news, and with a wry grin in the direction of my last post, I've started work on network streaming of uMFCD displays. The primary design-driver is to keep latency (that word again) as low as possible. Initial tests appear to thoroughly exceed the inter-system design goal of 20ms passing-encode-transmit-LAN-receive-decode-passoff. Edit: That's PC-PC, not mobile devices. Oh the struggles of paying attention to latency. :)

I agree with you regarding the situational awareness and immersion, and certainly that 2D-tracked solutions come nowhere close. My misgivings concern the visual acuity aspects along with experience regarding that which the brain will readily reject when viewing stereoscopic imagery. The latter being accidental or implicit distortions in the image due to poor rendering design, non-ideal optics in the headset or incorrect stereoscopic setup; lack of ability to focus within the stereoscopic image (which will be a problem for some time to come); and movement-to-rendering time latency, which with current graphics engines can be in the order of 50+ms even on decent systems. All of those factors combine to create the discomfort many people experience while using VR devices. It's just the brain freaking out. Then, from the development perspective, there is the apparent lack of reliable standards for communicating with the headsets themselves. Etc. Etc. I'm not attempting to rain on VR's parade here, but professional experience, from working on military-grade 3D/VR stuff, tells me that I'd be more irritated by current-gen VR than anything else. :) Edit: Regarding the visual acuity aspect, I reckon we'll be cooking with gas once headsets and graphics cards are pushing out >4K (3840x2160) per eye at 10-ish ms latencies and framerates of >60Hz

Is anybody else experiencing strange sometimes-nearly-works, sometimes-not-at-all, sometimes-glimmers-of-hope-but-no-cigar behaviour along the lines of that reported by Sobe? Sobe, As it stands the diag packages are plain strange. The only thing I can obviously identify at the moment is that your system barely meets the minimum requirements for running DCS, let alone uMFCD alongside it, which does require extra CPU/GPU/RAM on top of that which DCS gobbles up. There are no obvious errors in the logs per se - just that things grind to a complete halt early on and never seem to recover. Most of the time I'm not even receiving the basics, such as the DCS log file, let alone the automated diagnostics from other processes such as looking at your monitor setup, export.lua etc. A couple of things I can't see/you might want to try (and apologies if I've asked this already): Are there any errors in the Windows Event Log when attempting to launch DCS with uMFCD? Are you running any Antivirus software, and if so which one? Quit everything else imaginable to free up ram before attempting a run. Look at the Task Manager's performance section. Is the system's memory use exceeding your 8GB of RAM and/or are the CPU cores pegged at something close to 100%? Does temporarily disabling TACVIEW and other export related stuff (rename your export.lua to export.lua.switchedoff) change anything? --Baker

Hmm. It might still be a manifestation of the same problem as before... just less crashy. This is what these beta tests are all about. When I said I was able to reproduce the issue, I actually meant that I was simulating it as it doesn't manifest directly on my system. Did you use the exact same steps to produce those four diag packages? They are respectively missing vital bits/pieces/steps. Could we take this over the the uMFCD forum so I can have you quick-test some potential fixes in short order at a time of your convenience? --Baker

From a theoretical standpoint the rendering of stereoscopic content is remarkably easy. The devil, however, is in the details of how that is achieved both by DCS and supported by whatever headset/API might be in use. I'd give it a shot if I had an Oculus Rift, but with my previous experience in this industry I'm not about to rush out to buy one. The technology is still a few generations away from the maturity required to match even the stuff I was doing back in the early 2000s, so it'd really be a speculative purchase to answer this question as opposed to something I'd frequently use. Have ED ever released details of the number of Rift users in this ecosystem? --Baker

UltraMFCD 2.6.8 Beta now available here: http://forum.ultramfcd.com/posts/m389-UltraMFCD-Beta-2-6-8#post389 Changelog: NEW: F-15C TEWS export now included. IMPROVED: Better handling of notifications regarding DCS settings. FIXED: Serious crash where uMFCD would complain about "unknown MonitorSetup.lua" and "SharpDX.Desktop.dll fle not found" now, finally, resolved. Known issues: F-15C TEWS will not function on multiplayer servers where "Sensor Export" is disabled.