JasonHarris

I do remember something like that, unfortunately for me that makes it a long term con that wont have me flying in xplane :( I have had it for a few years now but I do everything in VR and flight sims are so suited to it.

A definite con for me is the lack or oculus rift support that they did talk about some time ago. The other popular flight sims (three others anyway) have got some form of oculus rift support and it works very well. For a while xplane was the only civ sim I was using and I wasnt using it a lot because I am a convert to VR. Since the other sims have it I have not been on xplane much at all. I wish they would look at it again.

Daniel, I am thinking the same as you are, thats how I read that quote as far as the end users cost. I thought there might have been some confusion others were having thinking the end user cost was going up because of higher license costs PMDG might have had with a third party.

I read that quote above and it doesn't say to me that they are specifically paying a higher license cost to anyone else. It reads that the license cost - i.e. the cost to you for licensing the pmdg aircraft will go up.

I have to admit that I have not been doing much flying recently and only had a small look at the last couple of changes. I just did a few small flights and I also thought things were looking better, I could go HDR with max AA etc and things looked good. On my 42" screen I needed to go hdr with max AA to get a good image but I then suffered bad fps. This is a nice improvement. Only issue was the mountains in the background being mushy.. Then I saw a setting for extended DSF scenery and it reminded me of something I read, I ticked it and then everything was perfect. It really is a nice looking sim right now.

It's strange their persistence to not use a scroll wheel. When you think about it like this, there is only one knob on a standard computer that even resembles the knob used to tune real world radios. It so happens the scroll wheel resembles that knobs function uncannily. The one input on our computers that is most ideal is the one input they dont like. Even steve jobs went to two buttons on the mouse so all is not lost for the long term.

Mouse wheel is the easiest for me. There isn't a mouse on a touchpad but there isn't a joystick, pedals, throttle etc so supporting something that is not on a touchpad shouldn't be too difficult unless they have made it too difficult themselves.

As far as basic 'philosophy' of structures in x-plane, x-plane goes for a plausible world, not an accurate world. Far from it. So if we take the philosophy that x-plane has gone for then some auto generated scenery in airports is certainly more 'plausible' to me than none at all. Every time you come in to land at a new airport is a bit of a disappointment. The thread was titled what would you like to see in x-plane in 2015, is it hard to have a wish list without people telling you why you dont need your wishes? This is a pretty popular one btw, along with other pretty common thoughts that take this away from a 'game' and more in to the realms of a 'sim'

I dont see why I should contribute my fair share TBH. I understand why people do it, some find it as much part of the hobby as flying, some find the content creation to be more than the flying. The modelling and creating your own area can be quite cool. I know from similar interests. The thing is, I have no interest in doing it for a flight sim but I hear it all of the time. We have a few dedicated people here that do the content creation side of things and say how easy it can be but the vast majority of people have no interest in this part of the hobby. There is no obligation to the community to do this except the obligation some people may feel others should have because of what was left short by LR. I understand your point. I understand it's not reasonable for LR to populate a world full of airports with buildings etc. IMHO while pointing out how it's not possible for LR to do it you have pointed out how it is just as unreasonable to expect the users to do this job as well. LR have to give up on the idea that the user does it all and start to populate airports with generated buildings. They may not be accurate but they wont be baron and they can be replaced properly as people do add ot the database. By your own calculations we will never have buildings at airports for years to come if left to the community. It's up to LR to autogen them.

Yes, and with how easy it is to integrate stuff like google maps you could easily create a set of waypoints for a flight plan, copy a STAR or even if you dont have that information you could take some predefined ones to apply to any airport. Only thing you might miss is that if it's not an aircraft you might now have information available, like forces, cross winds etc but that is only for effect, like landing in crosswind with yaw etc. Now, who is going to do snoopy on his doghouse..

OK Tony, you may have the way to do it, I didnt look at it from the scenery point of view as I had seen what the fsx api had to offer so I looked for something similar. I suppose if you can treat a model of an aircraft as a simple object, move and rotate it's position then thats more or less what I was thinking as well.

Interesting, I have not looked at the api for some time. Because of the AI issue I looked at it, although this was some time ago. I knew that in FSX for example you could easily add an ai aircraft in a position in space and move it around, so you could create your own very basic lightweight (on cpu), or complicated, flight model. This seemed to be a good way to get lots of aircraft in the air and move them around. I seemed to remember that in xpx there was no way to do this. IIRC, you couldnt spwan something in space like an aircraft, you had to create an ai aircraft and that had all the overheads of creating a fully AI aircraft. I think there were significant overheads in doing it and you still came up with the problem of adding too many. This is from memory but I think that was the gist of it.

Yes and no.. I could cite many examples of projects that I have worked on where more people would not gain you a 40 hour advantage for an extra 40 hours worked by an extra person. Similarly, I could cite examples where this does work. If I was to generalise between the different projects then the ones that scale better are larger and are designed in such a way as to let this happen. For the smaller projects sometimes this kind of design is not necessary for the scale of the work, it's basically overkill - you know, writing the hello world app doesnt have to be object oriented with layers of abstraction when one line has worked for decades Having said that, I would expect that xplane should be developed so that some things like AI, ATC can be worked on relatively independently from physics, graphics, etc.. The rift is gaining a lot of popularity in cockpit based games/sims. Unfortunately while they provide an API it is not something that they can inject in to an existing sim with a good experience. It's very much like TrackIR, the sim needs to integrate it in to it's own engine. I have seen a number of die hard simmers now decide the titles they use have to have rift support and thats just from a developers kit, once it becomes more mainstream I expect to see more if that.

