Shabi

It would be fantastic, but I'm doubtful, unfortunately: http://uploadvr.com/no-vive-2-at-ces-htc-confirms/

No issue you guys asking the hard questions, I'm willing to give my feedback as to how I fly on this server. I fly in VR, and load up to fly to bullseye, usually with 6x aim120-c , two aim-9p and two drop tanks, conserving fuel on the way there. Depending on what I see I either go low or high. I don't claim to be an expert on situational awareness but if I see an unfavourable situation I will turn back and either maintain potential energy or fool myself into staying low with an idea that I know what's out there. Yes the f15 radar is powerful but it's not a full picture. In this case, seeing 3x friendlies heading NW low I decided to tail them high and play the advantage, it worked out. More often than not I'll fail to see a m2000c or similar pop up under and take me. This time I pushed too far forward and dropped too low when I launched, and then turned the wrong way. If people think being more cautious due to more time invested in refueling/rearming/ins will change the dynamics of this approach, it's understandable, as I know how long it takes to start an a10c, and how lightly armed an m2000c is. The question is, how do we achieve this but still maintain the approachability of the server to a wide range of people. The night before I was trying to introduce a friend to mp in DCS, but the enforced delay took a while to figure out and stretched the time available. One thing I would like to emphasise is how important tacview output is. I would never have had these insights with you if that wasn't there. Big thanks to our friend in Montreal! Re acdelta, if I had to do it again - yes, I would push to do the TWS, as 3 distracted targets down low (I am so high that the aim120's have thin air, their other advantage) are too hard to give up. To take 3 targets and be at risk of a SAM while at 20k feet is reasonable, I just wish I looked at the map and considered that I was pushing North of my own Sam battery and needed to turn back ASAP. I think I would have launched the second wave sooner and dived at 700kn, dropping tanks, as soon as they went active. 50/50 chance of survival in that case and the flight back and rearm is totally worth it. In rebuttal to the thread so far, why couldn't 3x aircraft spot me at 20k+ feet instead of being distracted? Harsh lesson, but necessary, I wasn't being subtle. Edit: I need to work on reading the rwr and SAM sites. I'm OK with AA contacts but admit to having little practice with working against SAMs. I should maybe get back to learning the a10c to become more familiar with how important that is in a nato context.

Yeah, your sam sites are a bitch [emoji14] Re refuelling notification, if you aren't aware that you start empty, you don't look for it. Some kind of notification or reminder would be useful. Re the in-air spawn, yeah it could work. I am however sensitive to the idea that it's a sim and all fighters should start on the ground. Some people might take offense to air starts, but, it is a server that is for both newbies wanting to get into multiplayer and people with more time to do sim flying. That's always a difficult balance to find and I respect that. If anything, my contribution to this thread is to help you seek this balance, not to start a flame war.

It's what TWS is designed for. If I was noob spamraaming I'd have launched them all on the nearest guy. Edit: and at 6000 ft. Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

Re passive refuelling, I don't really mind it THAT much as yes it's a sim. But without knowing that refuelling is happening it's very confusing, also, if you leave f15 flaps down it will prevent refuelling, and you can only move them when engines are on, so fixing a refuelling mistake takes some care. Perhaps an indicator prompt/announce saying "refuelling started" for fc3 aircraft would help people figuring all this out. In other news, I pulled off a near perfect TWS attack the other day: http://tinyurl.com/j7y9z3e If you hate airquaking, you'll hate this ;) though to be fair, it's not as straightforward as running at full ab and hitting the fire button, I did plan this approach to include the distraction down below. It doesn't usually work this well. Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

+1 from me. A frame buffer that pops up on a floating card parented to the camera would work wonders.

Current state of my man cave, sorry for the blurry pic. The seat's back legs clip into the metal loops on the doorway, and the stick is bolted onto ikea offcuts that make for a removable unit. The one handed gamepad is for F1-F12 with a few extras. Yes, it's in a closet ;)

True that INS alignment and whatnot takes a long time, it's just frustrating being so passive. Do the external tanks fill simultaneously? It's just that I was introducing a relatively new player to DCS online play and we spent some time figuring out why the engines wouldn't start (no fuel, or fuel expended on start as we didn't know about the wait). Perhaps a player message/announce that refueling takes approx x minutes when they request ground services would help. I guess as a server that is generally great for newer players I found it surprising that this handicap was built in, as it made the whole thing a lot more confusing and tested our patience. I would still urge a different way to introduce the delay; ie farther take-off locations.

