Headwarp

Rather than edit the OP again, I wanted to provide another update. Blackhog sent me a long email, both apologizing for the lag in their communication and for misunderstanding that I had paid for expedited shipping and wasn't receiving it. I'm not going to lie, I got a little belligerent with them about it. And while it did take a week for a response at times, they maintained their patience through the entire ordeal. I wish I had been nicer, frankly. They killed me with kindness. Not only did they refund the entire cost of shipping, they followed up to let me know exactly where things went wrong, where the miscommunication happened, and that it led to finding an error with their order process in regards to shipping. To top it off, I'm going to quote this much of their email "- Today we also had a meeting in order to evaluate the Express shipping system including: Investigation to confirm if other customers have been possible affected by the same mistake and offer them a compensation. Modification in the notification system and webshop in order to fix the issue." First off.. smooth usage of bullet points. Second, kudos to Blackhog. So yeah.. they refunded me, and this issue also led to them investigating previous customers order numbers and compensating anybody who paid for express shipping and didn't get it. I don't know if there are any other customers than me that this happened to, but for a small company like Blackhog, I found this to be one of the most impressive statements I've ever heard from a business. They want to be sure they didn't unintentionally do the same thing to anyone else and seem willing to do the work to determine that of their own volition. So, where I've said anything negative about Blackhog, I take that all back. They seem like good folks that went a bit above and beyond to correct an error, and the b-explorer is pretty cool for what it is if you have a side mounted throttle or some other means to mount it like Monster Tech mounts. Or, like me you have the Warthog plate for the obutto R3v

Lol unlike the rest of you cray crays I'm upgrading from the Original Samsung Odyssey And other than being able to use index knuckles without running space calibrator.. the G2 honestly sounds like the better headset for simming and one reviewer shared those sentiments. HTC has made some kind of ? decisions with the vive pro 2. Requiring vive console, using a new kind of motion compensation rather than Steam VR's motion smoothing. Sure, WMR has its own kind of motion reprojection, but I can turn that on and off while games are running even... also Microsoft software development vs HTC software development.. Microsoft seems more reliable in that regard IME, even if the level of reliability is debatable. As far as I can tell motion compensation only works for 45/90, though i'm hoping to be wrong on that one as I seem to be maintaining 60 fps when I crank the odyssey up to 5.9m pixels per eye in DCS. If the G2 accommodated a 72mm IPD I'd have been all over it when it released. I mean.. sure I have index knuckles now but my main use for VR is still going to be DCSW and other sims. anyway. I hope you guys find the difference between the Reverb G2 and the Pro 2 worth the $800 or $1400 if you needed base stations and controllers. I personally just didn't feel like I had a lot of options without feeling crosseyed. So yeah.. I'm in a rush. I've been wearing the Odyssey for a long time now. It's heavy and sometimes causes pressure headaches as the only mechanism for keeping it on your head is tightening it like a vice. . Hopefully it's here by Monday.. left new jersey about 6 hours ago.

Honestly I'm not sure I was in such a rush other than the fear of HTC running into stock issues or something. I don't even have my room arranged for it yet. >.< Thinking I might have to spin my obutto around so the back of my monitor is facing the wall.

Hopefully you at least opted to use the promo code and saved $50 on your pre-order. It took three days for my base stations to get here from where the shipment originated in Indiana. I live about 500 miles from the eastern coast of the US, so when they do ship it's not a long wait. Hopefully the weekend doesn't add a further delay for you. I've never ordered from B&H Photo before. Read a few bad reviews but it was mostly about used equipment being sold as new. I don't think that will be a factor with a headset that's only been on the market for 2 days now. Supmua seems to have done some business with them before so that was kind of reassuring.

Lol. I should've waited a day then I guess, as I pre-ordered on the 12th. HTC customer service wasn't being very reassuring though when I asked when I should expect it to be fulfilled so I cancelled with them and placed my order with B&H Photo last night. I got my tracking number from them about an hour ago and Fedex has it in their possession. Unfortunately that cost me another $54 because I forfeited the $50 discount from HTC, BUT, whatever. Mine's on the way. I will say, the base stations I ordered from HTC got here like 2 days after my order. So I wouldn't be surprised if you guys had your headsets by Monday.