To be fair, LR decided not to have buildings at airports or any algorithm based building because they wanted other people to work with OSM. So no buildings at airports is directly related to their decision, not because people are or are not populating OSM databases. A decision to say you are not responsible for things you say you want in the game is no decision at all.

In this order I would go for... The oculus support, Better ATC, A world alive more with AI that is implemented a lot better.

They don't need more money, he gets plenty of money and that shows with his toys and the amount of money he gives away. He is entitled to do that and good on him but I wouldnt be throwing more money his way if you want it spent on flight simulation, it's most likely going to go somewhere else.

We shouldn't be too hard on people that might have the placebo effect. After all, it's not bound by Moore's law and is a lot cheaper than new hardware. I have not got the latest RC and probably not the latest nvidia drivers so I will do a quick scenario and see.

Looks like Totems list is comparing their final product against the DK2 dev kit, not the final oculus product. I haven't looked at their site but it seems the stated resolution is important but they have not put it there. Anyway,. I am happy with whomever comes out with the best unit.

Its smoother for sure, nice work. I noticed a few things, like textures missing, nothing that you can solve yourself though. The more annoying thing, and once again I don't know if it is the rift, is that I was coming in to landing and I put down the flaps and my screen turned off. I didn't think it could be related and it wasn't. What happened is that the screensaver had gone on and turned off all my screens. I was playing but hadn't used the KB or mouse for 5 minutes. I have my setting low because i only use the machine for gaming, so if I haven't used it for 5 mins I am generally not going to. I don't know if this would happen if I wasn't using the rift or if I can get around it, perhaps I just have to put my setting up higher, or jiggle the mouse from time to time.

Thanks Norman, I will give it a whirl tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing what asynchronous time warp can do. Luckily for me when it comes to civilian sims I am happy flying light GA so I don't have to worry about gauges so much, just the general direction some of the needles are pointing.

Yes, support for the rift! I have put a bit of time in DCS, one of my stables anyway, and the other day loaded up p3d again for its oculus support. It is great and I am sure it will be great in xplane as well. The feeling of flight in the rift is better than anything we have tried before, even with its current limitations.

Yes, you are farsighted so the optics in the rift will work fine for you. If you are near sighted (which you personally are not) then there is another set of optics that comes with the rift which you can try. If that doesn't work then you can adjust the rift so some eyeglasses will fit inside. If all else fails, get contacts I can see a number of aftermarket accessories for the rift and one of them would be replacement optics for standard diopters. If we are lucky, even lenses made from ED glass for those that want more than the basic ones. Of course then they would need drivers to come with them for the enhanced chromatic aberration For those that see this as something that will pass, I think you are wrong. I have never seen anyone with a rift think that although I have seen people say it's amazing, they wish they could use it but they cannot get used to it, i.e. motion sickness. The only flying I have done in it is with DCS. It is amazing, it is like being there. Landing is like landing a real aircraft, the size of the runway, the approach. Nothing gives you the same sensation of scale. I don't mean a sensation of scale like we are using a bigger screen. This is all 1:1. It is not like trackir. A better way to think about it is that it is a portal to the real world. Basically, put on a pair of goggles and each eye looks out of each eyecup on your goggles. Move your head around, up, down, 180 degrees behind you and you see what is presented to you, in the real world. That is what the rift is like. The scale is 1:1, it is in 3d, like you are there. I am mostly using it for racing simulation. It cannot be beat. It is so much better than either my triple 27" or triple 42" screens. I believe if you don't like the concept, you don't fully understand the concept. The concept has been around for a while but never really properly realised. This is one of those things, it's made the difference from watching yourself control an aircraft to feel like you are controlling one. For all my screens and gadgets I have never felt like I have been in a cockpit. First time in a rift you feel like you are there. If you do your first landing in a rift and don't feel like this changes things then… I don't know what to say If you haven't tried it I would hold off too many thoughts of what you think it is like because it is obviously (to those that have one) not. Still, as pointed out, it needs improvement, mostly resolution. It is good enough for me but it would not be a good combat sim device in it's current state. Finding small objects in the distance is not it's thing. I hope CV1 has a good improvement in resolution. I will add, it has already given me the best night flying of anything. The blacks are silky and pitch black. It adds something significant to night flying to have contrast on the levels that it delivers.

PingPong, as far as I am aware DCS doesn't play so nicely with SLI. Try turning it off and seeing what happens. At the moment DCS uses the old SDK so there is judder which is pretty bad. Not your computers fault there, just waiting for DCS to update. Ohsirus, the rift has a screen running at 75Hz, for some of it's technology to work properly you need to match that with your fps. If the game can't do that then it can seem laggy when you move your head and that is bad for your stomach in VR. It's buttery smooth at 75 but anything less and your brain is not convinced, it's conflicted and thats when the symptoms of motion sickness come in to play.

On a slightly side note I am tempted to load up p3d as someone released a plugin or coulus support and they are getting 75fps, not at the highest of settings of course. At the moment it could be the best flight experience with the rift though.

Oddjob, I do get the judder, it's part of why I can't fly it for too long. I don't know what framerate I am getting either but running on [email protected] + 780ti so it cannot be too far below what is possible. From what I read DCS currently uses the old sDK and the judder should go after it has been updated. I assume this is a positional tracking issue and the new sdk properly supports positional tracking with the camera. I am also a bit sceptical about getting the 75 frames required in x-plane but we will see how it goes. I guess with the resolution of the rift at the moment we can afford to pull back the settings to help us get there. I actually thought there was a point in time where I got better fps in plane than I do know. I have a video on youtube on four monitors getting a framerate that I find harder to get now on a single screen.