Baldrick33

I have worked in Corporate IT including software development and project management for 30 odd years. I have also had the good fortune of being on some alpha and beta groups for sim racing and flight sims (not DCS for the avoidance of doubt). The games industry is remarkably different. Someone with better knowledge of it than can probably explain why, there seems no contingency time. The development goes to the wire every time. I am not even convinced it is to get ahead of the competition, it just seems to be how it is. Code is literally getting checked in whilst the "final" testing is taking place leading to some "final final" testing of the release version hours before it is due to be released. My Corporate IT mind is screaming, I imagine it even more so for military and aviation project managers. At least in the "mission critical" systems I have worked on no one gets hurt if people can't order more widgets! I think this discussion could be had for pretty much every games studio, they are all a bit crazy IMHO

You have been to Manchester Arena then! On the plus side at least we didn’t have to drive half away across the country to find out our Phantom had been delayed.

If you are happy to use additional third party programs you could use Joystick Gremlin to duplicate selected axis to a vjoy device axis or buttons. Or use Joy2Key to simply map axis to buttons if you don’t want vjoy.

Unless the SSA developer is part of the pre release testing team I can’t imagine this happening.

Symbolic links is a good shout. Personally I find that a lot simpler than many of the aircraft systems we have in DCS!

I don’t believe there is a need for another sound card as the Jetseat uses USB. The only times you need a second card is for using the sound module for additional shakers or for (optional) additional filtering using the sound for vibration in games that don’t have direct support for the Jetseat.

Joystick Profiler is a brilliant utility for managing DCS mappings across multiple aircraft and allows for easily moving mappings between devices. https://github.com/Holdi601/JoystickProfiler

Totally understand resource contention. Having applied the best practice with separate drives and also tested with a dual boot on the same hardware but with a build constrained to a single drive for OS and DCS it made no discernible difference. The point is that in some applications like intensive database the setup of drives and optimisation of access is hugely important. With games like DCS much less so such that any gain is at best negligible. If you have two SSDs then sure, it rules out any possibility of resource contention with the OS and DCS but the probability seems so incredibly low to make it a very poor return on investment if you were to add another SSD just for DCS. You can be right that resource contention is a thing but in terms of advice to fellow players adding a dedicated SSD for DCS is poor value. A single SSD works well enough in my experience and others reporting on these forums.

Having worked in IT for many years it is a given you separate the OS and application data on server drives with data intensive applications. Most games aren’t disk io intensive and once you have sufficient performance adding more has zero gain. Of course it doesn’t hurt to separate them just in case but the chances that DCS will be impacted by disk access shared with the OS on a semi decent SSD seem most unlikely based on real world experiences I have seen reported and my own testing.

Yes it is logical, however, the law of diminishing returns may make any change in drive performance at most negligible. Moving to a SSD drive has a noticeable gain. In my experience moving to a faster nvme drive had no noticeable gain, having DCS on a separate nvme drive compared to running on a SSD with the OS again made no noticeable gain. Things like increasing/faster RAM, CPU & GPU upgrades and optimising Windows to not use those things whilst DCS is running all make the big difference. Once you have DCS on a SSD be it shared with the OS or not the chances of it ever being a bottleneck seem most unlikely. The theory in general is sound but my experience is it makes no difference to DCS

My understanding is that WMR will remain baked into any new Windows 11 installation until the feature update 24H2 is released towards the end of this year.

That is one of the most bizarre comments I have seen on these (or any simulation) forums. Combat flight simulations provide the capability for people of all walks of life and physical abilities to get as close as they can to the experience of flying combat aircraft, however complex they may be and at whatever levels of learning they desire. It is the very purpose of simulations for our entertainment

Rather than pausing updates it is possible to set a target feature update, which Windows will stop updating to a later feature update but all security patches will still update. Assuming 24H1 coming out in a couple of months is the last feature update to support WMR then simply set the target feature update to 24H1. It should be supported with security patches for another 2 years or so (approx April 2026) Instructions here https://www.elevenforum.com/t/specify-target-feature-update-version-in-windows-11.3811/?fbclid=IwAR3B2XcWAAg1ABVe7gD6-BU5V5uRVMyUaNX7VlKDE_X4ZMI5MfhrRvgbsrE

If you have no plans to change it then the amount of effort selling it will far exceed the effort to keep Windows 11 from updating to 24H2 sometime in the future, the update version prior to 24H2 will continue to receive security updates for quite some time.

