VR Inclusion in MSFS

[BrettT 63]

17 hours ago, Flybynumbers said:

Sry everyone...the mods gave me a time out for posting in the x-plane forum that they should name it "ex-plane", and posting in the Prepar3d forum they should rename it "un-Prepar3d" in response to the previews of the MSFT 2020. 

Anyway...back onto the topic of VR and simulators. 

• A real airplane has a field of view of about 180 degrees from left window to right window. It also has control surfaces and instruments for aviating, navigating, and communicating.
• A home build simulator can easily replicate all of these conditions...and many have done so EXACTLY. 

So if you already have a 180 degree FOV, and have a physical cockpit with all control surfaces, and instruments, then you stand nothing to gain from using VR...in fact you would be losing realism. This goes the same for racing car simulators. If you have a playseat with wheel, pedals, and shifter as well as a 180 degree FOV, you too would be gaining nothing from VR.

NOW...VR changes things significantly in RPG games. I was just playing elder scrolls V - Skyrim...obviously the future is VR as it blows non-vr games out of the water...same for games like boxing...and COD etc. many games out there are obviously better in VR. Truly exciting times for gamers!

I really think it is a personal preference.  I have done it both ways; a generic cockpit with goflight panels, other pushbutton panels, separate monitor for gauges and a HOTAS setup with an extra Saitek TQ;  or a VR setup with only the hotas and Saitek TQ.  I wouldn't call either one more "realistic" than the other.  In one instance I could flip a switch or push a button for a particular function but the mapping of these functions would change from plane to plane and would often be in a different layout than what the video was displaying but it would have a tactile feel to it.  Though even with 180 degree setup you still don't represent the cockpit view in aircraft aside from the heavies (i.e. you can't look back over your shoulder as you could in most GA planes).  On the other side you have everything in the cockpit where it is supposed to be, you just have to use a mouse to click it for the functions that you do not have mapped to your HOTAS.  You also gain a lot more accurate visibility (i.e. you can lean forward to clear a blind spot in the plane which you can not do with a static display)

Being a personal preference, I can tell you I sold my goflight gear and shelved the extra monitor and other pushbutton gear and haven't looked back yet.  I use this setup for VFR, IFR, GA, Heavies, Military and haven't been happier.  So in my experienced opinion I would say both have their limitations and benefits on realism and it really is a personal preference

[G-RFRY 1,705]

This thread should have its own forum wait it has VR forum.

[Flybynumbers 42]

9 minutes ago, BrettT said:

I really think it is a personal preference.  I have done it both ways; a generic cockpit with goflight panels, other pushbutton panels, separate monitor for gauges and a HOTAS setup with an extra Saitek TQ;  or a VR setup with only the hotas and Saitek TQ.  I wouldn't call either one more "realistic" than the other.  In one instance I could flip a switch or push a button for a particular function but the mapping of these functions would change from plane to plane and would often be in a different layout than what the video was displaying but it would have a tactile feel to it.  Though even with 180 degree setup you still don't represent the cockpit view in aircraft aside from the heavies (i.e. you can't look back over your shoulder as you could in most GA planes).  On the other side you have everything in the cockpit where it is supposed to be, you just have to use a mouse to click it for the functions that you do not have mapped to your HOTAS.  You also gain a lot more accurate visibility (i.e. you can lean forward to clear a blind spot in the plane which you can not do with a static display)

Being a personal preference, I can tell you I sold my goflight gear and shelved the extra monitor and other pushbutton gear and haven't looked back yet.  I use this setup for VFR, IFR, GA, Heavies, Military and haven't been happier.  So in my experienced opinion I would say both have their limitations and benefits on realism and it really is a personal preference

Ya good points. So your set up is VR with a physical yoke, rudder pedals, and throttle? I wouldn't want to give up any of those. One of the best parts of landing a heavy was pulling the throttle back for reverse thrust.

Edited October 9, 2019 by Flybynumbers

[BrettT 63]

2 hours ago, Flybynumbers said:

Ya good points. So your set up is VR with a physical yoke, rudder pedals, and throttle? I wouldn't want to give up any of those. One of the best parts of landing a heavy was pulling the throttle back for reverse thrust.

My present setup is a Warthog Stick with extension and Throttle, pedals and a separate Saitek TQ for extra levers with the VR.  I realize the Stick is preference issue over a yoke but I tend to spend more time in fast movers, helicopters and GA planes that would have a stick than anything heavy that would be a yoke.  I have used a yoke in the past....just prefer the stick with the extension

[Casualcas 830]

4 hours ago, Grindathotte said:

I'm guessing you have a pretty top-end system.

I have a 5 year old Walmart special with a new gtx1660ti. (Virtually same performance as a 1080 for half the price)

And a $60 amd fx8350 and Rift S. No stutters, no blurries, sharp image and fly with nothing else. 

[Grindathotte 44]

42 minutes ago, Casualcas said:

I have a 5 year old Walmart special with a new gtx1660ti. (Virtually same performance as a 1080 for half the price)

And a $60 amd fx8350 and Rift S. No stutters, no blurries, sharp image and fly with nothing else. 

There's hope for me with my 1080 then (i7 8087)!  This runs AFS2 in VR with no problems, but I've never tried it with X-Plane as it seemed that people with even relatively powerful CPUs and GPUs were reporting slow frame-rates.

