Nagilem

I think the missing piece here in what you're asking is the difference between fresnel vs aspherical lenses. The current crop of HMDs we have today are the best of what can be done with fresnel single lenses. These are on the market because they are cheap to make and weigh less than the alternative. The reason XTAL is different is the LENS. The use of aspherical lenses means less magnification of the panels, which equals lower software rendering and higher ppi because the software doesn't have to compensate for the zoom affect of the lens. With less rendering and reprocessing necessary, the performance gets better. As to why the current crop hasn't gone for aspherical lenses, I think the costs were much higher as the glass is not as simple or cost effective to make.

I think sometime soon there will a very large punt in some of the f18 systems to call ‘er done and move to something else that has more potential to bring in the money. Given how large and man hour expensive these sims are, I’m surprised this isn’t a subscription model vs individual one time packages. The spice must flow!

I think the lens comparison is apt. Good lenses retain value due to expensive glass. Not sure that will change with headsets.

Had the same issue - I installed, ran the server dedicated icon on the desktop. I get a splashscreen box with DCS logo. If I use IE or Edge - no go Firefox worked fine...

It would be amazing if May is the holy grail month of VR goodness! Keeping fingers and toes crossed!

I agree - I think its not just about the map but the engine too, which would make the ability to release Caucasus only untenable. I suspect this won't happen til midsummer. The good news is - they at least have a fix coming.

I can also wholeheartedly recommend the VR cover for the odyssey plus. I have the studio creative on order and received the VR cover first. The VR cover made a HUGE difference in comfort. With the headset at $299 and $60 for some comfort, its a great deal for a starter HMD. I created a summary of settings for the o+ here - https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=239020

Anybody else having VA with Viacom shutdown periodically mid flight? I'll be at the tanker, get the 'pre contact' wave in, and when I trigger and say 'ready precontact' about 1/4 of the time VA shuts down. I have the latest version, running as admin, and no issues being reported in the logs. I've done a few searches but haven't found the right search terms yet to see if anyone else is having the same issue. I *suspect* what I am saying is being taken as VA shutdown or something.

@DutchCoolHand - same here! just received it yesterday and flying is much more enjoyable! It now feels comfortable enough to wear for hours and not give me the dented forehead look... I still have the studiocreative strap for over my head coming to also relieve some of the pressure on my nose and forehead. Hopefully, between the two it will feel like a baseball cap with googles.

I concur with the aspherical lens comments for cost. The high end camera lens market has not gotten cheaper with time. The glass and what they do to it costs big bucks, and will likely remain that way for a while. I'd love to try one of these out for a day or two to see if I want to save the big bucks for it. For $5k, it better be all that AND THE BAG OF CHIPS to justify cost.

Ok - dumbass here. Figured out what I was missing. Found a vid that showed where the UI Panel settings were. There are two options under that for VR Zoom and VR re-center. Those worked with key mappings! Nothing to do with WMR or HMD.

@Harlikwin - from your lips to the god of VRs ears.... I love the O+ I have, but I still feel like I got in the cockpit and forgot to wear my contacts or glasses. Especially with anything more than 1nm away. Less zoom, less distortion, better optics might just equal much better visual acuity at a lower performance requirement. Now that would be something!

@ Rage - totally agree. Just wish I could keep my appendages, private bits, and have a few nickels left over to eat for the rest of the year after I bought it. :) Seriously considering though... @ Pegon - I agree on the glass being the hardest part to manufacture economically for mass or wider production. New lenses will likely keep the costs high for a while. The question is - Will that be 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, or Always?

Damn! That is nice. I love the better glass and lower mag to get better FPS and performance. Maybe it will be more mainstream in a year or two.

Using the OB F-18, an Odyssey + and all the latest updates, I cannot for the life of me get any VR zoom working via the keyboard or via key bind. :helpsmilie: None of the unmodified KP buttons do anything OTHER THAN KP5 for re-centering the VR view in the cockpit. All of the controls setup with the word zoom on the control menu are mapped to the number pad. Pressing any number pad key besides KP5 without modifiers does NOTHING. No right/left or up/down inside the cockpit. It works as expected in external views. Also, if I press RSHFT + RCTRL in the cockpit, I can get the up / down and strafe right / left to work. I have also found that if I map a DX stick button to re-center view, the DX button does not work either. KP5 still works, but no button map. I have a warthog and am using DCS to map keys NOT Target. Anyone solve this before?

