VR Noobie

Flight Sims
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Well my mind is offically blown … In a rash moment i bought the oculus rift … i got it home yesterday afternoon, and the daughters and myself were absolutly blown away by the whole VR experiance. Now i have had some time to myself with it, and got Elite and DCS up and running… all I can say is Oh MY GOD ( what I really said was unprintable here !)
Elite was just amazing and as for DCS. I took the old faithfull UH1 over a city in the gulf. I left my settings pretty much maxed and was getting a respectable 30+ FPS. The 3d on the Huey’s cockpit left me speechless, and my stomach lurched several times during the flight.(probably normal with my flying)

one of the best pieces of tech I have bought in a loong time.

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Welcome!

(Picture of Mr Magoo superimposed as Morpheus in a The Matrix picture, just imagine it I’m not near photoshop) :vr:

It is a hard to describe thing, isn’t it? I mean for the price of a decent monitor it just feels quite different, in that if I buy a better joystick then I write things like ‘Yeah, it is better, cool’ but when it comes to VR then ‘Yeah, it is nicer than TrackIR’ doesn’t really cut it as how different it can feel.

Did you buy the Rift new? I ask because if you are planning mainly just for sims/cockpit ‘sit-down’ VR play then you might be able to exchange it for an Odyssey that’s on deep discount at the moment here? They are reducing stock for the new one out last week.

Having said that, the Rift is excellent and I love mine. There’s an intro to the various headset specs here: VR Headsets Comparison Summary 2018.

For framerate and the sickness feeling, the default ‘update rate’ (like a monitor) of the Rift etc is 90Hz, so to help with that many of them allow a framerate of 45 frames per second and then ‘double up’ the frames in something called ‘reprojection’ or ‘Async Space Warp’ (lol, that name). What this means is that for DCS and Elite etc, if you can change your settings to get to 45 fps then you’ll get a much reduced feeling of ‘lag’ that can give people motion sickness. It’s because your eyes and head movement aren’t properly in sync, so you get that ‘travel sickness’ feeling. Tweak to hit a regular 45 fps and you’ll be good!

On DCS because a regularly 45 fps can be hard in all settings (at the resolutions that VR use) then you can mod the graphics shaders a bit to help out here.

The next thing to play with is to help with the clarity in sim, so you can read those Huey dials comfortably while sat back, is to experiment with ‘over sampling’. This means giving the headset a higher resolution than its native display. In DCS this is called ‘Pixel Density’ or PD and is on the DCS VR settings menu. The higher the PD the clearer it’ll be, but of course with a hit on FPS, so it’s a balance. I run with a 1.6 PD on a 1070 and the VR Shader mod and it works well, although the key thing is experiment on what’s good on your hardware (i.e. CPU bound etc).

Let us know how you get on @tempusmurphy, lots of plastic cyclops flyers here to ask!

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Just fly an enjoy, Temp! The great thing about the Oculus is that once you get it dialed in, you will probably leave it alone. Even the most incurable tweakers and FPS-chasers settle into satisfaction pretty quickly and don’t give it much more thought. Your endorphin pump requires that you fly—not fiddle. So you do. My experience anyway.

EDIT: responding to Fearless below: Oh, I wasn’t arguing against your advice at all. Although I see that it might look like I was. I was trying to play defense for other potential users who fear their own propensity to dive into the mod-tweak wormhole. With VR you only need to get a couple things just-about-right and you’ll pretty well leave it alone after that. But before that happens, some moderate effort will likely be required.

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I absolutely support the ‘Don’t Turn Settings Into A MetaGame’ as we often go there as we love to fiddle, but for new users and VR my only worry is that people run bad frames, feel sick and then get to the ‘But VR makes me sick’ state.

Seen it so many times on VR demos that if nothing else I want to pass on the ‘why’ rather than just considering it something that is normal and has to be put up with.

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It doesn’t matter how good someone tells you it is, you just have to experience it for yourself to appreciate just how amazing VR is. Flight sims will never be the same again for you! :sunglasses:

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Yeah - sure is.

How do you like that 1:1 tracking? It’s awesome isn’t it? It feels so much more natural (and physically demanding) than TrackIR with non-proportional rates.

And what I always go back to is that amazing feeling of “this was always here…and this was how we were supposed to see it” with regards to the 3D cockpit and everything. I mean…it has been there all along, and we are just now being able to see it the right way. It’s an insane concept for me to grasp…LOL…

And I’ll put in my plug to try VTOL VR if you got the hand controllers (you would need those). Yes, it has a unique art style that isn’t like DCS, but it is so incredibly fun in VR with your hands making everything move.

Yes, and a big recommendation to not let new people experience one of those stupid roller coaster demos or any FPS that has natural movement. Better to ease them into it and make them feel comfortable with the tech. Aircar and anything that has a yaw axis should be taken very carefully initially.

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one of the weirdest things i came acoss was on elite, at present I have a side stick set up, similar to the setup in the elite cockpits, and when i looked down, the avatar in the cockpit had taken its hand off the stick, but my brain was still telling me i was holding it … it was a very strange sensation …looking forward to getting used to it :grin:

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Yeah. My first VR nutty moment was when I was in FSX in FlyInside and I had my cell phone in my hand and I went to put it on top of the glareshield of the Metro III I was flying. I didn’t go so far as to drop it…but it was definitely a what the heck moment…

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Oh…and I’d suggest Dirt Rally too… (Sorry about all the recommendations…you are going to get sick of those…). You are lucky though, because so many of these VR titles are on deep discounts now!

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Rally can be a bit bumpy on gravel! :slight_smile: If you don’t have PCars 2 or Assestto etc then Live for Speed is a great free intro into car racing VR - https://www.lfs.net/

This old topic has some great info and recommendations of things to try in it - they still hold up well today:

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Oh…and this is a pretty fun, relatively cheap VR title that won’t get you sick…but is really cool to play. No hand controllers necessary…definitely works best with something like an X-Box controller…

Currently 50% off too:

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