Devil 505

Mistermann will really dig hearing this! He puts so much hard time and work into creating this stuff for us. I like providing what insight I can from a technicalish perspective, but the PDF, photos, and all the stuff you see on the user files is him. He also goes above and beyond dumping money into voice overs using some pretty creative AI to give it a more authentic feel. We are always looking to make things better and enjoy providing what we can to the community. Feel free to provide feedback and anything you might enjoy seeing in future stuff. Glad to hear all the hard work and fun we have making this stuff is also bringing good times to other DCS players. Look forward to creating more content down the road for everyone.

Speaking of A-4s! Did a little practice in the Scooter last night. Only my second time doing AAR. Love this mod! And yes, I should have gone around on the carrier landing, but it was late.

Did a quick A-4 practice flight last night. Been a while since I flew the scooter. Only my second time doing AAR. This was a good time.

Absolutely digging the feedback! Mistermann is the master mind behind creating the missions and everything. I help with the story line and test flying. We are both very happy to hear this. I would agree that the Kiowa missions out there are sparse. It has been a blast putting this together and flying it. Coop play was a lot more rewarding than I thought flying in one aircraft. It has really inspired the three of us that fly together. There was a lot of communications going when two were only two Helos. Really drove home the teamwork. We should have the last two missions inbound soon. Real world work has kept us busy.

Back in the OH-6 with the boys (Zipper took the Kiowa). This is still my favorite helo to fly. Looking forward to some good times when Violent Nomad gets his Cobra released. Going to be off the hook. Toyed around with some camera effects in this one. Need to work on getting the Sandy in there next.

Back in the OH-6 with the boys (Zipper took the Kiowa). This is still my favorite helo to fly. Looking forward to some good times when Violent Nomad gets his Cobra released. Going to be off the hook. Toyed around with some camera effects in this one.

Dude! You guys are crushing it!!!!!!!!!!!!! You absolutely need to make a heavy Vietnam Cargo Helo next. I think you guys absolutely need to do a UH-34 next!

Really digging the feedback. It's nice to hear other perspectives as well as experiences with other VR headsets. The market and options are not very big, so the more I hear I read on this forum, the more informed decision I can make when I need to replace the 8K someday. Hopefully by that time, they will have ironed out some of these issues with the CL and we can see how the super turns out. My only concern at this point with the super is if it will require the 2.0 display port. I greatly appreciate the ongoing feedback. Good stuff and I am glad to hear another success story with the CL.

Could not agree more. I was pleasantly surprised to see this and had no idea they monitored these forums for issues. I will not give up on the Light just yet, but will wait to see if QA improves on them. As long as my 8K continues to work, I could not give it up. Good post though! Glad to see you and your team are rockin the headset without issues. Only gives me more hope.

Posted Yesterday from ViolentNomad. The AH-1G looks to be getting closer to release,

Posted Yesterday from ViolentNomad. The AH-1G looks to be getting closer to release,

I was hoping to see if there any future plans for the mod or if she is feature complete. Anyone know?

Much appreciated to both of you for these comments! You have not lost me completely and these two responses have made me feel better about PIMAX. No other VR headset out there as you stated is any better in the FOV department. I would be inclined to give PIMAX another shot and even the light, if the QA improves. I was really hoping my HMD was a one off, but there are so many posts and comments out there like my experience, it really forced me to think twice. No other VR company has yet to sell me on their product. I will continue to monitor and when the sad day comes my 8K finally goes out on me, I will see where you guys are at. You have spoiled me to the 200-degree FOV. LOL. I know people mention the screen door effect, but I do not have that in my 8K. It is still beyond an amazing product. The guys are still flying their 8KX and the OG Crystal and loving theirs as well. Since I have caught your attention, does PIMAX refurbish or work on the older models anymore? Or once they are dead, they are gone? I wish PIMAX the best of luck, thank you for the professional and quick responses, and I will have my eyes on your stuff as always. I have only posted here about my issues with the Light and do not plan on going anywhere else. Just so you know, my 8K is literally used between 4 and 8 hours a week and she is a beast. Sill kicking with 550 cord holding the head strap on and a toothpick to turn the headset on because the rubber power button finally gave way and came off in the headset. She is like a fine wine or an old 79 Ford Bronco you love and get offended at when people talk bad about her. Below was actually a quick flight last night getting reacquainted with the P-51 because it has been a while since I flew WW2 in DCS. Never gets old in VR.

