TripRodriguez

You all may want to watch this video starting at the linked time stamp: The forum youtube embed feature seems to be broken. Hopefully it will fix itself but for now, here is the address: 8K X is a go if you are willing to skip a mortgage payment or two! I already ordered mine, I'm sure I can make the payments if I turn off the heat and don't eat food for a few months.

Norm, I imagine you are a bit gun shy after all the noise about that last go-round, but is there any chance you could tell us a little something about how the Vulcan thing is coming along? Is it looking like there's a good chance it will happen this year? If yes, any chance it might make it in H1? A lot of people expect Vulcan to be a magic bullet. I don't know anything about game engines and such but I do not believe in magic bullets. Hopefully the improvement will be pretty significant, but I wish folks would keep their expectations reasonable. With enough hype, disappointment can be guaranteed!

Hey guys. Just wondering if anyone has the 8K Plus and could share their experience with it. In particular I'd like to know about how well you can read smaller gauges and see things in the distance. Also there's that shimmering effect in DCS. Trees especially, it drives me nuts. I run all of the AA types and Anisotropic Filtering all maxed out and it's still there big time. I'm hoping the 8K will reduce that quite a bit. I ordered the 8K X so I've got to wait a while yet before I can try it for myself but if anyone has the 8K Plus that's the same as the "X" in upscale mode. So far I've used DK2, CV1, OG Vive, Index, and for a few days reverb and it's always there. It was a bit better on Reverb but not gone.

Here's the first sample panels off the laser. Laser cut and laser engraved.

Greetings friends. I've always been pretty anti-Facebook but this past year I've learned that "Facebook Groups" can be a fantastic resource. I've joined various simulator groups and a couple of DCS World groups and I've really been enjoying them. I'd love to have a group to chat about DCS simulator cockpits, share our builds, and help one another with advice. I would expect this group to probably stay pretty small, and I'm not at all sure there will be any interest but I created it to see if anyone chooses to join up. I'm looking for you guys to submit images I may use for the group banner art at the top of the page. The ideal size is 1640 x 856 My cockpit build is not far enough along to provide an attractive banner for the group so for now the banner is just the default one from Facebook. I'd also be very happy for any volunteers to moderate and manage the group if it gets to where there are more members than just me. :lol: Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dcsworldsimpits/

All RTX owners and prospective RTX owners please join me in emailing Nvidia requesting that DCS World be added as soon as possible. There are lots of us, and we flight simmers need it more than anyone else!

Hey guys, I'm re-evaluating some of my simulator plans before I commit 100% and wanted to check out what is possible using projectors instead of VR. Apologies if this has already come up, I have to admit I was unwilling to read 14 pages that might not answer my question as I sit here under a blanket with a nasty cold and headache. =( Are any of you using 3D projectors with curved screens? What are the results like? I would think that with current technology it should be possible to get similar results to VR but with a real simulator cockpit by using 3D projectors with 3D glasses for the outside world, HUD etc and have the HUD etc. appear as it should, where it should due to the 3D effect. Does this work?

That sounds like exactly what I've been asking for! I hope it can support vive trackers in addition to Leap Motion though, trackers definitely have 1:1 tracking. Even better the upcoming Quest hand tracking which I was able to semi-verify will be 1:1. I also tested with my Leap motion and isn't 1:1 but the dev may be able to correct it. Do you have a link? This is super exciting.

I thought the passthrough was non-stereo at launch on both HMD's, my mistake apparently that only applied to Quest. All the rest is fantastic info and sounds promising, thanks!