Have been waiting eagerly all day for a shipping notice from HTC. Nothing yet. Still says "Order Submitted" and "Boxed shipment"

So after shipping my package via DHL Parcel when I paid for DHL Express and it taking over a month for my product to arrive, Blackhog has went ahead and refunded me for the entire 59 Euro cost of shipping I paid for DHL Express. I would've been content with the 23 Euro difference between DHL Express and their standard parcel service, but appreciate them making it right. I got a little firm with them.. as I felt i'd been ripped off and they didn't seem to acknowledge that and matters like this have a time limit. But they've more than made it right in the end and I appreciate that and I hope DHL made it right for them if they overpaid for shipping. Maybe the company will learn from this experience, as they said the DHL Express option was new to them. That being said - The Blackhog B-explorer is a cool device. It's very well crafted, very well made. This thing was an answer to my desire for more axes and then some. I especially love it for propeller powered aircraft where I might have to adjust mixture and radiators and/or cowl flaps, but I will find a use for this thing in just about every aircraft I fly, thanks to the 16 buttons. The toggle switches are all momentary. They feel quality, but don't take much effort to hold up or down at all. The buttons are plastic, but have a nice smooth feel when you push them. The mount has a little bit of flex but nothing detrimental. For the longest time I thought about getting a saitek or CH products throttle quadrant for extra axes to bind controls to, but the b-explorer offered a much better solution, with 16 buttons to boot. Being positioned so close to my throttle, the buttons and axes are pretty easy to find with a VR HMD on my head as well. Anyway, here's a pic of the B-explorer 1 A model attached to my T-50cm3 throttle, mounted to my obutto pit using Obutto's warthog throttle mount. Virpil's warthog mount adapter made things a little easier here.

DLSS 2.0 is amazing and any developer whose game has performance issues by other means of anti-aliasing should do themselves and their community a favor and implement it. We've been suffering with MSAA performance since they switched to deferred rendering 3 years ago. DLSS would be an awesome solution for nvidia users. Ignoring it and not implementing it is a bad idea, especially when so many of us are always looking for performance increases. I don't care if AMD users can't utilize it. That's on them for buying an AMD card. The end user made the choice not to have that advantage. I'm pretty sure the majority of us are rocking an nvidia GPU. Here's the truth regarding hardware. It's only as good as the developers that will utilize it. When game devs opt not to support new cool toys those toys die out. Bottom line though, this technology would allow for better performance and a clearer image than we currently have. When this forum has the amount of threads it does complaining about performance, jaggies, and shimmering not jumping on that is lazy and kind of dumb imo. Frankly the benefits of deferred rendering are kind of defeated when it leaves you with a washed out shimmering image.. which may improve with higher resolutions, but still.. not quite as good as msaa 2x, which introduces a significant performance impact. . DLSS was invented as a solution for that. It was even advertised as a solution to anti-aliasing in titles that utilize deferred rendering. It certainly would bring those of us using nvidia 20 and above GPU's more performance and increased image quality. I can't say I agree with holding AMD's hand while they catch up. If DLSS were to cause DCS users choose nvidia cards over AMD cards, that's on AMD, not Eagle Dynamics. As it stands the whole "we don't support proprietary tech" excuse when it comes to a game changer like DLSS is re re talk. It just means we all have to deal with the same crappy performance rather than some of us getting a massive fps increase and improvement to image quality. DLSS would cause a 2070's value to jump way up for DCS. As it stands.. people are buying the most expensive offerings from both AMD and Nvidia to try and keep up with DCS VR, and that's the joke. Not supporting this technology benefits no one other than saving developers the amount of work it would take to implement. let's not pretend the decision to ignore such a technology is saving a single customer any money, where its implementation could make a lower priced 3070 offer better performance than the 6800XT, IF anybody could even get their freaking hands on one right now.