I could not agree more. That is why I have been so disappointed. I am not giving up on them per say, but it will be a while before I go back. A lot of stories like yours are surfacing with the Light. I hope they are reading all this and taking notes. Time will tell. I was hoping PIMAX would create so competition with US VR distributors, but it has not really taken off like I hoped it would. Closest thing I am looking at if not another PIMAX down the road is HTC Vive stuff. Just hoping the 8K stays in the game another few years.

I never wanted to write a review such as this one on a PIMAX headset, but I think it is only fair to the DCS community I provide my perspective if anyone is on the fence about buying a PIMAX Crystal Light or Super. To provide a little background, I have been a PIMAX 8K Kickstarter backer from day 1, receiving my headset over 5 years ago now, almost 6. I have been flying with my 8K ever since while my close friends purchased the 8KX, and then the Crystal prior to Crystal light being released. I have been flying in VR with DCS and only in VR since I received my PIMAX to exceed hundreds if not thousands of hours (maybe embarrassing to say). I have flown the 8KX and the first variation of the Crystal when it released. All fantastic headsets. My 8K recently stopped working which pushed me over the edge into purchasing a Crystal Light. I would like to start by saying the primary reason I went with PIMAX and backed them from the start was the field of view (200 degrees horizontally). A lot of people like to debate this, but I have yet to actually meet someone who owned an 8K or 8KX for any significant amount of time who would honestly say giving up your peripheral field of view is worth gaining the clarity and sharpness at the expense of being placed in a box. To put it into perspective, sitting in your car looking straight over the steering wheel and down your hood, you should be able to see the passenger and out both windows to your left and right. PIMAX pulled this off and did it very well. It easily surpassed any headset on the market at the time in clarity and FOV. I was sold. The lens in the 8K and 8KX allowed this wide field of view. It was not made of glass, but a high-quality plastic of some sort. Still in my 8K, I can sit back and read all instrumentation and MFDs just fine in every module for DCS. I predominantly fly the Hornet, Kiowa, and Phantom right now along with the Cayuse mod but own every module DCS has made. When the 8KX came out, it too had a 200-degree field of view and pretty decent increase in clarity. I flew this over at my buddy's house to test it and loved it. I almost jumped in on getting one, but the Crystal was right around the corner, so I decided to hold off. I held off for the Crystal which my close friend purchased before I pulled the trigger. This was the first iteration of glass lens PIMAX had worked with. The specs on the original Crystal said 120 degrees field of view Horizontally. The clarity was awesome, but this came at two large expenses. It was battery powered with no ability for a direct power attachment to the PC without a DIY solution and you were losing 80 degrees off your field of view. The field of view loss made me wait because PIMAX was already teasing the 12K and stating it would be bigger in FOV than the 8K and 8KX. That leads us to the sad state we are in now with the PIMAX Crystal Light. The 12K got put on the back burner because PIMAX is stating the 12K was struggling meeting the FOV requirements utilizing the new glass. To complicate things, PIMAX is stating the 12K and even possibly the Super light will require a 2.0 display port on your video cards to process more data through the HMD at one time. No NVIDIA card that I can find even carries a 2.0 DP right now and none on the horizon have been teased. AMD is the only brand promoting the 2.0 DP. To top that off, the 5000 series will be the only cards supposedly carrying the 2.0 display ports. Out of pocket for a 12K and possibly the super, you would need to purchase and new card plus the HMD. Not happening for this guy. You would easily surpass the $ threshold of a brand-new top tier computer for the cost of a card and a PIMAX. When my 8K went out (supposedly), I pulled the trigger on the Crystal Light thinking the FOV would be like the original Crystal, only with some amazing clarity brought to the table. I knew I would need to adjust to the 80-degree loss, but I had no other choice really. I had my concerns though with the Crystal Light and those concerns soon met me full force. PIMAX has taken an approach to a one size fits all method to compete wise with the industry and the cost of a headset. I have always lived by the mindset; you get what you pay for. My first concern was the price of the light was significantly lower than the original Crystal which they do not sell anymore. I first wondered how they could produce a superior headset at such a lower cost but include improved technology. On paper PIMAX originally advertised the FOV as the same as the Crystal. In fact, it was another 5-degrees smaller than the Crystal. It may not sound like a lot, but it is, and I will explain. My second concern was the modularity approach they took to the lens. You can now remove the lens yourself and replace them with a different set. I was really concerned with this because I knew any deviation of a lens not seating properly would cause issues visually in the headset. I was glad to see they had included a corded power source again and deviated from the battery. I decided to pull the trigger but still had my hesitations. I wanted to wait on the Super and man, am I glad I did not pull the trigger. Prior to stating my complaints, note, I have and still continue to fly with my 8K and LOVE it. I wish no ill will on PIMAX and hope they can make some better business decisions moving forward, but I cannot support their future line of products with the quality they are producing now. I already had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth with PIMAX customer service prior to the Crystal Light. My backer package was to include 2 controllers and 2 base stations. They decided not to make their proprietary sword controllers because they were struggling to get them to work. PIMAX decided to go with including steam base stations and controllers. When I finally received my base stations and controllers a year after my headset, they sent an old pair of sword controllers that never went into production and 1.0 steam base stations. 