Hey Everyone.
Long time lurker here but most especially on the site where most of the old-timers HERE came from. 'Nuff 'bout that, I want to know how many of us have not only taken the VR plunge but have been users for a few years. I've had one since Rift went CV1 and after the fiasco around the launch of the Reverb from HP earlier I just bought a Sammy Odyssey+ so I consider myself "seasoned" but who else has been doing this for a while? And what if any upgrades have you done and what were your thoughts about those?
My initial setup was on a I7 4790K with a 1080 running Oculus CV1 but I am currently on an HP Omen I7 8700k with a 1080ti running Odyssey+ with "generally" 1.3 SS through Steam VR settings. I miss a few things from my Rift but after the S specs released I just couldn't see the extra coin for what amounts to a re-badged Lenovo from where I'm standing. I realize it is a LOT more than that but for the 250.00 I paid for the Odyssey+ it was a definite upgrade as it has similar display specs to the Vive Pro for a LOT less coin. Also, the anti-SDE gimmick of Sammy's works a treat for me and with its' lowered hardware requirements (Windows Mixed Reality) I can generally crank up the supersampling in place of anti-aliasing and get better frames.
I realize that VR is not only a bit polarizing- it is NOT to everyone's taste or abilities financially or aesthetically and for that I am grateful as choices in gaming can only be a good thing.
But for me at any rate IL-2 Stalingrad and the 109 were the deciding factors.
I like to think I have every combat flight sim made since CFS 1, at least that were widely available here in America. And in ALL of those, ALL the hours I spent "trying" to learn that particular airframe I never could. I could learn pieces of it and I had a ton of technical type knowledge, but the "gestalt" of it if you will eluded me and I was unable to fly and fight in that aircraft. All that changed the first time I took it up in VR in IL-2 BoS - the plane finally "came alive" for me and I could understand it's relative strengths and weakness' in a wholly new and intuitive manner. In fact so well that I can't think of a single time I've augered in from getting outside its' flight envelope- something I would routinely do before- even in the same sim!
But what are your experiences with it? VR that is, not strictly IL-2 or even flight sims in general. I think that for any of us that have helped fund the PC hardware that we currently have THIS is the natural outcome. The feeling of driving the langheck Porsche at LeMans in '71, the chance to ride along on the Apollo missions I watched as a boy, the chance to fly with my dead Father in his beloved Cherokee and make another Portland to Eugene Hamburger run in P3D or XP11, even the chance to "pre-run" Portland International Raceway in my own car- these are the places where VR goes above another peripheral.
I have literally thousands sunk into FSX improvements alone over the years by way of hardware and add on purchases- this PALES in comparison and it delivers on more than one front- who amongst us VRHeads has NOT sank MORE hours into Skyrim in VR? My hours there DWARF my hours in pancake! Additionally where I used to ācheatā with various aids in FSX I have been driven to turn off the aids by VR as the things that Dad taught me way back when in '77 work GREAT in VR! Things like trimming the aircraft for level flight are SO much easier to grasp when itās like it is in real life, a glance out the window to check your planeās wing attitude in relation to the earth.
Closure rates for the 109- I remember my frustration at trying to implement Eric 'Bubi' Hartmann's advice -"wait until he fills your windscreen" to try to fight in the 109 in the original IL-2 would inevitably lead to a collision. GONE the minute I was engaged in VR. I was turning, climbing, descending, all while keeping my engine managed AND my enemy in focus- things I found almost impossible as an aging 55 year old to do in pancake became almost routine in their fluidity and my new-found respect not only for the 109 but for those men who flew her into combat. No wonder Galland called it his favorite- for her time she was an energy fighter extraordinaire with few defects in relation to her foes.
But enough VR love letter to former Soviet video game developers who keep the fires alive for big ww2 action- what are everyone elseās experiences with this? I came here on the advice of someone from the other forum specifically because Beach had come over here and I had a question about X Plane as I knew he was both a serious simmer and pilot IRL and one of his last pieces for them was on both XP and VR so I wanted to check in on the state of things. I noticed the piece on XP on the front page about ditching the controllers and although Iād like to, Iām still in love with āthrow a switch, see it in VRā and Iāve gotten pretty good muscle memory from where my warthog is placed. When true hand and finger tracking become available for a modest cost of course Iāll purchase that but for now although I understand Austin and Cos. methods I donāt particularly care for all of them. Glowing switches in particular are a bugaboo of mine, but your mileage may vary and of course in VR you should turn highlighting off.
Iām still stupidly trying to run at least 6 ORBX areas, iBlueyonderās KPDX, Ultimate Traffic and ActiveSky on my P3D in VR with 140 reprojection, you know like in the old days of FSX when your FPS would go into the single digits only NOW in nausea-inducing 3D!
Thatās somewhat the reason for the āseasonedā comment- anyone whoās had the rug yanked out as many times as I have in Skyrim VR is bound to have what we might term to be good VR legs! But Iāve got 54 mods running on my current install with over a hundred hours in so I do have good VR situational awareness and nausea resistance.
Plus my older home-built PC had power management issues with Oculus from day one and would frequently āhangā the light houses and their constant USB 3.0 connection need so it would crash a lot. New HP computer does it all for me now and was considerably LESS bother to set up, I feel OLD now. But nonetheless it is a good setup and has had few issues and what with the 1080ti for the aforementioned VR titles I felt it was a good bang/buck proposition and I didnāt sweat anything except delivery and a 32Gb memory upgrade to make it comparable to the old system it was replacing.
So again, Iāll back to topic myself and just leave with these questions:
Are you an old guy? Have you been goofing with flight sims and PC hardware for the better part of twenty years? Have you been at LEAST three years into the current VR headset craze?
What were your experiences?
Whoaā¦I think I went a bit too deep on that one.