randomly get large chunks of my view covered in black squares occasionally.

[Cheese16]

Hey guys, sorry I didn't realized I'd sparked such a lively discussion.

I am definitely not seeing the same issues as @Jazzadanub, water and everything looks normal. I just randomly get large chunks of my view covered in black squares occasionally.

I haven't had time to check back until now. It seems I am not seeing this at all in 2D. I'm using Virtual Desktop on a Quest 3. While it is worse, it definitely isn't exclusive to VD, it happens using Oculus Link as well. Its not as bad as it when I tried it the other day but its still happening and its still annoying. It doesn't appear to show up in tracks or video at all, I tried multiple times. The mission that seems to do it the most is the Case 1 Carrier recovery mission in this track file. This was with Virtual Desktop. It flickered twice right after closing the briefing, then not at all in that track. I recorded a video of that one and the flickering didn't show up at all so I didn't bother posting it. I'm normally running Open XR Neck Safer and SimShaker while playing DCS, neither were running during this test. 

I think this may actually be the result of the game stuttering but I'm not 100% sure. I've used VD pretty reliably for a couple months now and still have not seen anything like this with any other game, sim or otherwise. I just recently did a full reinstall of DCS in March after having an endless string of issues that I thought were caused by the new unified game version but that turned out not to be the case. Since finding the root of those, mostly USB issues, DCS has worked pretty well up until last week.

Flicker1.trk

Edited May 15, 2024 by Cheese16

[Flappie]

@Cheese16 I've just tried your track and I don't get any stutter (Ryzen 3700X, GTX 1080Ti, 64GB of RAM, SSD).

[Cheese16]

So an update on this. I looked through VD's support channels and there are a lot of people reporting similar issues, mostly with DCS, but some with other sims as well. Unfortunately VD's support is exclusively through discord and not particularly helpful. The only response I've seen in regards to this is to lower the bit rate or disable OpenXR, which is frustrating considering its been reported by almost everyone that in game settings and VD settings seem to have no impact. Switching VR runtimes also doesn't seem to make much difference.

Someone on Discord was able to get video of it. 

For what it's worth, the earliest reports seem to be around mid march, at least from what I could find.

Virtual Desktop just released a new beta today so I'll try that out and report back. 

[Flappie]

Thanks for the video, it helps.

I took screenshots of it. It does not look as usual. For a while (and it may not be over), people were seeing half of the screen covered by a large rectangle. This is usually caused by models with "holes", essentially ships and some terrain parts. But here, we can see the black thing does not cover the whole height of your screen, so that is certainly something very different.

We can also see your FPS app is not covered by the black thing.

Last but not least, the black thing ends with a strange pixel effect.

[silverdevil]

On 5/17/2024 at 2:54 AM, Flappie said:

Thanks for the video, it helps.

I took screenshots of it. It does not look as usual. For a while (and it may not be over), people were seeing half of the screen covered by a large rectangle. This is usually caused by models with "holes", essentially ships and some terrain parts. But here, we can see the black thing does not cover the whole height of your screen, so that is certainly something very different.

We can also see your FPS app is not covered by the black thing.

Last but not least, the black thing ends with a strange pixel effect.

@Cheese16

i do not run VR though i did experience this a while ago. May 8, 2021

i no longer have the issue. does this video represent what you are experiencing?

[Cheese16]

Its pretty similar but not exactly the same. What I'm seeing is more random and sporadic. Like 95% of the time everything is fine, then I start seeing the flickering, usually only in one eye, for a hand full of frames. Some times its really bad, some times its better. But I never had this before the Kola update, I've tried repairing my install, I've uninstalled and re-installed VD, I've tried using Meta link with and without a cable and no matter what this issue persists. It only effects DCS

[Cheese16]

In case anyone was wondering, this is still a problem in the new update. 

 

Edit:

Better video from this reddit post:

https://reddit.com/link/1bqtllh/video/yb0c2chevarc1/player

 

Multiple replies also state this only started happening after going from OB to Unified standalone.

FWIW I had other issues after the unification patch and did a clean install, thats when it started for me.

Edited May 25, 2024 by Cheese16

[Cheese16]

Okay, so I've tried every setting in DCS and VD, every codec, open XR runtime, bitrate, resolution, framerate, uninstalled all rgb software and vr utilities, you name it I've tried it. I've reinstalled both beta and stable versions of VD multiple times. It happens in Steamvr, oculus, and VIrtual desktop, regardless of HMD. I've deleted metashaders and FXO. I deleted a bunch of Windows bloatware, I uninstalled RTSS, disabled steam and Nvidia overlays. Everything I've tried either does nothing or makes it worse. at this point my POV is just constantly flickering.

This is 100% a DCS issue. It does not show up in track files, I've provided multiple videos. 

 

At this point the only thing left to try is reinstall DCS(again) or reinstall windows, which I'd rather not do.

Is there any way to reinstall DCS and NOT lose all of my logbook/profile data? Cause thats super <profanity>ty. 

 

[silverdevil]

5 hours ago, Cheese16 said:

Okay, so I've tried every setting in DCS and VD, every codec, open XR runtime, bitrate, resolution, framerate, uninstalled all rgb software and vr utilities, you name it I've tried it. I've reinstalled both beta and stable versions of VD multiple times. It happens in Steamvr, oculus, and VIrtual desktop, regardless of HMD. I've deleted metashaders and FXO. I deleted a bunch of Windows bloatware, I uninstalled RTSS, disabled steam and Nvidia overlays. Everything I've tried either does nothing or makes it worse. at this point my POV is just constantly flickering.