1 base station stopped working 3 months in and the controllers were garbage, never tracking or staying on. PIMAX support at the time said they would not replace the base stations, stating I needed to go through Steam. Steam gave me the finger and pointed me back to PIMAX. PIMAX said my original backer was for sword controllers so that's what I got, even though they never made them officially. I finally trashed the controller ad bought my own 2.0 steam base stations because it was going nowhere. I received my Crystal Light in a few weeks and was thoroughly fired up. With the new US distribution centers and improved customer service, I was a little less concerned this go around. Upon opening the box and getting everything plugged in and fired up, I was immediately met with the smallest FOV I have seen in a PIMAX. To put it into perspective, it was only 15 degrees bigger than the original PSVR headset. I honestly thought there was a setting in the PI tool I had inadvertently adjusted to make it small. NOPE, that was the default view. I fired DCS up and had the same settings as my 8K in both the PI Tool and DCS. Prior to the Light, I was running everything smooth as butter in max settings. I have a top end PC with the latest of every piece of hardware. The performance in the light was absolute trash. Stutters in the main menu, jitters in game, unplayable without going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch with every setting in DCS, NVIDIA, and Steam VR. Before I could even become angry with the performance and figure out what was going on, I noticed a terrible vertical distortion that immediately started giving me a headache after 5 minutes of use. After restarting my computer and attempting to trouble shoot the clear disconnect between the two lenses, I noticed while the headset was sitting in my lap, a clear deviation in height between the two lenses. The right lens was sitting significantly higher than the left. I remembered watching a video on changing the lenses with PIMAX and went straight back to YouTube to check it out. You must remove a set screw in each lens after taking the face cushion off and rotate the lens counterclockwise to remove them. You then seat the new lens into place and rotate clockwise to lock them in and screw the setscrew back in. What they had done with mine was not set the right lens into place and just screwed it on while it was not fully seated. I managed to seat the lens, and it was massively loose, clearly not aligning with the left. Nothing I could do would correct the hardware issue. I tried DCS one more time and could not get beyond a cold start in the Hornet before i had to shut it all down because of performance and the lens being off. I contacted PIMAX and wanted to send the entire HMD back the same day for a repair, on a brand new out the box HMD. I suddenly found myself going down the BS rabbit hole with support again asking stupid default questions such as have you tried turning it off and on, unplugging it, ect.... All I wanted to do was send it into a repair station because it was a hardware defect, not software. No dice. Still more questions. I required a cool down period and had to set all of it down. During this time, I plugged my 8K back in and holy S***, it fired up. Not sure how or what happened, but it has been working since. At this point I did not even want to use the Crystal Light anymore. It was absolutely Crystal clear, no pun intended. Beautiful from a clarity standpoint of view. But the construction and all my fears about the lenses and quality of the HMD were coming true. I tried sitting in the F-4 and it was so bad FOV wise, it felt like you were sitting in a small box. It was terrible. 0 peripheral view. You had to turn your head everywhere for the smallest interaction in the cockpit. It felt unnatural. I finally made the call to send the HMD back and get my money back. A few days later, I received a text from my virtual DCS wingman with the article listed below. I was so relieved to see so many others had the same experience I did, and I was not over exaggerating this. I could not in good conscience recommend this headset to anyone unless you are willing to roll the dice dealing with massive performance problems, a significantly smaller field of view, and possible hardware setbacks from the time you open the box. Customer service is not set up to deal with the level of hardware issues coming in on the Crystal Light. How I play even commented in his video today he has had to put his Crystal Light on the shelf because of the performance issues. I do not think this is all ED's fault. I feel between PIMAX's decision to make an all-inclusive one size fits all model and a poor-quality assurance team for mass distribution of production units has caused a severe decrease in their quality. I am also not happy that they are going down significantly in the FOV. This was their bread and butter. My intent with this article was to provide an honest perspective of the Crystal Light and the progression regression of the PIMAX headset. I feel your best bet if you were to invest money would be to find an 8KX. They run amazing on DCS and still provide an experience you will not find in any other VR headset on the market today. I wish PIMAX the best and hope to see them back on the performance train in the future with another wide FOV HMD. If I can answer any other questions regarding PIMAX for the community, please ask. I probably have an answer.