I just use Group Policy to set a target feature update version, some instructions here: https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/set_windows_10_version_to_stay_on_or_upgrade_to.html

It is relatively simple to instruct Windows 11 to remain on a given feature update e.g 23H2 and still get essential security updates. You don’t need to revert to Windows 10 to retain WMR capability.

According to this article the build update for Windows 11 (24H2) will cease to support WMR https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-mixed-reality-headsets-no-longer-work-with-windows-11-version-24h2-and-newer/

IMHO @SharpeXB is spot on with his observations on the value and accuracy of this poll both in terms of sample size and skewed nature on those who vote in forum polls and the customer base as a whole. That said there are many sims which have been converted to VR with success, the whole MSFS change of mind is a classic example, pretty much every racing sim started out as 2D only. VTOL is an example of a game designed for VR capable of running on potato PCs but is hardly of interest to most DCS customers. In my view DCS is pretty spectacular in VR. Yes it needs a more powerful PC than the average player will have but I fully understand the enthusiast base it has. I am sure it is a niche but in much the same way the cockpit builders are a niche. In both cases it probably represents groups who spend far more on DCS than average, so simple percentages of numbers of users may not represent the sales value. Personally I think these discussions are somewhat moot, the VR user base is sufficient enough and perhaps more importantly enthusiastic enough to merit supporting. 2D will remain a key aspect of future development, I don’t see VR becoming the majority use even though I exclusively run it for DCS I the foreseeable future.

I have been trying out various combinations of button boxes with DCS. JoyPro has been invaluable in changing mappings across multiple aircraft. It has proven totally reliable for me. The biggest challenge has been Windows reassigning Arduino controllers but JoyPro also allows for swapping devices.

I was responding to your quote about OpenComposite and OpenXR toolkit being "the only reason why WMR itself survived this long" and without it "no WMR user would had a good experience with VR games". Now that is real niche stuff as much as I like what was created. It may be relevant for a small group of enthusiasts here but hardly VR gamers at large, for whom SteamVR and WMR for SteamVR is all they have needed and has probably worked well enough in their eyes. It is easy to see how WMR has no strategic future as an environment but in its current form the user experience is far from the disaster you are portraying.

I disagree, whilst OpenXR opened the opportunity for exploring various options and performance tweaks, SteamVR and WMR worked adequately from the outset. I would hazard a guess many have no idea what OpenXR is and many games don’t officially support it even now. FWIW I still think a Reverb is a good choice for seated sims right now at its price point and use it for several years.

HP’s problem wasn’t WMR but the poor quality of the devices which it seems were the product of an experimental lab allowed to be given an opportunity to see how it went. Speaking with support which I did several times thanks to a two year warranty and four replacement headsets and a cable and faceplate they didn’t seem to know the product even existed. I had to talk them through what it was. That said they were very accommodating in replacing broken units. At one point I had to explain I had a conversation with the VR dept leader on Reddit as to what to do with my failed headset. The relative success of the Reverb as king of reasonable priced headsets had nothing to do with OpenXR, the headset has been frequently out of stock in G1 & G2 variants and still charged at full price (in the UK at least) throughout its four year life thus far. The Reverb was always a toe in the water and WMR provided a relatively straightforward environment to use without having to create a proprietary API like Oculus and the costs and time associated with doing so. The problem is that Microsoft wanted to jump in to the VR space to create a VR store and it failed to take off and unsurprisingly has abandoned WMR as a project.

With OpenXR support increasing the ease of installing a WMR headset has never been easier. Simply plug it in, Windows detects it and installs the WMR portal and Windows has its own OpenXR drivers. There is no need to mess around with SteamVR or WMR for SteamVR. Stuff like toolkits for fiddling with settings is optional depending how computer savvy you are. It is probably one of the few genuine plug and play environments out there, doesn’t need a phone or third party account.

You can bind a button to Options (but also need to bind a button to stop VAICOM listening after you have finished). There is a thread here

It has been asked many times to decouple the VR and mouse movement, I don’t believe it is possible.