Anybody ready for it to be May yet? LOL The anticipation of new VR sets and DCS VR updates is killing me!

@Naruto - I tried out those settings and found the same. No significant stutter. The biggest change is setting the cockpit res down. There is doesn't seem to be much difference between the 256 and 1024 options. I thought those two would look wildly different and they just don't. Also the repaint screen options have little effect that I could see visually for the performance loss. I will say that the clarity of objects far away, especially lights at night is not very good. Did a case 3 recovery last night and could see a jumble of lights but had to get very close (within 3nm) to start make out the shape of the carrier. could be my old tired eyes hehe.

Personally, the Index for me sounds more compelling on paper, but the additional cost for lighthouses may be what pushes me to the Reverb unless the DCS reviews are STELLAR. Not sure I want to pay Vibe Pro prices for another mediocre HMD set. If they can keep the price under $1000 and the set itself is good, no question they will sell a ton of them.

After going on the journey I've been on with high end hardware (i9-9900, 2080ti card, and Odyssey plus), I think we may be 2-3 years out for the holy grail of high resolution HMDs with a card that can consistently drive the detailed content to the HMD without stutter or lag. It's definitely coming, but I don't think it's here with the HMD offering due out this summer/fall. With all the optimizations I've done with my o+, vr is good, but I still have many minor issues. I am NOT saying the new HMDs won't be playable, just not that 'it looks so good I can't believe it' state. I also anticipate we need some time for the software to catch up to the hardware too. Some of the tools are still not fully optimized, not to mention DCS itself. The upcoming terrain engine updates could make a good dent in reducing or maybe eliminating the stutter and shimmer on existing HMDs- the two bains of VR existence. I do think we'll know either way by late summer.

@DeltaMike - Yes they are additive. I'm not sure I fully understand the tech behind it - driver priority, hardware screen painting etc. What I can tell you is that I have my SteamVR at 108% to set the resolution for the HMD, and set the PD to 1.3 to render the images to the screens. I get the best performance and resolution at 1.3 and NO HIGHER. Otherwise I get what I call micro stuttering - where the outside no longer moves smoothly and sort of hiccups slightly. Not a slide show, but not smooth. @Dutchcoolhand - I mainly fly F18 at the moment. I will be getting the F14 but wanted to truly have some mastery over F18 first. I agree with the shimmer as the number one thing to address. The settings above have *almost* complete removed shimmer from all but the carrier. Not sure there is much to do about that given all the fine lines on the deck of the carrier. I am curious to see if the MSAA can be turned up further after the VR mod comes in. Yup, just applied the strokes config you mentioned as well. It made a very slight difference to readability, and I also get the same issue where readability of DDIs depends on the map I'm in or what is happening on the map. It isn't consistent. Anybody have suggestions to address the forehead pad on the O+? I always end up with a red line on the forehead after flying, and it gets uncomfortable after an hour. I purchased the CreativeStudio strap to help along with the VR cover. I'll give them a try and report back.

So I went back and tried a few more things.... First, pushed the textures up to high and removed the FXAA. I also added the shadow settings to flat. Image is slightly sharper, but I get alot more micro stuttering. Very frustrated I have a top of the line video card and still can't get smooth VR... I may just live with it and hopefully see improvements when the VR enhancement comes out. I don't have high hopes for the new cards coming out to be that much better. 1400x1600 is already taxing my 2080ti card or my i9-9900k cpu. I suspect more upgrades will need to be in that mix to get anything new out of those high resolution HMDs. We will see. Interestingly, I also pushed the PD up to 1.5 just to see if the image gets better. The answer for me is NO. I saw no discernible difference in PD of 1.3 vs 1.5 besides more stuttering affect. That surprised me. On a separate item: Question - For those with WMR, does your loading screens flicker and constantly disappear during loading? Not a big deal I guess, things work after they load, but my sky and f18 loading screens flash and flicker badly during loading. Not sure why.

