RealDCSpilot

Alright, all is up and running for a couple of hours. Setup was really easy. I'm really impressed with what i've seen so far. It's like being cured from an eye disease called "LCD". FOV measuring was kind of an surprise 110° horizontal and 100° vertical. Didn't expect this from how it looks from inside the HMD. Didn't had the time to test DCS yet. That's for tomorrow.

I already got the adapter, Steam says the app releases in ~5 hours. I'm very curious how well it will work.

Definitely not. But the sun on your end can look smaller by gamma and brightness settings. On my end the sun is blinding with a huge flare if i look directly into it. Kind of realistic, but not the ultimate best solution. There are also differences on dusk and dawn, which look also okay on my end.

Resolution per eye might be set to high. You can try to enable DLSS and check the real numbers in the logfile at a line that contains: DX11BACKEND (18368): DLSS successfully initialized, (resolution)x(resolution) -> (resolution)x(resolution). Another thing could be the way how you connect your mobile headset with your PC. Virtual Desktop is a very efficient OpenXR streaming solution. I would advise to check that first and make sure you are running everything in the recommended configuration (PC-> router over cable | headset over Wifi5/6 -> router).

It's actually connected. In a 3D engine a "light's" range and brightness are intertwined. Because it is cut off rendering after a very short range, all the "energy" goes into that short light beam and acts like running in overdrive.

I'm playing strict VR only. For a very long time the Moon was always to small. Now it actually matches much more the size of a real full moon that i can see once every ~4 weeks in real life.

No wonder when i look at the cockpit textures. Each surface object needs 3 types of textures: color, roughness/metallic and normal map. Atm there is a huge waste of all that texture space with 12 texture maps in 4K resolution for 4 different cockpit instruments when they could be combined into just only 3 texture maps. As if everybody has a 4090 with 24GB VRAM.

This is just an example how the tail section textures should be uv-packed. This leads to an 33% increase in pixel resolution aka sharpness aka crispness on each surface. This is just puzzled together quickly with Photoshop...

The above post shows why the external model looks so bad and how much PC's 3D artist didn't care about the waste of texture space with bad UV packing. This is all loaded into RAM and VRAM. A huge number of pixels are unused and eating up memory. For comparison look at the F-4E. This is how it's done. To correct this, the whole texturing process would need to be redone from scratch.

Times are changing: https://mozaracing.com/flight

Oh man, please stay realistic. Is it the most accessible helicopter FM, easy for beginners? Yes. But that's only because it's the Fiat Panda of DCS's helicopters. It clearly got it's DNA from a civilian machine. Power, weight, materials... Atm the Kiowa FM also has issues. I have a random problem with ground effect, slowly gliding in to a landing spot leads to a strange bouncing off effect sometimes. As if the aircraft dropped a ton of weight all of a sudden. Retreating blade stall seems also very undefined, it simply switches to "hey, i'm a stone now" in a split second.

Textures, especially the normal maps are only at 30% where they should be in 2024. The whole 3D model looks more like something that would be used as an AI object in a game. The Apache is simply state-of-the-art. It demonstrates up-to-date texturing artist craftmanship.

I was able to see it with NVS in daylight. It's very very dim. Just check against a higher contrast background.

This only comes from a technical limited perspective. Imaging being a deaf person in the middle of the crowd on a dance floor, but everybody is wearing headphones. You simply hear and feel nothing. The track just entered a break section and everybody calms down. And then the DJ let the next beat kick in. All you can do is wondering why everybody is going crazy. That seems to be how most people experience VRS in DCS. No wonder, because the most people sit in front of a monitor, only with a spring-centered joystick or maybe a HOTAS. But DCS does much more, it exports real-time telemetry output. Feeding that into a motion seat or into a haptic seatpad via Simshaker opens up much more information your aircraft is telling you all the time. Hull vibrations, turbulences... everything is there. VRS, retreating blade stalls etc. announce themselves long before it happens. A simple seatpad with Simshaker already does the trick to make you feel what the aircraft is telling you. It doesn't matter if you have thousands of hours in the real thing. A SME, equipped only with a small monitor and spring-centering stick, is not able to tell you much about how good a flight model truly is. He is missing out on a lot of information. You'll need at least a VR headset for all the three-dimensional references of the world around you, the much larger field of view that simply gives you all the information on movement of everything around you. And on top of that a haptic solution for telemetry output. To let your body feel what is going on. It's up to you how much you want to dive into DCS. But don't judge stuff by just looking through a small cellar window that makes you miss the most of what is going on under the hood.