So heads up. Very specific scenario here but if anybody plans to go the route I did, where I ordered the Index controllers from steam and then placed an order for the 2.0 base stations from HTC as well as pre-order my Pro 2. Unless you're willing to wait for any accessories, like the base stations that are currently in stock to ship with your Pro 2 do NOT place them on the same order as your pro 2 pre-order. I used paypal so they charged me for everything, the same rep told me on two occasions my Base stations would be processed soon.. then sends me an email stating he was wrong and my base stations wouldn't ship until the headset shipped. So when I went back to their online chat tonight they told me my only option was to cancel the order and lose my pre-order spot or proceed with the order as is. I requested a supervisor and it wasn't until I pointed out that my order status still showed "Order submitted" that they said they could remove the base stations from my order. In hindsight.. it's probably related to the fact that the order only accounted for one shipment. Either way I submitted a separate order for the base stations which included a $16 shipping fee and they've already posted the refund to my bank. Of course, also specific to my situation, I plan to use the Index Knuckles with my WMR headset in the event I find the Pro 2 isn't for me and there are apps out there to achieve this, along with the right wireless dongles. But the other concern for me was, what happens if suddenly they run out of stock for base stations? That's a potential delay on my pre-order. So, save yourself the hassle imo. If you plan to pre-order the Pro 2 AND buy any accessories along with it, submit two separate orders and make sure the headset pre-order is on its own order.

On another note.. I just got my Index controllers from the Steam store and can't use them because HTC hasn't sent out my base stations yet for an order I placed on the 12th. I was assured my order was in progress and that my base stations would ship as soon as it was processed, but when I go to view it just says "order submitted"

I'm getting my info from experience. Raising the SS% in my odyssey to as close of a resolution as I can as the Reverb G2 with a 2080Ti that boosts to around 2040, an 8700k @ 4.9ghz and 32 GB of ram. Sure it will maintain 45 and even 60 fps through the majority of the flight but on the ground on a busy MP server or flying low over trees and especially in a bank or inverted DCS will start to dip below 40 FPS. Frankly if you haven't been struggling with balancing performance since the 2.5.6 update at those kind of resolutions kudos to you but it's been a pretty heavily discussed topic on the forums for some time now. 2.7 seems to have offered some improvement in that regard but I'm still running into points on the ground in certain busy servers where my frames start dropping into the high 30's and my best guess is that I'm hitting VRAM limits as neither my GPU or any single core of my CPU are maxed. I run with 60hz in the odyssey and 99% of the time am at a solid 60fps that maybe drops to 55, meaning I probably run at more than 60FPS at about 150%. Even that can dip below 40fps until I get in the air on a busy server. It might not dip below 60 at another location on the map. But it happens here and there. @ 170% SS in the odyssey I'm rendering 1864x2320 per eye or about 4.5m pixels per eye which is maybe a couple hundred thousand pixels per eye off from the Reverb and it can still struggle. Perhaps you're not flying in the same scenarios as I am.. and hey, now you're running a 5950x and a 3090. I mean.. why build a new rig if performance was fine?" Let's not discount that we're still compensating for a lack of capable hardware/software, even with lower end headsets, with tricks like motion reprojection, motion smoothing, asw. For now, DCS is not going to be a title that takes full advantage of that 120hz screen, more so with resolution increases. I for one think it's going to be quite some time for hardware to catch up with DCSW VR. Until then. I am making due.

Any WMR headset can lose tracking if you turn your head towards an unlit area of your room. My Odyssey would lose tracking if I looked over my left shoulder. I put a lamp behind my seat, which my seat is in a fixed position so it wasn't like I"d knock it over. But the additional light solved my tracking issues. Every once in awhile I have to clear environment data in the mixed reality portal settings. Other than that if I have any tracking issues are probably due to lighting. Although DCS has been putting my head way outside of my cockpit occasionally for no reason since 2.7 and I just hit the recenter button.

They specifically state "Credit cards." So debit card and other means of payment I think still get billed up front.

It does 90 or 120hz. So 45 fps is still a magic number.