This is 100% a DCS issue. It does not show up in track files, I've provided multiple videos. 

 

At this point the only thing left to try is reinstall DCS(again) or reinstall windows, which I'd rather not do.

Is there any way to reinstall DCS and NOT lose all of my logbook/profile data? Cause thats super <profanity>ty. 

logbook and configurations for controls are in saved games\dcs. can you share your dcs.log? also a slow repair essentially performs the action of a fresh install. also another idea to test is rename the saved games\dcs folder to dcs.bak. run dcs, a new folder with fresh settings will be made. then copy the input folder \Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\config\Input over from the DCS.BAK. 

[Cheese16]

I tried copying the whole save games folder when I reinstalled back in March and I still lost all of my flight time and campaign progress. Is there just no way of preserving that at all? 

 

I forgot to mention I've also tried repairing the game multiple times and cleaned the files using the updater utility. 

 

I'll try a fresh save games folder and see if that does anything later today.

[silverdevil]

On 5/25/2024 at 10:28 AM, Cheese16 said:

I tried copying the whole save games folder when I reinstalled back in March and I still lost all of my flight time and campaign progress. Is there just no way of preserving that at all? 

 

I forgot to mention I've also tried repairing the game multiple times and cleaned the files using the updater utility. 

 

I'll try a fresh save games folder and see if that does anything later today.

the controls are in the save games folder. 

On 5/25/2024 at 7:36 AM, silverdevil said:

copy the input folder \Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\config\Input over from the DCS.BAK

log book is also in the saved games folder

\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\MissionEditor

you can also copy this folder over from the .BAK

[Cheese16]

Starting with a fresh save file did not help, unfortunately. Here is the log file. 

I am currently doing a full clean install, so we'll see how that goes.

dcs.log

[Cheese16]

Okay so after a fresh install some things have changed. I tested OpenXR, Oculus, and Steam VR again on a fresh, virgin install. No modules, no old Save games folder, nothing.

The game now appears to work fine in SteamVR now, which is nice. But it still flickers in Oculus and OpenXR. OpenXR is by far the worst, basically unplayable. Oculus is not much better. Still isolated to DCS.

I would prefer to use OpenXR but at least now I can play. I looked through the logs and it seems to be throwing a lot of errors with OpenXR.

Here the latest two from this fresh install. The '.old' log was with Openxr. It did work, but continued to flicker constantly. 

dcs.log dcs.log.old

[silverdevil]

18 hours ago, Cheese16 said:

Okay so after a fresh install some things have changed. I tested OpenXR, Oculus, and Steam VR again on a fresh, virgin install. No modules, no old Save games folder, nothing.

The game now appears to work fine in SteamVR now, which is nice. But it still flickers in Oculus and OpenXR. OpenXR is by far the worst, basically unplayable. Oculus is not much better. Still isolated to DCS.

I would prefer to use OpenXR but at least now I can play. I looked through the logs and it seems to be throwing a lot of errors with OpenXR.

Here the latest two from this fresh install. The '.old' log was with Openxr. It did work, but continued to flicker constantly. 

the error in the .OLD file has a similar error to one solved in this thread. though the user is crashing and it is not screen anomalies.

i am thinking there is some hope in "restore defaults" in nvidia panel tip.

[Cheese16]

Seems there a few interesting solutions in their worth trying. I'm pretty sure everything in Nvidia should be default already but I'll double check. Might have to try reinstalling .Net framework as well. It's rare but I do occasionally see .net errors when launching simshaker. I was under the impression that it was caused by running multiple instances but maybe not.

 

Thanks, silverdevil. I'll check a few of these out and report back.

[silverdevil]

3 hours ago, Cheese16 said:

It's rare but I do occasionally see .net errors when launching simshaker.

i seem to remember seeing other issues about simshaker. maybe a good test is to unplug it.

[Cheese16]

I have been testing without it, it doesn't seem to be that.

[Cheese16]

Okay, so it still isn't completely fixed, but its a lot better. Nvidia settings were all default already. I think what really did it was updating .Net Framework to version 4.8. Logs are no longer throwing tons of OpenXR errors, so thats something. Its gone from flickering every few seconds to maybe once every 5 minutes, which is still pretty annoying, but much better. I'm not really sure what else to try again. I checked everything in that thread and the only thing I was able to do was update Windows and .Net. I'll test it a bit more over the coming days but I may just stick with SteamVR for the time being, unfortunately. 

[Cheese16]

This is still an issue after the most recent update. Oculus and VD both had updates this week as well that had no impact. It still only impacts DCS and judging by posts elsewhere I'm still not the only one experiencing it. 

[Dr. Anti-Vehicle]

Same issue with Quest 3 hand tracking pass thru via Virtual Desktop. It’s only noticed in DCS. I did notice that flickering only occur when looking back. Hands also flicker really bad. Tried turning of HDR. No luck.

[FusRoPotato]

I've been seeing these black rectangles in this and the past version as well, but I don't use any VR equipment. I'm also using an AMD card unlike the rest of you so I'd assume this is a bug in the new shaders.

[Cheese16]

This was fixed for me in a VD update shortly after I reported it in their discord and they banned me after denying the problem was on their end. Go figure.