They weren't doing this a week ago, as far as I recall, and the server was functioning fairly well no? For the server to force people to sit on the tarmac in a completely passive way seems unnecessary, I saw at least 4 other pilots in hangars, just waiting. Moving FC3 aircraft to airstrips further from bullseye would be a better way to reduce the number of them over bullseye, not an enforced, passive wait.

did I miss something, or over the last few days did this server change to spawning aircraft with empty fuel tanks? Or perhaps the fuel fill rate is a lot lower? As it was taking FOREVER to fill a tank on the tarmac when I played 12 hrs ago. I decided to play in 104th as I didn't have all night... Maybe something is broken?

I use a one handed game keyboard pad thing to get around that, with f1 to f12 and backslash bound to it. This also doubles as a handy view switching thing too. But yes a more interactive interface would have it's place.

VR zoom (oculus) Playing DCS last night I realized that the zoom feature was making me sick. Forced slewing of a camera, whether it's the transform or FOV will do that. Would we be able to get an option where it instead pops up a new framebuffer in a hovering window parented to the head? That way you could quickly snap it on and off without the slew and sickness.

While you m getting pretty good at all tabbing to google maps to triangulate where I am in comparison to airports, I too would like to join the "normal" people and have a map.

Oh and numpad 5 (recenter vr view) is on the extreme pinky bottom end. And backslash is the top pinky, to bring up or exit the radio. Problem solved!

I'm using a razer tartarus chroma keypad, to which I bound them all. And the thumb nubbin is the numpad (for panning external views). I also stuck textured children's stickers to certain keys so I can tell where my hand is sitting.

Does the fact that VR requires two frame buffers double the draw calls on directx? This would have a huge impact, as DCS has a dependence on the directx api as far as draw calls are concerned.

That's a very reasonable approach to settings. If you're supersampling the render resolution the headset will shrink it back down, and in effect that's a kind of anti-aliasing. Just like in photoshop where you resize an image to make it smaller and it blurs out some of the sharp/jaggie details instead of 'pixellating' them. In visual effects this is sometimes done when very small & fine details are required, but it's hard to get render sampling settings to play ball, ie when rendering sparks.

it's lifted from their blog post about ATW: https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-timewarp-examined/ Oh man... don't tempt me with mentions of 2300 quid headsets. I'm already ordering a rift.

RE tracking, I think it might be an unstable mount, I could be bumping or shaking it. At any rate the dropouts don't happen much so it's not a big issue. In other news, today they announced that multicamera tracking is now supported, so it's a move to the Oculus Touch controllers being fully supported. As far as colours and optics go I didn't notice too much other than a narrower FOV and more evident godrays. The brightness could well be lower but I had forgotten that some people found that to be an issue, so in my opinion it must be very minor. What I want, what we all want, is the same thing but with a higher res screen!

Whenever I start binding things for a new aircraft, and for vr, I spend a loooong time getting it right before I do too much flying, muscle memory sticks. My vr sim pit is bare bones as you can imagine it might be, but definitely get a game keypad thing. I have a razer chroma and use it for mainly F1-F12 keys, and a recenter vr view plus the radio button (/). Works a treat.

Yep, the performance of ATW makes all the difference. It seems like this is something that all the players will catch up on, but for now it's obvious where the advantage is.

Ah man, a new DCS version came out right as I posted this. Reserving this post to note down any VR changes.