Most VR titles in general aren't going to be anywhere near the resource hogs that DCS and other flight sims are going to be in VR. Your framerates in iRacing don't really matter. Even if they did model race tracks and everything else to the level of detail things are modelled in DCS it would be one tiny section of a DCSW map. IMO start from the VR preset settings in DCS. At 1.5PD expect to need to run with ASW on. The 3070 is also an 8GB card. 3090 users have been reporting anywhere to 16-21GB of VRAM usage in VR. I myself can easily run into situations where my 11GB of VRAM is maxed while flying DCSW. Go with low ground textures, medium textures, high water, and set pretty much everything else to taste. MSAA even at 2x is a big ask out of DCS since 2.5.6, but you might be able to get away with at least that if you can lower your VRAM usage.

It's almost impossible to look over my shoulder in my seat with the horse blinders on. But it is a fixed seat.. no swivel so. The app is pretty amazing when I need to check six and don't have a datalink telling me where everybody is. I can clearly see directly behind me looking over my shoulder in my pickup truck. Even if the Pro 2 does a true 120 degrees it isn't going to fix the horse blinder feel. I stuck with button presses, because I have plenty of buttons between the MCGU and T-50CM3. Just a quick tap to check behind me. Instant improvement ime.

Yeah I was thinking about that.. you guys might be able to benefit from the 120hz refresh rate for 60fps reprojection as well. Although.. I have to say I've really been enjoying running at 60hz refresh with the Odyssey and tuning for 60fps minimum. Everyone keeps telling me there's a flicker with the Reverb headsets at 60hz Refresh though which I couldn't tell if it was related to dropping below 55-60fps or not once reprojection was off. As long as I'm at 55-60fps in the Odyssey it's smooth like butter and I have a much easier time identifying something I'm looking at than I would with a 90hz refresh rate and reprojection on. Kind of a mute point for anybody who doesn't already own a 3090 though unless they're willing to pay scalper prices, which is just idiotic. I'm certainly not looking forward to a 12GB card release and who knows if or when 3090 production will resume. I may just wait out the next generation anyway and pre-order. I don't think I'm ready to spend even MSRP prices on a 3090 just yet. But, this may be something that leads me to keeping the Pro 2 regardless of how I feel about it initially.. as far as DCSW and flight simming goes, both software and hardware have room to catch up with the displays of the highest resolution headsets on the market right now, and even still older headsets. Ultimately, we want that 90fps or 120fps minimum.

If the Reverb G2 would work with my big head, without a doubt I wouldn't even care about the Pro 2. But, your money, your reasons. Highly recommend trying out that VR Neck Safer thing I talked about if you haven't already. It may well soothe the hype of added FoV. It is it's own app that hooks into openVR.. so it works with any VR title. VRNeckSafer is the program's title, despite the error in grammar. This has been an absolutely lovely little tool to have being confined to the bucket seat in my Obutto pit. Less likely to break my own in neck in a dogfight. It makes up for the "blinders" we wear in our VR goggles that make it hard to look over our shoulder. You can assign button presses, or there's an automated setting that will shift your view depending on how far you turn your head, which I have yet to try. In your shoes I'd have probably just used that openvr tool that allows you to calibrate index controllers and base stations to work with the Reverb. But that's me. In fact that's my backup plan if performance vs resolution is unsatisfying for me in the Vive Pro 2, just with the Odyssey instead of the Reverb, and that's only for other VR titles.

You seem to have a lot of headsets as it stands. It's my understanding that the dual lens design to achieve the 120 FOV is the same method the Index uses for it's claim of 130 degrees of FOV. The Reverb G2 is no slouch though with its resolution and as it stands.. while I can't speak for the RTX 3090, AFAIK Reverb G2 users are already downscaling resolution at least somewhat for performance in DCSW. Just at a glance on paper.. the biggest difference I'd expect between the two is improved controller tracking from the Lighthouse base stations.. which I never use my controllers in DCSW. It will be nice for HL: Alyx and Boneworks etc etc, but there are existing workarounds to use the knuckles with WMR headsets as it stands. I am fully anticipating having to downscale from the native resolution of the Pro 2 looking for that 45fps or 60fps minimum, personally, as I am certainly not about to drop 4 grand on a GPU that likely no longer has a valid warranty. Even if my 2080Ti was ridiculously priced at MSRP. cranking the SS% level in my Odyssey can get pretty rough at low altitudes.

