Baldrick33

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.

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.