Thanks for the feedback. Trying to consolidate this stuff so maybe someone new doesn't have to read every thread to get to a decent setup :). Just curious, how do shadows affect the plane spotting? I find that mostly the distant objects are very blurry, but I do see the small dots of aircraft at ~10km or so. I'd love to figure out how to get aircraft sharper. Will retry textures and shadows to see if anything changes. I also forgot to mention I do have the Nvidia MFAA on as well.

I am also fairly new to VR... I went with turning off the controllers and making sure the mouse (I have a trackball on my right when I fly) was available and visible in the VR set. Then I use the mouse primarily to click the cockpit. It does take some getting used to with the various switches and dials as some use left / right mouse button depending on what you want the switch to do, and the zoom wheel for switches.

So I decided last week to purchase a VR set. I've been playing with a 2 monitor setup for the past few months with the primary monitor a 34" curved gaming monitor and a secondary smaller touchscreen in the F18 cockpit. And while that was working well for me, I found myself wanting more immersion. TrackIR was good, wasn't really giving me the experience I wanted. Before I go farther - 1. I am not an expert by any stretch, but I read alot, and came to some clear objectives after I bought and played with the HMD. I'll cover those below. 2. As a photographer in real life, I like clean readable images. That kept me from buying VR for a long time. I tell you this to give some context - not everybody enters the VR adventure the same, and reading any VR reviews is very subjective. What I like may be very different from what others like. This is my attempt to give you some context on what I see when I play VR. Sadly, there is no way to show something directly through the HMD. VR seems still to be looking through a screen door, even with the O+. The effect is minimal, but the fuzziness around everything is still there. 3. If you read my sig, I have high end equipment - i9900 with a 2080ti card which I use for things other than gaming. I have been fortunate in my life, I have a very understanding wife, and have been able to save for a long time... and what I am going to put below will be with this hardware context in mind. I chose to purchase the Odyssey Plus HMD vs wait for the new versions coming because I've never tried VR before and none of the new sets will be inexpensive. I didn't want to spend ridiculous money and time on something I wasn't going to like from the get go. The HP will be $600 when it release, the Index will likely be much higher (I'd have to buy lighthouses too), and the Rift S, while somewhat economical, is still a few months away. I wanted a cost effective way to try out VR with a solid HMD. The Odyssey Plus at $299 with 1440x1600 per eye and OLED screens is here today, is a known quantity and defintely fit the 'low cost' bill (pun fully intended). I also think the new sets will likely have issues for a few weeks / months while software drivers and settings get worked out, and I decided I could take a slight loss in clarity to have a much smoother and more stutter free experience with the hardware I have. I also think even a 2080ti may have issues driving those new HMDs - only time will tell. After getting the HMD, I played on it a bit, then decided to meet these objectives with my settings - 1. Lower the shimmer effect for polygons and lines as much as possible both in cockpit and out. 2. Reduce or eliminate the micro stutter effect when moving the plane. I see these most if I turn up the settings and perform a basic roll or turn in a densely populated area like Sochi or Dubai. Instead of nice smooth trees, hills or buildings rolling by, they stutter just a bit. No bueno! 3. Make the cockpit readable. Going in, I will say achieved these for me, but there is no perfection. I still get some very minor shimmer (especially the carrier with all of those fine lines), the occasional micro stutter, and while readable (without squinting or leaning forward all the time), the cockpit is just slightly fuzzy still. My settings - Textures - Low; With much testing, I found that the high, med, low was not that different and made things micro stutter alot more on high. Terrain Textures - Low; same as above. Not much real difference for performance loss. Civ Traffic - Low; I like this on for a little traffic and to make the cities seem real. Water - High; This setting shows a big difference in look to me. The ocean looks much more real. This is one I would target to lower if I start seeing performance issues. Visible Range - Ultra; I turned this up to keep the immersion factor high. I didn't want to see buildings being painted in the distance. So far, everything paints just out of view so no issues with this. There is one more notch above this one... Heat Blur - Low; this is preference. I like seeing some effect as I chase down migs :) Shadows - Off; Having this on made very little difference in image prettiness that I could see in game and had huge performance negatives. Cockpit Resolution - 1024; very needed to make the cockpit legible. Repainting every frame unnecessary and was a huge performance bog. MSAA - 2x; To me this is REQUIRED. This took care of most of the shimmer outside the cockpit. Sadly, more is not better. 