No significant performance changes are to be expected before 3.0. For now, it’s only optimizing the new features for them to have as little impact as possible. Minor iterations in that regard for now seems absolutely reasonable.
Persian Gulf looks peautiful at night, can’t wait for this to come to other maps. AI dogfights are fun, pretty impressive, really. And the weather is doing the most important thing it does in terms of gameplay: Is being a little more unpredictable.
No extra money required, no new early access module to be bought. If you ask me all of this is just good news. I’m loving this new update.
Performance-wise, I lock my frames at 60 because of TrackIR, so I can’t see much difference, but I did get some slowdowns on 2.8 that didn’t happen before. I’m sure this will be sorted down the road.
I’m happy they finally dropped that sprite based effect when flying in inclement weather. It looked bad with the new clouds. Did some campaign flying yestarday after the update, I have to say I had a lot of fun. Reflected’s Fear the Bones campaign is just awesome.
Uh-oh, I’m still reading forum posts and have only flown the Kitty, buy it looks like VAICOM and SRS are broken. Losing VAICOM, AIRIO, and Kneeboard would be a major bummer for me. Not the wheel!!
Edit: sadly it appears that VAICOM has become abandonware.
I just flew a run through one of the new weather presets, “overcast&rain 2”. It had me in tears of joy. It truly were the halls of air Gillespie wrote about. Superb. Screenshots do not do it justice, as the depth and scale conveyed by the stereoscopy and view from the fast moving jet would be missing.
GASP! Man, I REALLY hope they don’t take the Voice Attack app away too! I can work around VAICOM Pro (cus it piggybacks off of VA).
From the more bad news front: I lost my ability to dynamically debug my scripts!!! RAT FARTS! Spent all day trying to figure out why to no end, and I’m kinda, sorta, highly aggravated over this[1] - worked before 2.8…grrrrr…
[1] for those curious, I was able to debug running scripts using break points + variable value examination using the Eclipse LDT IDE (not a great IDE but better than nothing) - a major time saver! Changes the workflow for sure.
I don’t think that anything ED could do would block VA completely, since at its core it simply converts speech to keystrokes. But I’m really going to miss skipping menus as deeply as VAICOM did in VR. And access to the F10 coms without touching a mouse really came in handy.
Just saw this post from IronMike about eventually mapping the Jester wheel to key binds.
Random thought. Maybe with VAIOM dead, the community will develop a DCS profile for VA that is just that, and less of a plug-in, which needed care and feeding with every update. Something a little simpler, but more resilient.
I will miss Vaicom. It and the AIRIO expansion made the F-14 and Jester a living breathing team. It was an awesome experience, and I can’t believe it’s dead.
HB should buy it, assign someone to develop it, and sell it as an ED module.
ETA: More than just F-14/RIO interaction, being able to hit the PTT switch and ask AWACS for a a bogey dope, or the crew chief to pull the wheel chalks or connect ground power, or talk to ATC (especially around the boat) made DCS in VR an incredibly immersive experience. This stuff should be part of the core game, or at least a paid, supported module developed and maintained in partnership with ED. If 2.8 doesn’t support it, I won’t be updating. Hollywood_315’s disappearance without providing a path forward for his incredible work is an absolute tragedy.
I NEVER fly without VAICOM. It’s number two, after VR, of my must have’s. The haptic feedback is a really close third. And I’ve never messed with VA ‘in the raw’.
My current project (that has had some sand thrown into the gears with the broken debug thing) is built with VAICOM - speech-to-keybind - in mind; I try to limit the number of, or depth of, the F10 menu thrashing (by using ‘generic’ commands). Works alright once you get used to it.
A lot of simple acknowledgements (like working through a tasking assignment - think filling in a form) can be breezed through with just the SPACBAR and BACKBASE keys. No way around the menus (with/without VA) for making requests or telling the AI what you are doing.
I recently switched to OpenXR for VR and got rid of Steam;I’m thrilled with the performance difference.
I did notice a drop in my FPS initially but then I lowered my Resolution to default in my Pimax Pitool Ap and they bumped up by 15.
One very cool thing I noticed flying the Viper in PG map I saw some friendlies on radar off to my left…I tried to eyeball them and did catch them…I wanted to ID them so I switched labels On…but they were too far away to show labels…Never had that happen before…kinda cool…This was with Visibility set to High in DCS
How is the Pimax working for you? What FOV do you run it in? That’s my next VR criteria: wider FOV. Seems like all other brands are sticking to ~90-100 degrees (distortion?).
I was checking out Bailey’s profile for the Tomcat last night and it works pretty well, IMHO. The coms menu commands should work in the Hornet, but untested. He’s done a profile for the Hornet.
Nice. I planned to include VACOMM instructions but now it looks like I’ll have to create a VA profile, which is why I’m keeping the menu item count as low and generic as possible. Just haven’t had time to research that yet.
I’ve personally rolled back after an impulsive update (v2.8 > v2.7.18.30765)! Too many personal sacrifices (VAICOM, ect…) to justify any updated weather improvements! VAICOM has become as indispensable to me as head tracking and haptic (bass shaker) feedback! Hopefully there’s a solution to getting VAICOM updated in the developers absence, I just don’t know how long I can isolate the current build, and justify holding off on more important updates!
This is my second Pimax Heasdset…It’s the 8kx…It was a very nice upgrade over my older 5k+ in both resolution and clarity.
I run it at normal FOV and this gives me a great comprise in resolution and peripheral vision.It’s very nice for situational awareness.
That’s 150-degrees? If so, yeah, that’s 50 more than I get with the G2, and as you said it sounds like a good compromise. I think it needs base stations though, right? I have none