Just a quick update. I was able to do a little test of Passthrough plus and this concept is definitely viable. Of course if we could use Quest hand tracking to draw VR hands that would be even better but we have every reason to believe that even if ED does implement the Quest hand tracking feature (which they absolutely positively SHOULD as it's perfect for cockpit use) we will probably have issues with the VR software activating switches and knobs through it's capabilities while we are trying to operate real life switches and knobs. So that means that the method I described here is the more viable one. I tested it, and it works. There is a problem though. The passthrough doesn't start coming on until you've passed through the actual boundary and there's no way to make the boundary invisible. This means either you have to lean forward pretty far, or you will be seeing the holodeck grid continously while flying which would royally suck. Hell it's bad enough that you'll see the grid when you reach for controls. That bit will probably only be really bad in low light conditions. For me this may be a much bigger problem since I'm strapped into a four point harness while flying. I might be able to do a quick release kinda thing though. Depending on how things work out I might be putting this into practice and if I do I'll certainly post about it and probably do a youtube video. Quick disclaimer, I tested this with a Quest so I was not able to do it with DCS running on the HMD. I did it with a Quest game running while sitting in my cockpit just to get proof of concept.

Couldn't agree more. It's really a shame there doesn't seem to be a way to get in direct contact with ED about this. I'm sure it doesn't help that so few are complaining. Because DCS's VR hand controller implementation is terrible almost nobody uses it, and because almost nobody uses it ED doesn't seem to think it's worth putting any effort into it. How to break the cycle?

Only had one, but that was more than enough! I thought I was being wise not doing it until my mid thirties, turns out "wise" is not doing it at all! =P The reason I pluralized it is that my various friends wives/girlfriends also thought it was intolerable. Also, if anyone is paying attention, this project is once again delayed. This time it's for a good reason! I'm building a new motion simulator with commercial servos and home built linear actuators that will be a huge upgrade, and also almost completely eliminate that noise I was describing. I should be able to make it silky smooth, it will be even more powerful, and it will have even more travel, not that the old one was lacking in that regard. The first motion sim is great for racing, but I've never been able to get it smooth enough to satisfy me for flight which is my main passion. The problem is the backlash in the worm drives and also just he geometry of rotary actuator driven Stewart platforms. Most people who've flown it think I'm being way too picky but I know what flight feels like and sharp little bumps ruin my immersion! I'm going to prep the sim to put it up for sale as a ready-to-go 6DOF racing sim. It's excellent for that. In the meantime I've ordered the six servos and the controller. I need to pay some of that off before I'm willing to order the rest of the parts though.

Thanks for the reply PolyChop! I feel like that is a satisfactorily direct answer and very encouraging! I very much appreciate the move to transparency, and I was very happy to hear that you guys intend to continue to produce DCS Helicopter modules going forward. Now if only I could convince the entire DCS community that vintage helicopters are more fun than modern ones with SAS and Autopilot. :smilewink:

<--- Please watch this DFTC, Polychop, and others. Sorry, I'm not going to pull punches here. If you look at my posting history you will see I'm am a very polite person. I'm not trying to be nasty or mean. I just want to be honest with Polychop and have them be honest with us so we wind up with a Gazelle and Kiowa that are as good as the other DCS helos. This beating around the bush is pointless. We aren't doing Polychop any favors by trying not to hurt their feelings. Let's be honest so that Polychop can recover from the Gazelle and sell lots of copies of their modules. I want to buy the Kiowa, so I want to help make sure things go in a direction that will make that happen. Another video I once saw showed that the Gazelle remained perfectly flat during pick-up rather than have one side hanging low like it should. Not sure if that was ever fixed, but I'd guess not. There is some discussion of the issues here: https://forums.mudspike.com/t/is-the-gazelle-worth-buying/3987/5 There's lots of discussion of this topic on the ED forums and elsewhere, but naturally you have to sort through the posts by folks who were in error and find the ones with legitimate problems being discussed by knowledgeable persons and real pilots.

