So on New Year’s Day there was an incident at work where a member of staff was assaulted – and I intervened. Anyway, the head of site gave me a rather tasty gift voucher which I put towards a Rift S (I could never bring myself to pay full price for one).

Today I broke out my old joystick and rudder pedals from my childhood (bordering on 20 years old) and managed to get them to talk to windows 10.

Installed DCS…

Long story short….holy **** shitballs why didn’t I buy this before! 2D gaming never really cut it after a few real flying lessons – but this has me captivated, despite the resolution being a bit like going back to 2005.

Just learnt the P-51s start up procedure and managed a successful takeoff 🙂

I hazz found my winter nights hobby and probably a divorce.

Flight sims yeah?

You’ll be trying to download VR pornography before Friday.

Having said that. I had a go at flying an X-Wing  on a mates Playstation VR and it was everything my 5 year old self dreamed it would be.

Hahah yeah, this has definitely awoken my inner idiot, not that it needs much encouragement. It’s **** brilliant.

There’s too much faff involved setting it up for porn vids. 😀

There’s too much faff involved setting it up for porn vids

Isn’t that the point?

I would have thought VR porn would be great for those with a lack of faff in their lives?

😀

I played out No Man’s Sky on PS4, but I really want to get a PS VR for it.

Do it Molgrips and replay it.

Oh yeah I only get a little motion sickness if standing for FPS games – and even then I’m starting to get used to it.

Worked out how to use the K-14 computing gunsight, cockpit is fully touch interactive …… just shot down my first 109….still got my gunnery skills 😀

IL2 in VR is immense, I got an original vive second hand to test it with, and now I’m waiting on the valve index to come back into stock, as I only need the headset, which makes it expensive rather than devastating in terms of price.

I even bodged me up a fold-away simpit for it

Currently right into playing Boneworks. It’s not porno. Been swithering for years about picking up a headset, then they announced HL Alyx so it had to be done. Oculus quest running the link cable for PC titles, but untethered titles running native on the headset are ace too. Quake 1 conversion is my current pick! Free and fun. Makes up for the £400 headset 🤣 Still not 100% I would have gone for it without the morphine, but really glad I did. Even now the painkillers have worn off.

I’d like something with a higher pixel count like an Index, Sobriety, but I’m going to wait for Nvidias Ampere GPU as DCS only just runs acceptably on my 1080.

Need to try the modern IL2!

Yeah bodged one up as well! My missus is well happy haha haha

Project cars 2 is also bonkers and at the same time easier with proper depth perception.

Yeah, IL2 returns 90fps with occasional drops to 50ish on the gen1 vive on my RTX2070, so the index is going to tear the arse out of it, but I’m hoping that the fancy anti frame drop shenanigans that that index has will keep me good until the next gen of GPUs comes out.

The vive just isn’t up to it in terms of distance spotting., otherwise I’d keep it.

Weirdly I find lower pixel counts better for distance spotting, where they are a disadvantage is tracking targets and working out their vector at closer range against ground clutter.

Isn’t there a major upgrade to Microsoft Flight Simulator coming soon?

Careful. There are some serious amateurs in this game. They have a full home built 737 set up.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-38102570/leighton-buzzard-pilot-s-boeing-737-simulator-in-garage

Rift is just a gateway drug

https://www.pilotweb.aero/features/homebuilt-simulators-feature-1-5860433

Seriously considering a ps4 and vr headset after playing resident evil 7 on a mates.

Interested to hear more about the x wing stuff on ps4. Is it a battle front type of thing.

No man’s sky is also great on the vr headset and with the hand things as opposed to a normal controller is something else entirely.

What hand things?

Careful. There are some serious amateurs in this game. They have a full home built 737 set up.

Who needs to home build a single cockpit when you can strap a pair of VDUs to your face and be in any cockpit you want? All I need now is true haptic gloves and boots and I won’t even need a HOTAS and Pedals…

Yes there is a MSFS update coming, it looks amazing.

I think the pixel counts and spotting depends on the game engine, WT is a piece of piss to spot in the vive, as all planes are rendered in at distance as a single black pixel, and they appear as a massive black splotch. IL2 is different, and spotting is really hard, especially through the spinning prop.

Interested to hear more about the x wing stuff on ps4. Is it a battle front type of thing.

It was a demo on another game, Battlefront 2 I think.