That was the extent of your willpower? Lol. Honestly if not for having an IPD of pretty much exactly 72mm I would have just ordered a reverb for a much bigger bang for my buck. The added 10 degrees of FOV is going to probably be negligible. The bump in resolution as well considering the G2 is already pushing the limits of our hardware in DCS. If it's the 10 degrees of FoV, there's a nice little app called "VRNeckSafer" that will allow you to view 40 degrees further in any direction with a button push. It's great for checking six without a swivel seat. Probably still going to be using it with the Pro 2 if I keep it.

I hate myself for it, but I pre-ordered one and ordered a set of base stations and valve knuckle controllers. Probably paid a little more than I would have if I waited for the entire kit, but then I wouldn't have knuckle controllers, which I have no use for VR controllers in DCS, but, I hope to enjoy other VR titles as well. I am dubious at the aspect of such a high resolution's impact on performance, but I have friends using the G2 and they seem to be enjoying it. Frankly, for me, the biggest factor was the fact that it's adjustable up to 72mm IPD, which I have around a 72mm IPD. I'd have probably bought the reverb already if not for the fact that they max out at a 68 IPD adjustment. This should be a pretty big upgrade from my OG Odyssey.. not even the plus version. Although.. I have everything setup to run at 60fps, with my HMD at 60hz right now and am a little scared of going back to any form of motion reprojection. I figure if performance is horrible or motion reprojection ruins it for me I can likely return the headset.. and I've been wanting to try pairing the knuckles with my WMR headset for awhile now.

If choppers were my main source of simming I might, but I'm pretty well set up for an all around fix and don't quite think I'm getting into a fight with the dust cover on the gunfighter again anytime soon if I can help it. I recently loosened them just to make sure nothing was interfering with their return to center point with the Avia S cams and wish the gimbal supported even heavier springs, but it's still leagues above the WH and I'm getting used to it. I mostly fly fixed wings and very much rely on trim which is largely based on self centering sticks. Even the MSFFB2 has a centering feel, it's just that the center position moves to suit trim functions in most aircraft that support it. Thanks for the suggestion but I'm still far more accurate with this thing than I ever could have been with an FFB device that didn't really allow for adjusting curves, despite being way more comfortable to fly with how it mimicked force trim.

Yeah I take it back. All is good with it mounted over the center with the damper clamp flipped over in the correct orientation. At some point I'm going to stuff something between the spacer and the bolt in the back.. but now I have it mounted over the center and the forces in either direction feel better. Still just the slightest spot of movement when switching directions where I don't really feel the damper, but see it moving on its rail and it holds position when I take my feet off with no spring attached.

I didn't flip the damper clamp over. And now it makes sense. I'm going to try it over the center now. Apparently Milan by default has it set up stock to align to the left. Like I said when I first got it.. it felt so straight forward how it all fit together I didn't watch instructions. Which now it makes sense why having it angled to the left offered smoother operation. I typed up something else before this but I'll try this out and see. *Edit - piece of wax paper from a piece of candy snugged the metal spacer up against the bolt, don't really feel like messing with the back attachment point right now. Still.. the only two pieces of information that I seemed to miss by not watching the instructions was initial orientation with how it was setup stock... and to reorient the damper clamp if I wanted it over the center.

Did you guys install it correctly? Where the damper sits to the left of the bolt on the front of the pedals? If you install it the wrong way, where it rests over the center line of the pedals rather than to the left of the front bolt the damper will move up and down. There is a little bit of play when I change direction with the pedals, but the damper is still moving and it's also still holding them in place when I remove the feet. The main reason I came back to this thread tonight though.. HOLY CRAP how much easier is it to control the huey when you have a damping system in place to hold your pedals and disconnect the spring so you aren't fighting a return to center mechanism? I don't think I've ever flown a helo in DCS so smoothly in my life. If only my new VKB Gunfighter had a force trim mechanism.. i'd love to build a cyclic stick with a force trim but the methods I see people using are way too noisy for my late night escapades. Anywho.. the damper kit is amazing. I can't believe how my ability to hover and taxi in a helicopter instantly improved.