Baldrick33

DCS is quite unusual in that it works by just copying the folders. Most applications need to be installed to update registry values etc. I have even shared a copy of DCS with two different OS builds on the same PC, it is remarkably tolerant of both being moved around and the OS.

It is an RTX thing. All RTX cards can benefit from DLSS, RTX40 series can benefit from some of the more advanced features.

Up until 2.9 I have found ST, OpenVR & reprojection the smoothest experience. 2.9 may change that (lots of fiddling to do) but having ST & OpenVR available in the OpenBeta provides a useful comparison of like for like feature wise. My expectations are that MT & OpenXR will make ST largely obsolete but we aren't there yet IMHO.

Up until this update MT running SteamVR OpenXR runtime was inferior on my system to ST running SteamVR OpenVR in terms of stuttering and visual quality. Hopefully this build will change that but I understand why some find OpenVR the better option with DCS up until now at least. This is with reprojection enabled btw.

It is strange how different we seem to be wired! I can’t stand any stuttering in VR, it kills the immersion of being there. Even if the resolution isn’t close to what I see and the textures are limited to approximations of terrain and buildings it still allows my brain to feel I am inside an aircraft. Others get immersion in different ways I guess. Back in my younger days I used to play Indycar on PC, it had a minimum frame rate setting which I recall I set at 12, hard to imagine playing that now, so I guess we get used to things!

I also find anything dropping below 90fps stutters. Some seem ok with it To resolve it for me I use motion reprojection which runs at 45fps and fills in the gaps, I find it very smooth. It can create some graphical artefacts and also ghosting when passing fast moving aircraft, these don’t really bother me compared with the benefits of smoothness. The instructions to enable motion reprojection are towards the bottom of this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/enthusiast-guide/using-steamvr-with-windows-mixed-reality#:~:text=Open the SteamVR dashboard.,to enable automatic motion reprojection. You can enable the signature under Profile, Account Settings

I had tried the RTX thingy a while ago, I hadn't tried retraining speech recognition with the speakers and fans on though. I will give that a go sometime. Thanks!

I should clarify my earlier statement about recognition being hit or miss. Vaicom is awesome at what it does. My issue is not with Vaicom but the environment I have. I use speakers and typically have a fan aimed at me given I have a windowless room and use VR. This makes any kind of microphone usage challenging. There maybe a solution (e.g. what F1 car cameras use!) but I haven't pursued it so far.

Assuming you are using the same base then I don’t believe so

@BIGNEWY uses Vr with a 10900 and 3090 according to his signature. Decent kit but not the latest and greatest. It is also worth remembering VR can be very subjective. 60Hz is unplayable for me with a Reverb, less than 90 fps is a stuttering mess without reprojection. Others' experiences are the polar opposite. I tend to play lightweight single player missions so my opinion of VR performance will be very different from someone who wishes to play big multiplayer events.

Not sure on the first one, can you give an example where you have to hold the mouse button and turn the wheel? Comms I use the mic and coolie hats on my Warthog throttle. Again I use Joy2Key to double up the controls with short and long presses. Then I use the mic switch for comms, push to talk/comm1&2 and the F keys F1-F5 &F10, coolie for kneeboard controls and F6-F9. I have tried several alternatives including button boxes and VAICOM but find this the best. VAICOM is good but as I use speakers and fans the recognition was hit or (mainly) miss.

The mouse recentre is a Joy2Key function. Under Mouse (Advanced) set absolute position Target position to X=50 Y=50 and Jump cursor to target I am using auto repeat 5 time per second for the mouse wheel keystrokes which seems to work well

I use the CMS hat on the stick (Virpil or TM Warthog). Forward=right mouse Aft=left mouse Right=mouse wheel up * Left=mouse wheel down * Push=recentre mouse ** * I actually use Joy2Key to map these to keystrokes which I then map to to mouse wheel in UI layer. This allows the button to repeat, handy for "turning" knobs by holding it in. ** I also use Joy2Key to perform the mouse centring function

I ended up with a hybrid solution. Physical buttons, switches and rotaries mapped to dedicated controls and some mapped to mouse functions for controls that aren't directly mapped, so I look at the virtual control and use the closest mouse control to the virtual one - be it a button switch or rotary - in the vicinity (e.g. left, centre or right). Generally I use dedicated controls for things I need to access whilst not looking directly at the control or stuff that is hard to look at (e.g. seat arm, cockpit close, F18 obogs. Mossie fuel controls etc.)