[blueshark747 1,842]

1 hour ago, Grindathotte said:

There's hope for me with my 1080 then (i7 8087)!  This runs AFS2 in VR with no problems, but I've never tried it with X-Plane as it seemed that people with even relatively powerful CPUs and GPUs were reporting slow frame-rates.

XPlane11 can barely achieve constant 45FPS with  eye candy sliders on low with a 2080ti/9900K combo because of the OpenGL engine just isn't optimized for VR so don't ever use that sim as some sort of hardware performance benchmark.

As for the GTX 1080 its fine for everything less than a Reverb or Pimax 5K/8K.

Aerofly FS2 was well done for VR, but its also a stripped sim as compared to P3D/XPlane11/FSX.

Alot of the features we love are processes that need to eat hardware resources.

AI Traffic both land and air

Flight Model Physics(its own individual process on the CPU for XPlane11)

Complex 3D clouds

Complex Avionics Systems

Realistic Populated Autogen EVERYWHERE on the globe(FS2 has nicely detailed eye candy in focused areas meanwhile outside of those areas are bland terrain where devs had to take shortcuts and sacrifice)

Edited October 9, 2019 by blueshark747

[Casualcas 830]

1 hour ago, Grindathotte said:

There's hope for me with my 1080 then (i7 8087)!  This runs AFS2 in VR with no problems, but I've never tried it with X-Plane as it seemed that people with even relatively powerful CPUs and GPUs were reporting slow frame-rates.

I use this in steam, xplane, and fsx and I dont have issues. Xplane I use the same settings as others, with the objects on high, hdr,  and reflections off. But get that oculus plugin for xplane if you have an oculus. No other LOD limiting plugins needed. At least not in my case

[Thac 29]

14 hours ago, Grindathotte said:

There's hope for me with my 1080 then (i7 8087)!  This runs AFS2 in VR with no problems, but I've never tried it with X-Plane as it seemed that people with even relatively powerful CPUs and GPUs were reporting slow frame-rates.

There is hope for everybody, including those with not the latest GPU/CPU hardware. MS just need to make sure Asobo implement VR support in this flagship flight simulator before launch.

It will be embarrassing to release this super advanced high tech software with no VR support in 2020 - remember the release is (at least) 1 year from now. The CP/GPU and VR harware will improve until then. But, the VR hardware is today 'good enough' as a bare minimum in my opinion (Valve Index, HP Reverb, Pimax 5K+/8K+/8K-X, HTC Vive Pro, Odyssey +)  

[smoothchat 99]

14 hours ago, Casualcas said:

that oculus plugin

Is this the plugin you are referring to ?

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/46918-vmi-twick-vr/

Edited October 10, 2019 by smoothchat

[Casualcas 830]

2 hours ago, smoothchat said:

Is this the plugin you are referring to ?

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/46918-vmi-twick-vr/

This little guy

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/50553-ovr-settings-oculus-rift-supersampling-asw/

[irrics 1,517]

21 hours ago, blueshark747 said:

XPlane11 can barely achieve constant 45FPS

That's an X-Plane issue that won't apply to MSFS

[smoothchat 99]

7 hours ago, irrics said:

That's an X-Plane issue that won't apply to MSFS

I think that may be wishful thinking.

I love to think that MSFS will have massively better detail and multiple layers of cloud etc, but all this comes at a performance cost.

Adding VR effectively doubles the rendering load, so if the devs are talking FPS in the low 40's for 4K, we can safely speculate that it might be in the low 40's for VR.

I'm expecting MSFS will require turning everything down to a minimum to get anywhere near usable VR with current hardware.

I'm not wishing this to be the case, just acknowledging the reality.

We'd better start saving for that 3080ti 😉

 

Edited October 10, 2019 by smoothchat

[irrics 1,517]

9 minutes ago, smoothchat said:

I think that may be wishful thinking.

I love to think that MSFS will have massively better detail and multiple layers of cloud etc, but all this comes at a performance cost.

Adding VR effectively doubles the rendering load, so if the devs are talking FPS in the low 40's for 4K, we can safely speculate that it might be in the low 40's for VR.

I'm expecting MSFS will require turning everything down to a minimum to get anywhere near usable VR with current hardware.

I'm not wishing this to be the case, just acknowledging the reality.

We'd better start saving for that 3080ti 😉

 

That really doesn't jive with what Devs said in that flightsim.com audio interview.

They're way more bullish on performance and this is before it's even been optimized (their words).

I think there's a reason this proprietary Asobo engine was sought after by MS for the new FS.

Edited October 10, 2019 by irrics

[smoothchat 99]

16 minutes ago, irrics said:

They're way more bullish on performance and this is before it's even been optimized (their words).

I certainly hope so, but all will be revealed soon enough.

If the devs choose to work directly with Oculus, they have a good chance to get the maximum performance available today. (I don't want to start any VR wars, but I believe that WMR and OpenVR have arguably always been outperformed by natively implemented oculus drivers)   The recent release of Dirt Rally 2.0 highlights this.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I will be surprised if Asobo implement native Oculus support, but will instead opt for WMR (which after all, is Microsoft's own product)

In any case, I'm still going to save for that 3080ti 😉

Edited October 10, 2019 by smoothchat