RealDCSpilot

Maybe you didn't understand that the textures on the outside are not the only problem. Many instruments and parts of the cockpit got a 4K texture set too, but only taking up a quarter of the texture space. Usually a texture artist combines the use of this texture space by putting 4 different objects in it to use it efficiently. So this texture needs to be loaded one time only to cover 4 objects. Instead of four times the loading time for each single object we have right now.

Then i don't want to see how your car looks like...

@Morat Check night missions! They look so stunning through those powerful OLED panels!

Well, we pay for the product, we do not get paid for spending time on testing and finding bugs. If something is marked as EA i expect bugs and treat them differently. PC is a special case here, bold claims are getting easily offending against customers because of their history. Selling a helicopter module and delivering the flight model 7 years later, just to remind you. And it's better to embrace early adopters, give them a little discount and let them help you detecting and ironing out the quirks. The poorly done texture job, this is something i absolutely didn't expect from being delivered as finished product. It's really embarrassing. Plus the comment we get from PC "we don't care, we fly from inside the cockpit...".

Mostly come from releasing the product explicitly not in EA. Why raising expectations when the company already has a record about problems with attitude and sanity. As far as i remember, that claim about "it will be not in EA when released" was made before you joined the company and basically saved most of it's reputation.

When you read the notebook till the end you have to press the next line button one more time to trigger the bug. It's actually not the only method: I found the broken ODA/NVG logic pretty quickly on my first night flight. Because having to switch between Pilot and Copilot with NVGs on and off all the time, you may also try to bring up the ODA for the Copilot too. But his NVG doesn't have it. If your Pilot's NVG is not activated at the moment you press the ODA button as Copilot it will be activated for the pilot when you switch back to his seat. From there the Pilot NVG will have two states: NVG on but no ODA and NVG off but ODA on. It's easy to replicate if you really want to.

Stuff like this doesn't show up in a log file. All of this is easy to reproduce in a couple of steps. Turning on the search light = 1 step. xD And all of these bugs (amongst others) were reported already more than 2 months ago.

No, i got no mods installed. All of them got reported shortly after release. You can replicate them on your end: 1. easy, turn on the search light and bring it forward. It's so bright that it even works in daylight. At night it's much better to see how crazy bright it is. Then fly around slightly tilted forward. You will see that it has a very limited range and is cut off. 2. The ODA is only available in the pilot's NVG. But if you switch between copilot and pilot seat several times, switching between NVG on and off and ODA on and off, you will eventually end up with NVG off but ODA on. Which shouldn't work because the ODA is a fixed part of the goggles. (It's a simple logic bug in their code) 3. Also easy to replicate. Never checked this in SP, but in MP. Just go to the notebook page on your MFD. Read the mission briefing till the end. From there all digital cockpit display elements will snap to the object space of the player camera and will stick to it. This happens in VR, don't know if it's visible in 2D if you don't change your camera angles. Check the bug reports, this is not the only way to trigger it. Definitely a nasty bug that ruins your flight 100%.

From time to time i use it for tasks where it fits. But it also reminds me of over promise and under deliver everytime. It's a cool aircraft, but that is because of Bell and not PC. It's sad that certain 3rd party devs have different standards and ethics about the quality of their products than others. It's also not about the whole team at PC, it's just one or two individuals.

I do totally understand him. It's not only the textures (and sound). It's also full of bugs. They made the big claim that it will be no EA release, but it is a 100% EA release. Here, just 3 bugs in one shot. I took me only 30 minutes on release day to find them: 1. searchlight is too bright and cut off after ~50 m. 2. i can trick the NVG's display to act like the AH-64's IHADSS. 3. i can completely break all the cockpit displays and have them floating in the air. The module's quality standards are behind every other 3rd party module. And for what it brings to the table, compared to others, it's overpriced. A humble 49-59 price range would have been better.

Yeah, on one side it's cool to have the option to modify. But this is also another indication that DCS might do a little sidestep here and doesn't follow the rules. Personally i do not use it, this should all be managed by the OpenXR API. It takes the value you mechanically set in your headset and reports it to the game which should adjust it's camera rig accordingly.

Well, here the moon is only an indication that something is off. Spotting of distant objects is problematic in general in VR. FOV not set right could act as a problem amplifier. Sadly we can only change IPD but not FOV to check.

IPD should always be on your personal eye distance. This setting changes the world scale as perceived from a normal adult human to a toddler or a giant. Everything close to you in the cockpit will get bigger or smaller but it doesn't do anything to size perceived for very distant objects. Which makes sense and i also double checked if there is anything wrong with it.

That question kept me thinking and i got the idea for an experiment. Highly inaccurate of course without knowing on what values the cameras in DCS truly operate. There is this tool which is pretty famous for being used measuring your VR HMD's optical FOV in a calibrated space. https://knob2001.itch.io/testhmd To get your horizontal FOV measured, you have to stare at the center of an image with two red bars left and right. Then you move those bars further and further into your peripheral vision until you can't make them out anymore. My current HMD gives me a result of 110° (depends on personal face shape and eye position). So i did a simple test in DCS. Prepared a date and time with a full moon close to the horizon, centered my heading on it and started turning sideways until i reached 55° more (233° -> 288°). Always kept the yellow cross of the fixed mouse cursor in the center. The moon was leaving my field of view at 292°. This basically means that DCS renders a FOV of 118° on my headset with 110°. Would be nice if someone else could test this too on his end... On top of that, i talked to a former Tornado WSO which also uses VR in DCS too and gave him the test mission. He said, from his memory, the moon definitely appears to small in DCS. By 30-50%.