The reason I don't like VR controllers or buttons on fingers is for me it feels very odd to be waving a controller or my hand around and pressing a button in mid air. I find using either a stick hat or a switch on a button box just feels more immersive. For instance adjusting the altimeter or gunsight by looking at the dial and having the mouse wheel mapped to a rotary switch in front of me works well. Of course if you have enough controls you can map the altimeter to a dedicated rotary but it rather depends how many planes you fly to get it in roughly the right place. The mouse option works well if you want a more generic solution. You can map mouse buttons and wheel functions to multiple physical buttons and switches to cover various parts of the aircraft consoles, e.g left, centre, right or more. It is oddly more satisfying (for me at least!) flicking a physical switch to turn say the battery on (even if it is just a mouse click mapped to it) then pressing a button on a controller. For aircraft which allow right click for on, left for off then the switch matches the animation perfectly. I even have all 20 buttons on Thrustmaster MFDs mapped as left mouse clicks. I just look at the virtual MFD button and press an MFD button in roughly the right place, no need for fumbling around counting buttons. It works for me but I am happy looking at the controls and find I can do this precisely. For everything I need to be operating whilst looking elsewhere during combat I have it mapped to physical buttons & switches.

After much experimentation including PointCtrl I have found a combination of simply looking at controls and using the HOTAS buttons for mouse control and physical button boxes and quadrants the perfect solution for me. It is surprising how quickly muscle memory kicks into use physical controls you can’t see in VR. I also use Joy2Key to provide a recentre mouse function with a HOTAS button. edit to add: I don’t use the VR controllers, they are not even connected.

Personally I would rather a functioning replay system with the ability to fast forward and rewind to specific bits to watch, be it to see how well you did, stuff you need to do better, creating videos or just for fun watching stuff you have blown up, over and above new content. Purchasing new content seems to be the obvious way to fund it but the risk is the insatiable demand for content means it never gets high enough up the list to happen.

It depends what people want from multiplayer and expectations of the developers to provide a multiplayer service or give the players the autonomy to do what they want and figure it out for themselves. ED fit into the latter category and IMHO it works fine for the squadrons to organise themselves. What it doesn’t provide is a true drop in service some seem to think it should be. For that you need very restricted content to gain critical mass of players. iRacing is a classic case study in how to provide a service where the numbers of players takes precedence over the content. People don’t join thinking they will drive MX5s or Skip Barbers but end up racing the introductory compulsory content forever because that is where they find the people they can race against. Over time iRacing has added content as the player base has grown, but only when there were sufficient numbers not to kill the core series, fragmentation is a real thing and has to be managed to provide a service. Some series are very niche and are more like the self organised servers here but the core series are very well populated round the clock. To get there iRacing exclusively managed servers and only allowed public hosting after getting the numbers. I don’t see DCS ever being like iRacing but the fragmentation of the community is inevitable with such a variety of content and free for all provision of servers.

Ah, I see! Just checked, the SSA Sound Module supports up to 6 channels but you probably know that. It might be worth asking Andre if he can provide a kit without the pad?

SSA supports bass shakers (transducers) and you can tune the effects in the same way as a Jetseat. You can even have both Jetseat and shakers running together. I can’t recall the limit of shakers it supports, I will check next time I use it.

The first thing we get asked when troubleshooting issues is to remove any unofficial mods. I prefer to keep DCS as vanilla as possible. Also mods easily get broken with updates as they don’t get tested by ED prior to release for obvious reasons.

I quite enjoy debating with @SharpeXB , maybe it is just me!

You raise some interesting points. Maybe there was a baby boom of sim pilots. Bearing in mind most of the nineties were pre PlayStation, those with PCs capable of playing games were probably more mature than your average gamer now. That was the games market where PC was king for a while and the big publishers wanted their share of it. Things then moved on and computer gaming for the masses became a thing and the share of hardcore simulation players got diluted.

I have a greater knowledge of sim racing but flight sims seemed to go down the same path, for instance EA and Microprose created the first big racing sims and were massive in flight sims. They lost interest or their new owners did in Microprose’s case to chase bigger emerging markets in console titles and ports to PC. This was twenty odd years ago. I agree with you it is economics, simply that the big publishers can make more returns on other genre since the turn of the century.

I had a massive gap in flight sims due to getting into competitive sim racing multiplayer with the release of Grand Prix Legends the end of the nineties through to getting an HP Reverb VR headset in 2019 and an online sim racing friend persuading me I must try DCS with it. I have never been so excited about combat flight sims thanks to the modern tech, yet my experience of the nineties era was that it had more and bigger companies funding it at a greater pace of development, whilst the current developers are having to find more creative ways to do what they do, along with community involvement.