All solid points and much appreciated. Being an owner of the map since day one off the shelf, I totally forgot the OG title was "The Strait of Hormuz". Also, right after posting this, I saw what the plans were for the Iraq map on the first page of the roadmap forum for 2024 and beyond. If my instincts serve me correctly, it appears we will be getting part of the Persian Gulf in the Iraq map. Hopefully to include Kuwait and part of the Gulf to place our carriers. Appreciate the feedback gents. Consider this topic shut down for me.

Looking out for our fellow Virtual Aviators!

@BIGNEWY @NineLine @Wags ED Team, I searched through the PG Map forum and threads and everything seems to be very old and outdated. With the size of every map in DCS seeming to be larger and more fleshed out, is there any chance or thought completing the empty space on the PG map? There is a lot of empty areas where current villages and towns are to include Kuwait. The coast up in the Northwest of the Map could provide some unique Gulf War scenarios but nothing is there. Same with a multitude of other areas. Just looking for some confirmation the map is still considered complete or if there might be some room for further improvements. Much appreciated! I love this map and would love to use the entirety of it.

Absolutely digging the new camo livery with the troops in the back. Is this coming out soon in a future update? Also, any updates on Vietnamese AI assets or any work being done there?

Several things, first and foremost, if you are not already tracking, check out ViolentNomads cobra mod on the way. INSANE job and right there at the same level as the Cayuse. Going to make a great Hunter/Killer team when he gets it released. His latest video just got released today and he has a forum you can follow on here as well as a discord page he keeps updated. Second, you may consider adding the OV-10 Bronco mod to your Vietnam inventory. My buddies and I have been flying a Dynamic Vietnam scenario we put together that has some endless good times to it. We have been utilizing the Cayuse as a scout and having the A-4's, F-4's, and Bronco to strike the locations the scouts are finding. Also have Huey/Cayuse time where tandem in attacks. Videos below. We plan on beefing up the scenario by adding in some more things. We have Air to Air engagements now but also want to add CSAR mission, transport, and SEAD. I was really hopping the WW2 version of the Marianas would make it out this year. We found a way to remove building from the map on the Marianas to make it look more like a sparse jungle. Any Vietnam scenario is a good time to fly in DCS! A lot of good modules on the way. I am counting the days until Heat Blur releases the Intruder.

Absolutely crushing it! I will keep an eye on discord more.

Bignewy, any word on this? It has still not been addressed in the latest patch. Just wondering if there will be a fix anytime soon. I selected the Air Boss station from the role select screen. Cursor will still not show up, even when attempting to turn it on/off. I fly every Thursday with the guys and we are starting up a Hornet Coop campaign. It would be really nice to be able to use the Air Boss station in VR. Right now we can just walk around and look. Any updates would be greatly appreciated.

Looking forward to the flight!

Any chance we might get a brief description of what is to come or possible fixes? Just installed it with the boys and really digging it. Probably going to make a 2006 Campaign with the C, F, and E model. Any chance we would be able to eventually jettison the center line tank? Unless there is a special way, I have not discovered a way to drop it yet. Great work gents! Really digging the feel. Also, stellar job not affecting the base C model from ED.

A video I did a while back flying the 104 in MSFS. I remember this flight wishing someone would bring it to DCS. Really looking forward to getting her in the air for actual intercept missions. Going to be a great addition to our Vietnam scenario we have set up in the Marianas.