F4 cockpit too dark in VR

[USA_Recon]

18 hours ago, Zabuzard said:

Possibly you misunderstood me. The grease pencil is made using HB UI and HB UI, as explained earlier, cannot offer "touch controls" or similar because that is a DCS limitation. There is no interface for it that thirdparties could use.

HB UI uses ImGui to render a texture in a popup window (that texture being written to by CEF, through off-screen-rendering). ImGui natively features mouse and keyboard controls straight through the Windows API, although we had to take some extra steps to actually capture keyboard events that DCS didnt suck up and forward them to ImGui. Additionally, in Jester Wheel and Jester Dialog, we have mocked mouse events driven by character head-movement.

I am not sure how you can conclude that we "dont test it" or are unaware of this. This is simply a technical limitation and as soon as DCS offers a way for us to access what your VR hands are doing and where they are pointing and clicking at, we could forward that to HB UI as mouse events. Until then, you have to use your actual mouse, there is no way around it - sadly.

But that doesnt mean the Phantom wouldnt be tuned and optimized for VR since day one. Please try to be fair with your feedback, thank you.

I appreciate the technical explanation but in the end as a customer, I just expect it to work if I’m in VR or not.  And not to be taken wrongly here, but when this was brought up in another thread it seemed you were unaware this has been broken.  If your asking a customer to click, it makes me assume you’ve never got in VR and confirms it would be a known issue 

And it relates to overly dark cockpits, as it’s been brought up quite a bit online by customers and the response always seems to be the same from HB.  So my conclusion is it’s not really being confirmed in VR.

 

Edited Tuesday at 01:30 AM by USA_Recon

[Zabuzard]

9 hours ago, USA_Recon said:

And it relates to overly dark cockpits, as it’s been brought up quite a bit online by customers and the response always seems to be the same from HB.  So my conclusion is it’s not really being confirmed in VR.

there really is no problem in disagreeing or having a healthy discussion. and we are always very open to feedback of an sort.
im sure there is sth about the lighting that can be improved as well. ideally talk to cobra about it, the person who worked on this topic the most.
but yes, afaik its fairly spot on, more or less (provided ur running reasonable dcs settings that are generally considered as the standard to tune the experience for).

we have SMEs in our group who flew the F-4E many years during wartime and also pilots and WSOs who flew other variants, for example the german Phantoms. and if they together say "this is correct", then that has a lot of weight - for any aspect that we simulate. i can understand that it's frustrating as u typically dont get to talk to these SMEs urself, so it might feel like someone just being mad and "playing a card" to kill ur argument. but thats not the case.
its unfortunate that most SMEs dont participate in public community, but i can also totally see why.

that said, some people with access to real phantoms are here and open to talking about such details.

9 hours ago, USA_Recon said:

I just expect it to work if I’m in VR or not

I understand, we would like to have it working as well. But there is nothing that can be done about it at the moment.

[Q3ark]

On 7/14/2025 at 3:23 AM, USA_Recon said:

This doesn’t work in VR either.

So you support it but don’t test it …

Grease pencil works in VR, I was using it yesterday. The only issue is the input window appears at the front in the same place as the jester wheel but that’s a DCS limitation. 

[Lt_Jaeger]

Damn, I exclusively fly in VR and just did not know I can not use the grease pencil and have a too dark cockpit. (sarcasm off) 

For me everything seems to be perfect with my no 1 plane in dcs, but I admit, the gui for the grease pencil could be better. I understand the limitations now, thank you zabuzard for explaining. 

I use the Pimax crystal OG, in case it matters. 

[USA_Recon]

On 7/15/2025 at 6:09 AM, Q3ark said:

Grease pencil works in VR, I was using it yesterday. The only issue is the input window appears at the front in the same place as the jester wheel but that’s a DCS limitation. 

Would be helpful to explain what you do… because I cannot expand the box… clicking does nothing for me

On 7/15/2025 at 6:37 AM, Lt_Jaeger said:

Damn, I exclusively fly in VR and just did not know I can not use the grease pencil and have a too dark cockpit. (sarcasm off) 

For me everything seems to be perfect with my no 1 plane in dcs, but I admit, the gui for the grease pencil could be better. I understand the limitations now, thank you zabuzard for explaining. 

I use the Pimax crystal OG, in case it matters. 

As with above … then explain what you do because when I click the arrow in the box in VR nothing happens 

On 7/15/2025 at 2:44 AM, Zabuzard said:

there really is no problem in disagreeing or having a healthy discussion. and we are always very open to feedback of an sort.
im sure there is sth about the lighting that can be improved as well. ideally talk to cobra about it, the person who worked on this topic the most.
but yes, afaik its fairly spot on, more or less (provided ur running reasonable dcs settings that are generally considered as the standard to tune the experience for).

we have SMEs in our group who flew the F-4E many years during wartime and also pilots and WSOs who flew other variants, for example the german Phantoms. and if they together say "this is correct", then that has a lot of weight - for any aspect that we simulate. i can understand that it's frustrating as u typically dont get to talk to these SMEs urself, so it might feel like someone just being mad and "playing a card" to kill ur argument. but thats not the case.
its unfortunate that most SMEs dont participate in public community, but i can also totally see why.

that said, some people with access to real phantoms are here and open to talking about such details.

I understand, we would like to have it working as well. But there is nothing that can be done about it at the moment.

I don’t really talk to Cobra, but send him my best regards

So far the only solution has been to turn off shadows and installed DCS VR shaders .  Then using the 2.2 gamma setting - would be nice if ED had this as “default”, I had no idea as it’s not mentioned 

thanks 

[USA_Recon]

Just to share what VR users see, fired up this video and immediately it’s like “wow that is dark”

 

[Qcumber]

18 minutes ago, USA_Recon said:

Just to share what VR users see, fired up this video and immediately it’s like “wow that is dark”

 

In my experience it really does not look that dark in VR. I can see all instruments very well. I am not sure that flat screen videos will capture this very well.