Dear Polychop, I very much appreciate your recent post. I hope that you are able to follow through and make some of the best Helicopter sims available. I have a request, or perhaps it's a suggestion, for you. Please admit and acknowledge that the Gazelle flight model was never what it should be as an official DCS module. Bugs are a big problem, yes, but regardless of bug fixes if the flight model is not nearly on par with the DCS UH-1H and Mi-8 we helicopter enthusiasts are going to continue to complain loudly and tell others to steer clear of this product. We want an authentic flight model that is as correct as possible and feels "right". I sincerely hope you are able to deliver this! I promise that if you get the Gazelle up to the quality bar set by those other DCS Helicopters I will purchase the Kiowa immediately upon release at full price. I'd bet that there are a whole lot of other rotary wing enthusiasts who feel the same way. It's not just that we want the Kiowa, we desperately want to support developers who are truly supporting and advancing our hobby. If you fall into that category, we want to give you money so you continue to develop for us. Thank you for your time and consideration, Trip

@BlimpyBoy thanks for posting. I'm going to try to get the facebook DCS VR group on this topic. This is infuriating and I can't imagine anyone is using it this way. I bet ED will say nobody uses the VR controller support so it's not worth working on. Nobody uses it because they haven't put in the effort to make it work well! Not to sound like a broken record but XP11 has fantastic VR controller support so I don't want to hear excuses that it can't be made to work well.

Happy to help! Maybe I'll see you over there. The whole "Euler angles don't matter/gravity doesn't exist" discussion melted most of our brains when Dirty first brought it to us! I argued with him a bit myself but once I came to understand it, it was a revelation. Short version is that you ignore gravity by not using Euler angles to drive the sim, but gravity is modeled as a 1G acceleration toward earth instead, compounding properly with all the other forces simulated to give the best results. This avoids a LOT of the false cues we've all been putting up with.

My process was the same for my Huey pit, but my muscle memory is nowhere near accurate enough to be able to touch a switch or knob when I can't see where my hand is relative to it. This is why I need to be able to see my hands in VR. It's not that I don't know where the switch or knob is, it's that I don't know where my hand is!

Ah ok, since you mentioned Curtis I assumed you were looking for the same functionality I had been working with Curtis to try to achieve. All I want is to be able to see (in the VR HMD) where my hands are, so I can reach out and touch the real controls without having to feel around for them. I'd completed proof of concept, it works. So I just want SteamVR to draw VR hands where my real hands are. Nothing else. Currently I have it working, only catch being that instead of drawing hands it's drawing VR controllers. For SteamVR to know where my hands are I'm wearing gloves with Vive Trackers mounted to the backs of the hands so they don't interfere at all with operating my cockpit controls.

Rolluptito, truly great strides have been made in improving this situation over on the SimTools forums. There are now two options for getting proper motion cues without the inversion issues etc. They also work "correctly" in that Euler angles are not misused by these plugins as they are in most hobby level softwares. Here are the threads for the two things you will want to check out: FlyPT Mover- This has a standalone DCS mode that doesn't even require SimTools, or you can use it with SimTools. https://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/flypt-mover-interface.13464/ Dirty's Plugin- Eventually this will be another standalone software, but for not Dirty has made an export.LUA and a modified version of the standard SimTools DCS Plugin to remedy these issues. Dirty has probably the best understanding of proper motion cues for flight in the entire community. He is a genuine commercial pilot so he has a lot of real experience to draw from. https://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/experimental-dcs-plugin-ready-for-testing.13560/page-5#post-185166 and more in depth discussion of the how and why: https://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/writing-a-motion-cueing-software-from-scratch.13108/

Yes I hit a bit of a dead end there too. So far you are the first to join me in this. Let me tell you the current state of things. There is a plugin for SteamVR called OpenVRInputEmulator. The problem is that it was abandoned by the dev. So far the community has been able to keep it working with band-aids but eventually Steam will break it badly and we are going to need a new dev. No luck finding one so far. Anyway, for now it works! So one of the features is "render model" where you can have SteamVR draw a 3D model attached to whatever device, in this case Vive Trackers mounted to the backs of my hands. Problem is there is no compatible glove or hand 3D model available. SteamVR is very very picky, to the point where most hobby modelers find it too aggravating to deal with. So for now my only option is to draw a controller attached to it which works but not exactly immersive! So we need to get someone to make a glove or hand model that works. I have contact with a guy who has successfully made 3D models for SteamVR. He can't do animations, just a static model but for me that's good enough. He is a busy guy though, so I'd been thinking about trying to offer him a little money just to make a hand or glove model work for me but I can't afford much. Maybe if you and I both chip in? You can PM me if this sounds like something you want to pursue.