TLDR: if you just want to play DCS get the CV1. After buying the Vive and using it for about 3 months now, my friend who has a Vive and CV1 needed to do some dev work with two Vives. We did a swap a few days ago and I can now directly compare the two as it relates to DCS. I'm not a developer for real-time rendering but I do work professionally in the pre-rendered CG discipline so I can offer a somewhat valid point of view. On this message board thanks in large to Skatezilla's posts we know that there are severe FPS limitations in DCS due to the DirectX API and the number of draw calls needed to render so many trees, buildings etc. I rarely render at 90fps in VR with this system (I only get 90fps if looking straight up). i7 4790k @ stock, gtx980 stock, DDR3 2400 (PC3 19200). With these settings for the Vive and at a render resolution multiplier of 1.5x I get the lower reprojection lockoff of 45fps most times, often dropping to 35 or so with the instant action, f15c intercept mission: When the bombs hit it drops to about 12fps, judder is extreme, and @ 30fps very uncomfortable forcing me to limit how fast I turn my head. Switching the Vive for the CV1 and setting pixel density to 1.5x gives the same FPS, which isn't really that surprising since it's rendering the same thing at the same res. However there is one thing that means I can jack the render settings up, and that is Asynchronous Time Warp. I could now set Shadows to HIGH and pixel density/resolution oversampling to 2 to achieve 30fps for a consistent minimum. Similar to Vive's reprojection (but better), ATW works like this: You can skip a lot of the ATW stuff if you want, but for reasons of clarity and disclosure I went through it anyway: https://developer.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-timewarp-examined/ By "warping the last frame" they mean taking the last frame, reading the new head position & rotation and warping the old frame to kind of leave it behind. If you just displayed the last frame you'll get frozen frames, ie judder, and that's the big issue with the current Vive reprojection implimentation. For whatever reason, the oculus display driver is better at doing this; it successfully takes the last rendered frame, warps it (a very cheap CG operation) and displays it if the current rendered frame isn't ready yet, avoiding a dropped frame. The SIMPLEST kind of ATW interrupt and warp is for a rotational head movement. Think about it, if the head is rotating and the position is not changing then you can just warp the image and not worry about a change in parallax (objects moving relative to each other in a frame based on the rules of perspective). Effective rotational ATW is the #1 thing you want in a cockpit/seated experience because you're usually just rotating your head. Artifacts: But because it's warping the last frame and you turned your head, at the edges of the display you'll see a black area where it doesn't have pixels, since you are looking in a new direction now. This becomes more noticeable the lower the FPS. But what about positional ATW? Well, you'll see this if you fly at 400kn @ 300ft and look out the side of the cockpit. Look at the trees, the buildings, notice the ghosting? This is where my understanding of it becomes a bit fuzzy. It seems to be doing a mutliple frame blend of previous images, but this isn't specified in the document/blog post. More reading is required, but it should be intuitive that positional ATW is harder to do, as it means you need to take into account more than just a twisting of your vision in a static environment, instead near objects are moving past fast, far objects are moving past slowly, and don't even get started on transparency and reflections, we're not doing a deep composite in nuke using a few gigs of data per frame! Thankfully, most of your attention is directed forward, not sideways, and if sideways it's to check situational awareness, not to articulate avionics and flight dynamics. Why is the CV1's implementation so much better than the vives? I'm not sure, but more time, a few billion FB dollars and John Carmack might have something to do with it! On to the other notes: 1- ERGONOMICS MATTER More than you think. A floppy elastic head strap and chunky cable plus heavier HMD is a pain in the ass compared to a much more rigid well designed and minimal headset. It really helps your experience and makes you last longer. Sounds like a condom commercial but it's true. I expect this to be resolved in time, but it raises some worrying flags over the current state of OSVR, even if they have higher res headsets coming. 2- OCULUS FOV ZOOM UI LAYER THING So far Eagle Dynamics only implemented this for the Oculus SDK, which will change. Its nice, I thought it would solve my resolution issues, but I consider it aesthetic unless you are doing an A10-C attack run. In which case it's ****ing awesome. 3- HEADPHONES I like having integrated headphones that aren't a dangling cord. Yes sometimes background noise leaks in, but come on it's a jet engine, it's not an FPS. Less things to arrange on my head makes it easier. 4- TRACKING Is better in the Vive, period. I don't know how Oculus will pull off room scale, my VR dev friend borrowing the headsets intimated this. It could be the reason the hand controllers are delayed so long... I get some tracking judder with CV1, although I do sometimes get dropouts with the Vive light station when doing seated VR (see following photo). At one point I had it dangling on a selfie stick which was definitely not stable enough, the fan airflow was pushing it around! (I live in the tropics and the mancave is exposed to the elements). Compared to the benefits of prompt ATW its not a big deal really, every now and again I hit numpad 5 to reset the view if it drifts. 5- OPTICS & FOV About the same optics quality, but with more godrays. I don't notice it if flying during daytime, for night flights maybe the moon would be irritating. FOV is less, but I welcome that right now as I want more pixels per degree of vision in the frustum. SUMMARY With the CV1 I can render @ 30fps and move my head around in a way that doesn't feel sluggish and juddery. Given the constraints of Directx10 (is it 10, or 11, I forget?) draw call APIs we can't push that far with FPS. Since Oculus ATW is better than Vive reprojection it means I can fly with shadows turned on, and a higher pixel density/resolution oversampling. This sounds minor, but **** me it makes a difference. And hey the CV1 is cheaper, even if you are subject to a closed platform (for now). But if you want roomscale VR for parties or showing people the future of VR, get the Vive, you can still fly. DX12 can't come soon enough to DCS. And OSVR reprojection improvements would be most, most, most bloody welcome. Render on. Special thanks to the test pilot crew:

I can play for about 20 minutes but generally get a connection time out. Have there been changes to min ping or something? Maybe its some new netcode thing... Does the server say if it's a server side or client side disconnection? Yes my tacview is also not outputting something, I would guess that we need to update tacview.

I vaguely recall there is a way to reduce the amount of time the tooltip hangs around for, as its quite long at the moment. Am I dreaming or does such a setting exist? It would alleviate this for the time being...