Don’t think it ever made it into a full game but it was ten minutes of  pure joy for me.

A  flight through an asteroid field, a dogfight with TIE fighters and a direct assault on a Star Destroyer.

edit: found it on YouTube

Who needs to home build a single cockpit when you can strap a pair of VDUs to your face and be in any cockpit you want?

Did this at pilotsweb. They are starting to train pilots with this system. But I think sitting in the real thing is awesome. Have a read of the second article I linked to. Real time virtual ATC also from enthusiasts.

Molgrips the hand things are called wands, they’re motion tracked controllers like you get on the oculus and vie vr setups.

You can use them to control the joystick and throttle on no man’s sky and if you look up in the cockpit you can grab the handles on the canopy to open it.

We did a works night out to the VR racing sims up in Glasgow last year, they were running Project Cars 2 on Oculus. What a hoot!

Saw the Alyx announcement and currently saving for the absolute arse ripping an Index and new PC is going to earn me. Plan on getting Elite Dangerous once its up and running.

Molgrips the hand things are called wands, they’re motion tracked controllers like you get on the oculus and vie vr setups.

Are they the same as PS Move controllers? I have a few of those.

x wing stuff on ps4. Is it a battle front type of thing.

As noted above, it was a (free) add-on for Battlefront 2

There was also a space flying thing on one of the COD titles, too. That was very effective.

Elite Dangerous

There is nothing more Awesome – in the true, epic and humbling sense of the word, than your first hyperspace jump in Elite in VR.

And then you go to a system with a pulsar… and then you take a pilgrimage to the galactic centre and sit in your tiny spacecraft, dwarfed by the utterly incomprehensible supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

There is nothing that will make you appreciate your place in the universe more than Elite Dangerous in VR.

Just picked up the F-14 module…..”mrs raybanwomble”……”mrs raybanwomble!!!”…..”WHATT!!!!”…….”danger zoone”!

Molgrips, have asked bloke at work and he says they are the move controllers.

Well the F-14 startup procedure is a proper **** – but it’s still every bit as fun as I thought it would be – knocked down an su-27 with guns with caged gunsight/no radar tracking 😀

For those that are interested, here’s the manual hahah

http://www.heatblur.se/F-14Manual/

Warthunder is well worth a look too.

VR is great, there are some very immersive games such as Pavlov, onward, Elite etc. As well if you want to branch out from flight sims.

I have the star citizen alpha 🙂 going to give that a go later!

Out of little more than a passing interest, what sort of spend would one be looking at for a setup that would cope with VR project cars/assetto corsa/equivalent and decent flight sim games? My only experience with VR is limited to PSVR and while its pretty good, there are lots of limitations. Hoping the PS5 will come good, but if not…

what sort of spend would one be looking at

How much do you have? 😉

The bones of gaming PC, which I try to build for a long lifecycle (the last one coped for 10 years before the power supply failed and wiped out te motherboard) tend to cost around £800 (motherboard/processor/ram/cpu/power supply/SSD) then I upgrade the Graphics card as I go, my current one cost £450 I think, and that was open box so a fair whack cheaper.

The main issue for VR in simulations is that simulations are very graphically intensive, and VR puts a large overhead onto that, because of reasons that are too technical for me to fully understand. Currently the VR unit technology is ahead of the graphics cards technology, so only high end cards can deliver simulation type games at an acceptable framerate on high graphical settings. That will change into the future, as long as VR doesn’t become too niche or die off again…

An i5 build with a gtx1060 or higher will last a good while. Doable off the shelf for under £600

An i5 build with a gtx1060 or higher will last a good while.

That’s fine for general HD gaming, but not for Sim grade VR I’m afraid, I know this as I had one (GTX 1060) that wasn’t up to it for VR – it wouldn’t deliver a decent framerate at any level of detail, and framerate is king for VR if you don’t want to end up with motion sickness. My build is an i5 though.

That’s a concern considering Oculus recently spec is GTX1060

https://support.oculus.com/248749509016567/

How longs a piece of string – my 1080 is just acceptable with DCS – it’d probably cope better with il2 which is known to be less resource intensive and better coded.

It rips through the first person titles but sims definitely tax it, DCS asp seems to be heavily CPU clock dependent on VR.

+1 sobriety

Well get much sharper VR when the GPU manufacturers have to design GPUs for 8k consoles.

Hopefully game streaming services with their laggyness won’t kill that before it happens.