Tobii/FaceTrackNoIR head tracking suddenly glitching continuously

[MysticFM]

I had the Tobii Eye Tracker 5 and FaceTrackNoIR with the Tobii plugin working perfectly in DCS as recently as a week ago. But today it is suddenly glitching back and forth between my head tracking movement and looking straight ahead, like 8 times per second or more. It is as if DCS is now seeing a second head tracker input that isn’t moving, and trying to obey both of them. But I didn’t change anything in the control bindings recently, and from what I can tell, the only updates in the past week were to DCS itself, and some sort of a Windows 10 update.

Today, in efforts to fix this, I’ve tried setting FaceTrackNoIR to only send TrackIR data, or to only send FreeTrack data, and it makes no difference … I always have the same glitching. I’ve tried deleting the TrackIR control bindings in DCS, and verified that head and eye tracking are not enabled for DCS in the Tobii Game Hub (so that it doesn’t conflict with FaceTrackNoIR). The only thing that changes any of this new misbehavior is if I delete the axis bindings for absolute camera views, which are bound in the HeadTracker column, but that only removes all attempted head tracking and locks me to a fixed forward view.

Yes, the HeadTracker.DLL from Tobii has been copied into the DCS bin folders already … did that months ago. (I don’t think that would be playing a part here anyway, since I’m not using the Tobii software directly, just the hardware driver.)

EDIT: I seem to have found a solution, sort of, although who knows if it will still work the next time I power up the PC. Specifically, I’d started using FaceTrackNoIR as a workaround for the Tobii Game Hub not being able to connect to the DCS window. It now appears Tobii may have pushed an update to the Game Hub that resolves this (or at least it seems to have done so today, knock on wood), but which also prevents me from disabling the DCS support … instead it just doesn’t send any data changes from head movement to DCS when I have the axes disabled, but for some reason still tells DCS that it is providing tracking data … data which is always looking straight ahead. So taking FaceTrackNoIR completely out of the equation and then re-defaulting the Tobii Game Hub’s DCS support (which was otherwise all out of whack) is allowing the default Tobii support to work for me … again, at least for today. For all I know, tomorrow it will be broken again, but my fingers are crossed.

Edited November 29, 2023 by MysticFM