FlyInside VR was a great add-on for FSX, P3D and X-Plane, that altered the sim to be able to show a VR view. Dan Church, the author, did an amazing job of coaxing good VR performance out of these sims that were never designed to work like that.
Eventually P3D and X-Plane added their own native VR implementation, but the use of hand controllers and Leap Motion, plus a clever reprojection method, meant there was still value in the add-on. Plus of course FSX never even got VR, so for a lot of people this was still useful.
As the next step for Flight Inside a while back they made the surprise announcement that Dan had formed a team and that they were writing an entirely new stand-alone sim. The news of that is here:
So tonight I got the chance thanks to a mysterious benefactor (it was Beach, the mystery is fairly short lived) I had a quick go on the latest version. The steam store entry is here:
Here’s a quick initial flight and AAR in an old 737-200, with screenshots taken in VR.
The sim has its own VR windowing system. Here’s the initial menu, where you can either use the mouse in VR or your hand controllers. It sort of reminds me of old X-Windows, but the refresh rate and clarity are good.
A few MILVIZ aircraft come with the sim already:
Including some helos, which if Aerofly FS2 is a good indicator of, is where a fast performance VR sim should shine.
The cockpits are not great, but clear. Sort of lowish quality in parts, although I’ve not gone through them all. All sim settings and options are available within VR as virtual windows which is neat.
The landscape graphics are fairly poor, in that the performance is fantastic (solid 90 FPS on my i5 @4.5GHz, Nv1070, 16GB) but this is more like a mobile game in terms of detail. My phone could do this.
Perhaps the worse representation of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge ever?
Weather is modeled and doesn’t impact performance at all. Again, not looking top tier.
So overall pretty disappointing so far, in that this is Early Access (what isn’t?) but has been out for about a year so far. I don’t think the systems part includes an FMS, or ATC and the landscape seems to be just raw public Ortho with autogen.
Surprisingly, you can’t really play with VR motion controllers alone (a la @smokinhole’s VR only control method that works so well in X-Plane) and you need to set up your physical HOTAS and pedals manually. Considering that the FlyInside VR plugin had great support for hand controllers then this is seems a really strange omission. As there aren’t any default bindings, it provides a pretty poor initial experience.
For the price point ($40) and the amount of progress in the first year (strike that, I’m an idiot, it’s been out a month so credit to them), this seems to be pretty hard going to recommend. The best and most positive point to end on is that the performance in VR is fantastic, but pretty much every other area needs to grow out to be competitive. If P3D has the best systems modeling on tubes, X-Plane continues to get better and Aerofly FS2 works best in VR then FlyInside needs to find its place to remain viable.