Everytime i read "but it's fun" in here i get the old Gazelle FM vibes. With the old FM it flew like ass and people claimed "but it's so fun to fly". It took 7 years to be fixed! Fun is something i actually expect from every module i'm interested in. It's out of the question, why bring it up here. Overall quality of a product is what concerns me as a customer (and DCS module collector). And your faith as a DCS customer is really tested these days. So now we have the OH-58D, released without EA and without release day cut-off price. There was a lot of bragging about that it won't be an early access product. What we got is still an EA product, with stuff that doesn't work right or is in substandard condition and needs to be fixed, like the usual DCS stuff. No big difference to an EA release. I found a lot of bugs within the first hours myself. What did the testers do? The amount of money is also quite high for the given complexity of the module. We just had the release of the F-4E, 100 times more complex module... Put that into perspective.

It's not only that. It only renders about 50m far.

@some1 As far as i remember, the global communication menu won't work if the server has easy comm disabled. You need to have dedicated PTT buttons to bind in a DCS module. Both current PTT binds work only for VOIP radios.

@Kinkkujuustovoileipä To prevent misunderstandings, can you please give us bindings for: Trigger 1st detent (ICS not only VOIP) Trigger 2nd detent (Radio not only VOIP) Weapon Release 1st detent Weapon Release 2nd detent

Sadly certain fundamental bindings are wrong and missing. It's even wrong in the manual. The trigger on the cyclic with two detents should be for radio (ICS and chosen radio). There is currently no other way than using the global communications menu. To fire the weapons we actually need an extra button (the thumb button on the real cyclic) and also a binding for the button cover. The 2nd detent on the trigger should not be for weapon release. Another problem is the IZLID laser button. If you want to use it, it will only work after you clicked with your mouse on the real button on the collective. Otherwise your bound button won't work. Check the page from the real manual...

AI Pilot Off does nothing. AI Pilot On does work like a toggle.

Is there any data about retreating blade stall conditions? Where is the threshold? What are does and don'ts? Had to quick dive a couple of times to dodge missiles and ended up falling from the sky like a stone. It seems to switch very quickly and there is no way to get controls back. Sadly there is no update to Simshaker out yet, normally i get the haptic feedback long before it happens. Another thing: ground effect. It kinda kicks in like with a delay and a bit to much?? I'm used to the soft cushion of air in the other helicopters in DCS, but in the OH-58 it kinda works bit like a trampoline (?)

I hope OP get's it that there is no magic button. Calling it "auto hover" is misleading. The button on the real stick does nothing more than helping with main rotor stabilization by taking away parts of control authority and shifting them to roll and pitch attitude sensors with the help of dampers. The current hard kick-in is clearly a game software helper taking control. A real auto hover feature would need extra hard and software with more precise positional data input and integrated actuators for full control.

@Kinkkujuustovoileipä Found a bug in the on/off logic. I can bring up the display without the NVS enabled. It happens if i switch between pilot and co-pilot and also switch NVS and ODU on and off several times. It's state should be dependent on if the NVS is currently on or off.

Inspected it in the modelviewer and would recommend to double the resolution of the textures and not choose that hard texture compression. There are very visible color compression artifacts everywhere on the hull. Didn't expect this in 2024.