2x good, 4x basically made the game a very expensive slideshow viewer. Depth of Field - Off Lens Effects - Off Motion Blur - Off SSAA - Off Clutter / Grass - 150; some grass without significant performance hit Tree Visibility - 70%; good amount of trees for Caucasus map. Preload Radius - MAX; I have 32GB of memory and wanted to max performance. Chimney Smoke - Off Gamma - 1.8; I made this choice to balance the vibrancy of the image - 1.0-1.4 very vibrant colors but felt like I was wearing sunglasses, above 2.0 all colors wash out for me. Anisiotropic Filtering - 16x; Also a must for me. This made a small difference in shimmer outside the cockpit, and a huge difference inside, especially with the IEFI and the DDIs. The difference between 4x and 16x wasn't huge, but worth it. This is one I would turn down if I found I was having micro stutters again. Terrain Object Shadows - Off Cockpit global illumination - off I left all the boxes unchecked here... On the VR page - I set PD to 1.3 - (I'll get to the SteamVR settings in a sec.) For my rig, this made a good balance between detail in the HMD and getting decent visible performance (no significant micro stuttering). Also of note is turning on the mouse cage and turning OFF the VR controllers. I also set a IPD setting of 60. This changed how close menus were to my eyes and made my scale seem less in my face while flying. For me, the higher the number, the closer everything was to my POV. YMMV. In SteamVR - I force set the PD to 108% based on threads here on the forums and Reddit. I haven't seen much difference between 100% and 108% so I think either would work fine. This pushes the HMD to just over 1440x1600 per eye. I intend to set this and forget it. All future changes I'll make in game. I also unchecked the Super Sampling box in the developer menu, and turned on the motion reprojection for WMR. THIS MADE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. I highly recommend giving this a try. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=228378&highlight=motionvector ****EDIT - I have chosen to skip the FXAA since it really made negligible difference and actually made the 'outside the pit' objects slightly less sharp. I also left the MXAA on in the NVidea panel (See below) **** The only other thing I changed was I opened the NVidia control panel and turned FXAA on to add one more layer of Anti Aliasing. My understanding is FXAA is very low overhead and I wanted to reduce shimmer. This does help a bit, and had no significant performance impact for me. :thumbup: Testing - I used free flight in solo to do my general testing. This is easy to get to, and typically flies over densely populated areas like Sochi and Dubai. I tried both to give a base perception with the expectation that I should get very smooth results over Sochi, and *some* micro stuttering over Dubai. I hope the pending VR updates from ED will make even those micro stutters over Dubai go away. I also tried air 2 air refueling missions for plane textures, and carrier flybys to see what that looked like. I do play online, and have found that if my performance was good to great solo, then multiplayer was at least good (assuming everything else is good). Final thoughts - What I get with the above settings is a very good experience in VR. The view is reasonable, no significant SDE, good black saturation, and reasonably sharp for a VR set. I have not seen a Pimax so I don't know what I don't know on FOV and will happily stay ignorant until some WMR wide FOV comes out :). I have had zero issues with head tracking on the O+ after playing most of Sat and Sun. Jury is still out on it long term. I have chosen not to comment on comfort of the headset because it is totally subjective (thankfully it works for me). I am also purposefully avoiding discussing frame rates - Call me lazy, but I didn't want to load up yet another software, and felt comfortable just using my eyes to "fly by the seat of my pants" to judge usability. I also didn't want to get wrapped around what I see as chasing performance for performance sake. I just wanted to fly. Others may want to take a more scientific approach... and I say more power to ya!

OK. got the actual files attached now lol.