I checked out that route, it's a no-go. There's not enough bandwidth available for a decent webcam video feed. Also, it would require a super wide angle webcam.

Yes that's the clearly viable option. This thread is 100% about dealing with full "replica" sim cockpits though. By the way, when you tried the Oculus Passthrough was it Rift S "passthrough plus" with the proper 3D stereoscopic view? This was a patch that came out some time after Rift S launch. The reason I'd like this tested is "passthrough plus" is apparently light years ahead of the other passthrough systems with the possible exception of Vive Pro "flashlight" mode which I never got to try.

I see you are rocking the Pimax 5K+ Battis. I'm sure if I got a Pimax wide FOV I wouldn't be able to go back either. I think that if Pimax added good controller free hand tracking I'd make the jump. I've come very, very close several times as it is. There are so many factors involved in my choosing what VR system to use. For the past couple years with my motion sim setup using Lighthouse has been mandatory for head tracking to work properly so I was limited to Lighthouse based VR sets which I don't mind because I think Lighthouse tracking is super easy to set up and ultra accurate. Now I'm looking at making changes that will kinda reverse the situation and make HMD's with no base stations work better for my rig. In a way I wouldn't mind going back to Oculus (though I'm ashamed to admit it) because it would give me back trouble-free access to Oculus exclusive content much of which is among the best VR content there is. I would feel like a filthy traitor though, because I totally disapprove of Oculus trying to force people to buy their HMD's by making so many games exclusive. I'm prepared to rationalize myself into it though! I can just keep repeating in my head to forget about Facebook's involvement and consider myself a customer of John Carmack if I go back to Oculus. =P

Hey guys, I'm too busy to do much with the sim currently but still have lots of things rolling around in my head. If anyone has Rift S and a cockpit I'd appreciate it if you'd do a little test for me... or maybe this is something that you already thought of and started using... I'm HF Autistic so my hand eye coordination is pretty poor to begin with. Put a VR HMD on my face and it's god awful which means fumbling around trying to find a switch that is right in front of my face even when the real life switch is aligned precisely with the VR one because I can't see where my hand is relative to it. This kills my immersion and I've been looking for a really good solution for a couple years now. The Rift S "Passthrough Plus" looks like a possible solution.. here is what I have in mind. Set up your Oculus Guardian boundary so it's maybe halfway between your face and your panels. To see the real life cockpit, lean forward until your Passthrough Plus kicks in and you can now see all your switches and such. The idea basically is just to lean forward for just a moment to get the passthrough and put your hand on the control then go back into the VR view to see your instruments etc. I think this should work, the only problem might be the holodeck boundary popping up. Can you reduce it's opacity or make it invisible but still have it trigger the passthrough camera mode? I think once the Quest PC link comes out I'm going to order one and see if I can make it work for me but I'm dying to know if this is a good idea. The passthrough camera mode on my Index is beyond awful, totally useless. Due to planned changes to my simulator (I intend to build a nice G-seat) I think I'll be able to set it up to work well with a base station free VR system which hasn't been an option due to the large range of motion of my sim. I'm almost tempted to try a Rift S, but between the fact that I know from DK2 that my IPD of 67.5 will cause eye strain without a physical IPD adjustment, and because Quest is getting hand tracking which I'm hoping for good DCS implementation of, and Oculus looks like they might be intentionally holding out on giving Rift S that feature to boost Quest sales vs Rift S sales so think I should hold out and try a tethered Quest first. If word comes down that they are going to enable the hand tracking on Rift S maybe I'll buy both, test for a week or so and return whichever one I decide is inferior for my simulator purposes. Thanks for any help, and I'd very much welcome any conversation on this topic. Trip