Not if you keep your head on an exact fixed position with a fixed distance to the screen and have set up the correct FOV for that distance. May not be practical in most cases because you have to cut away a huge area. But a 3D world on a 2D monitor only is always a way bigger abstraction than VR. A half dome screen would be best.

Man, you are really starting to waste my time. Optical FOV is fixed in every HMD. The screen space is also fixed - the rendered window on each display per eye. Pixels don't play a role here. How much perspective you cram into that fixed space is happening on the software side, in the VR camera rig. The VR spyglass zoom demonstrates this very well, but with a way to big value for this purpose here. Did you never wonder why when you look around in the cockpit, the pilot model's feet look a bit tiny? Or the seat? Despite you have your IPD correctly dialed in in the VR HMD? That's a wrong FOV.

Quad view and eye tracking...

No, not entirely. It would have the most impact on everything that is rendered at infinity (skybox with moon patch on top and hud). The closer something is to the camera, the less it would be affected. And i'm talking about a correction of 1-2° only. Let's say 2° less and the Moon + HUD will be rendered a bit bigger while still holding the correct measurement. Here is something fresh from the night sky: As soon as i stepped on the balcony i was reassured that something is wrong in VR in DCS. The real moon appears so much larger for the bare eye than it does in VR for the "bare" eye. Of course this is all crappy cellphone photography, with no scientific value with stretching out arms and so on... The camera also doesn't have the dynamic range the human eye has. This is a montage, just for visualization: I'm much more sure now that the whole thing is a FOV issue in VR. Decreasing the FOV angle by a couple degrees would also impact spotting distant objects in the skies, this is a problem in VR for years now. It would definitely improve it.

??? What? How? I hope you know about image pre-distortion for VR HMD optics and that a screenshot of a display panel in a VR headset like this: is the same like this: Setting a couple degree more FOV would only add to an effect like concave lenses like in correction glasses for short-sighted people. Reducing a couple of degrees would have an effect of convex lenses like for far-sighted people. Inside the headset you wouldn't see much of a difference because everything looks related to each other and 6-dof movement isn't affected at all. What i'm trying to tell you the whole time is that we are looking at a "concave lens" effect all the time, that's why the moon looks smaller in VR than in real life.

Okay, you didn't get the connection about FOV out of this. Let's get this more clear, this is the DCS VR camera rig: For the spyglass zoom functionality, they manipulate the whole rig. It's a linear interpolation for about one second from a start FOV value to the much more narrow FOV value. They might even translate the IPD too for this. I've never seen this in any other VR game. While it works, it might have a slight flaw. The start FOV value which might be a couple of degrees bigger than it should be. While IPD is exposed and changes world scale, especially the appearance of very close objects, FOV has more impact on the appearance of Objects and especially on those that are extremely far away. ... or any other exposed FOV setting does only apply to monitor usage. For VR it does nothing. There might be a .lua somewhere, but i couldn't find it yet.

As i'm trying to point out all the time, it's about how big the moon appears in VR. I never use DCS on a monitor. I still think that FOV for each eye could be the source of the moon being smaller perceived than in reality. Unfortunately, i can't change the FOV per eye anywhere. There is "VR spyglass zoom" which does that, but it only toggles from a min to max value and back if i hold the button. Can't bind it to an axis, which would help a lot in this case here.

It's actually three different sims in those images. And no, i will definitely not "thrust" my eyes. Well it's the oldest one in the comparison. Have to give it some slack here. Did that, the hand object is touching the cockpit frame arc. And yes, of course a glove makes the fingers a bit bigger. But i can't bring any other reference object into the game. Well, isn't that interesting...? From all sims it actually gives me the best result how i can see the Moon in real life (size and darker surface details).

Alright, let's see... Hmmmm... and another two other sims examples... So they are all wrong?

Guess what, i can do this in VR. And as expected, it's to small. Needs to be 2x bigger i guess... As i already said, i would expect the size of a pea, not a pinhead.

I didn't say that. That was freehand. But i can relate to what he said. ED makes a lot of changes under the hood without mentioning them in the changelogs. Night lighting is a very good example, it was broken for years. The last time i remember having full moon as main light source and realistic ground illumination working correctly was ~2019. Then it got broken again and the moon was only a sprite in the sky and the ground always dark as hell no matter what. Especially this was problematic for LCD VR headsets because everything looked extremely dark and i stopped doing night missions at that time. This was going on for years. Now, since a couple of months, night lighting did have a really nice comeback and it seems to work well across all maps now. And i also got a "new" OLED VR headset since last week which makes doing night missions really enjoyable again. But well, the size of the moon is off... As perceived through my VR headset. What makes me confident is -> i'm an old fart. I've simply seen many full moons in my life. And can't do a scientific measurement to compare FOV with other sims. Because that would need the exact same 3D object being looked at from the exact same distance in both simulators. Don't have the right tools for that. No.