DCS OpenXR Quickstart Guide for G2 and other WMR headsets

Hey Spinnaker, do you ever check out the VR4DCS discord? If not, there is a ton of stuff related to OpenComposite in the vr-video-capture channel. They are also chatting up using the DCS mirror instead of OC OBS Plugin and setting input smoothing in the OpenXR Toolkit to 50% to get rid of the VR shakes. I’m going to test this asap. You might want to drop your question in there.

I think that it’s called Shaking reduction now.

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for recording, I dont know if it works with openXR,

But the DCS VR Section allows a user to select left/right/both eyes, crop the image, and use the DCS Resolution set for the Mirror, and has for a while IIRC, its just features that have been overlooked.

For example. I used to record off the Oculus Mirror with OBS, now I can just record off the DCS Window itself set to 1080P (I dont have crop checkbox checked, but I set a custom resolution for my VR Profile so the aspect ratio stays correct for the window).

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With the Reverb G2, I tried the rectangle setting last night and it just elongates the DCS mirror without removing the mask. The Both setting puts both left and right HMD displays together without merging them, so neither is ideal unless your editing software could somehow do that.

I couldn’t tell any difference with cropped on.

Do you mean the source window in OBS, or the screen resolution setting in your profile? And what is the exact resolution of your profile window? Right now, I’m capturing the DCS mirror right eye for the A64D and setting a custom mask in OBS. It works but of course feels zoomed in.

Cropped checkbox isnt working for me in Stable or OB, reported

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I’ve been playing around with OpenComposite and OBS the last couple of days. I’m having no problems with the latest OBS plugin that comes with OCXR_WMR_ACC_v0.6.3. I dropped it in \Program Files\obs-studio\obs-plugins\64bit and can use it as a source. However, I get better fps using the DCS mirror as the source.

Capturing from VR running OpenConposite probably needs its own thread.

I wonder what the use for this option is? Or rather, what would it use for the Mirror’s res if it didn’t use the one set on the System page? The native resolution of one eye of your HMD? Regardless, I have my VR profile using 2160 x 2160 anyway, which is the native res of one eye of the G2. Seems to work well.

DCS Resolution would control the window/mirror window size.

when it says to edit the .ini file is it changing enable layers=true to false?
NM, found the ED thread with all the info. I was watching a youtube video which didnt show all the readme

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The vibrancy and contrast settings, using OXR ToolBox, are nice. Helps the NTTR map at least. Makes the ground textures less ‘muddy’, for no apparent cost.

I am new to VR and just got the G2 headset last week. I am around 30-55 or so FPS most of the time. I have rending on 100% in the XR settings and reprojection set to auto. My pixel density is set to 1.0 right now in DCS. I get what I can only describe as waves in the screen in certain areas. VR is really cool but I only wish it could look as good as my monitor did. Its annoying to me that anything out of the hotspot is blurry.

I downloaded open composite and when I run it DCS does not show up under App config. I thought this app was for if you have steam as well you can select dcs so it uses openxr. I dont have steam so not sure if I needed this at all.

I also got the OpenXR toolkit but not really sure what the settings do it in yet.

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Last time I tried the new opencomposite UI, DCS still crashed when starting after setting OpenXR as default runtime. I ended up using the DLL files from the last release of Opencomposite ACC instead.

Best not to install OpenXR Toolkit until you have OpenXR working without the toolkit, it adds another layer where things can go wrong. Does not make sense to add it until the other layers are working.

I dont get what opencomposite is for.

To use OpenXR instead of SteamVR for games that otherwise don’t support it

@JJay03 To get DCS to show up in the Opencomposite UI, go all the way to a flight. Not just the main menu. At least that’s what seemed to work for me.

So then as I suspected I do not need it.

For me, setting reprojection to auto causes stutters.

This is probably because of motion reprojection. The G2 operates with 90 frames per sec. If DCS produces lower than this you’re going to miss frames. Motion reprojection fills in those missing frames by extrapolation, essentially faking a screen by comparing with previous frames. This often leads to wavy images when things are moving fast, like looking through a propeller arc or flying low and fast, etc.
VR certainly has its fair share of drawbacks and it isn’t for everyone. There’s a lot of tinkering with settings involved and if you get hung up on the visual limitations you may end up focusing on this, which exacerbates the problem.

Same here. Always/Force On and it’s fine.

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First, Welcome!

I don’t know if you’re new to DCS either so I’ll assume so…

DCS isn’t plug & play with VR (or really anything when compared to a lot of other games). A G2 will only be clear near the center. Just the way it is. The future is Foveated Rendering (headset tracks your eyes and makes the spot you’re looking hi-res). Maybe they can update the G2, but I doubt it.

VR is, to me, about adding another dimension (from 2D to 3D); it’s a different experience. In general, at G2 prices anyway, we are just not close to a 2D monitor in resolution at, say, 60 FPS in DCS with a lot of ‘stuff’ happening. I wish it were so.

I have a pretty good system and I still needed to do some work to run the G2 smoothly and at as high a res as was acceptable to me.

OpenXR didn’t give me any performance increase but it did remove the frequent crashes I got with SteamVR.

There are some posts here (site) on things to try to improve the performance for VR, which should allow you to bump up the resolution a bit.

Welcome again!

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I am computer illiterate. I followed instructions on this thread. Open XR does not pull in DCS as the instructions show when I click on configure tab. I run it through the oculus app. Is this the problem? DCS still starts and I am able to play it without problems however I don’t notice any change at all. I’ve never played it through the steam app. And I know the purpose of open XR is to bypass the steam app. Should I delete the oculus app? Not really sure I want to create more problems than it’s worth.

This whole OpenXR thing is mainly useful to people using an HP Reverb or other Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headset. The standard rendering pipeline for WMR through SteamVR is bad.

If you are using an Oculus, don’t bother: DCS supports Oculus’ interface natively

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