X-Plane Public VR Preview Released!

279 comments on “X-Plane Public VR Preview Released!”

1. Having taken care of Santa duty, I in my kerchief and Mom in her cap had just settled in for a long winter’s nap. When what to my wondering eyes should appear but X-Plane VR, after waiting all year!

   I haven’t been this excited for Christmas morning in years. Merry Christmas!

   1. PLEASE include regular yoke/throttle support! Trust me, using the Oculus controllers is tiring as your arms are holding them up for extended periods of time. I found this out in Ultrawings VR. FS10 with Flyinside worked really well. There is no reason why normal yoke/throttle/mouse support cannot be used in VR.

      -Ski

      1. It is already the case that your normal hardware setup—yoke, stick, rudders, etc.—will work in VR.

         1. i cant get out of the main hanger because i dont have contollers
            Please enable mouse support and hopefuly leapmotion PLEEEZE i cannot affor $300AUD for controllersa

            1. So there is no way to play this without forking out 100+CDN on hardware I would not use for anything other than this? At least tell us if mouse support WILL be added later.

            2. It’s been said numerous times that we’re working on ways for people to operate without controllers. If you haven’t tried controllers, borrow a pair from someone and use them. You won’t want a mouse again.

            3. plhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azWt0idTkxMease include leapmotion support to replace the controllers

            4. i think im the only person in tasmania with the CV1 so i cant borrow a pair 🙁

2. Nailed it.

3. I’m very sorry about your developing plans regarding Linux. The only real OS for people following the philosophy of freedom!
   Michael
   OE-MM1

   1. At ~1.4% of users, we’d kind of have to be crazy to expend our (very) limited development resources on Linux-only features… regardless of our personal feelings about Linux. 🙁

      1. If I don’t plan to use VR, Linux/Mac will still get generic updates/content?

         Thanks,
         Sam

         1. Oh, absolutely—we’re not dropping Mac or Linux support in general by any means. Our goal is always feature parity across platforms, but in limited cases, we can’t do that. For this particular feature, we don’t have a good way to implement it on those platforms at this time. (As Chris said, macOS is on the roadmap; Linux would require support from SteamVR, which is out of our control.)

4. What a great surprise to wake up to on Christmas morning. Just done a couple of circuits in the 172, and it’s probably the smoothest bit of flying I have ever done. Total immersion. Thanks and Merry Christmas.

   1. Brilliant Updete and actually using just the oculus touch controllers it’s great, please keep this feature. As I’m sure many will say they want to use physical hardware, but seriously it’s not needed anymore. Touch rules 🙂

5. Happy Christmas to all at Laminar Research and thanks for the gift I’ve been hoping for since 2012. I first tried to hack in VR support to x-plane almost five years ago! Three iterations of the headset and at least 5 third party software programs later and native support is here. Helicopter flying in X-Plane has never been so good. Great job!

6. I have been waiting for ages for this and am so dissapointed it wond work without those stupid controlers I use the leapmotion in flyinside and they work perfectly
   so sad we cant all affor those really expensive controllers :-(((

   1. You can afford a VR headset and a high end PC, but not the controllers?

      1. Don’t forget leapmotion

      2. that was when i had money now i dont times change

7. Very nice surprise!
   After short flight with Cessna 172 – working great!

8. Thank you Santa what a fantastic Christmas present you just left us!

9. Thanks Laminar!

   What an awesome Christmas present, Now this Dad gets to feel like a kid again today!

   Woohoo!
   #bestchristmasever.

10. Thx for that update in VR and i wish you a happy christmas. My question is, its possible to work with the mouse in the next time? With the touch-controller are difficult to fly! Thx and regards!

11. Thank you very much, works very well with HTC Vive!

    Is there any instructions for developers? I have problems with my plane, cockpit_INN and cockpit_OUT objects doesn’t show correctly in VR, I can only see cockpit_OUT. Reflections in the cabin are wrong, reflecting outside world instead of interior.

    Also is there any instructions on how to make plugin based menus for VR? Right now menus doesn’t seem to work.

    1. We don’t have plugin instructions yet. The XPLMMenu APIs should work – we haven’t figured out what to do with XPLMDisplay/XPWidget windows yet (but we DO expect they’ll be VR-mappable someday, just like they can now be popped out).

       If you see an artifact in your plane that is not caused by custom code AND is not present in the default planes, please file a bug – we’ll need your plane to see it.

       I don’t think the reflection bugs are specific to your plane -I’ve heard lots of squawking about them during beta; my guess is they’ve always been full of artifacts and people just didn’t notice as much until they had a VR headset.

       1. Thank you, I’ll test it further and will send you the plane.

          1. Denis, massive respect. A small developer immediately asking for help to get his aircraft updated? Wow. Carenado can learn from you. Merry Christmas (for January 7th! :)).

12. And I feel like a kid again on Christmas!!!!

13. I sure was surprised to open up my browser and find a VR release this morning on your site ! My GOD !!! What an above and beyond effort you guys must have made to do this for all of us and get the release out !!

    THANK YOU DEVELOPERS FROM ALL OF US X PLANE USERS AND HAVE A VeRy merry Christmas and New Years.

    P.S. STOP DEVELOPING and take some time off for yourselfs and THANK YOU for the best Xmass present EVER !!!

14. Congratulations for this great step and happy Christmas news for all Windows users.
    For me as a Mac user, the happy news in this post is that X-Plane is moving to Metal in 2018.

    1. I agree, thanks Austin and Ben for keeping the Mac flag up!

15. Thank you guys, great work, this VR implementation has a lot of potential!!!

    Happy Holidays to all!

    1. I few suggestions after today’s testing:

       1) Command Line Option for VR On and Off (to have two desktop icons and start in the preferred more)
       2) Echo the data output text within the HMD’s field of view (to troubleshoot FPS issues without taking the HMD off), same for plugins text output like X-IVAP
       3) When VR Mode selected with an ongoing flight start right into the cockpit instead in the hangar (like it’s now happening while disabling VR)
       4) Change the Touch controllers design to human like hands 😉 (Sorry I couldn’t resist it)

       Thanks again!

       1. Hi,

          I think (3) is not an option. When you are in an on-going flight and turn on HDR, you end up in the hangar because the hangar is the place where all UI is displaced that would have taken over your screen and blocked out the flight (by pausing and darkening every screen). Since you were in the settings screen (it is “up”) when you click this, that’s where you end up.

          We could potentially add a command-key binding to toggle VR if people really, really, really care, but my hope is that people aren’t toggling VR on and off so often that shortcuts are necessary. Our goal is that in a VR session, everything you need is accessible in the VR headset.

          cheers
          Ben

          1. Thanks for the prompt reply, the thing about turning VR mode on and off is that with long cruise flights on airliners it’s more comfortable to have it off and just turn it on during preflight, taxi, climb, descended and landing.

             Anyway, The only important item in the list above is text output.

             Another suggestion I’m sure you already got is to be able to open PDFs or images within the iPad.

             Thanks!

          2. I think some form of key binding would be useful, as for some flights, particually longer ones you might only want to use VR for takeoff/landing/interesting bits, and when the plane’s over an ocean on autopilot just use the regular screen for fuel checks etc

16. Oh my god, what a nice surprise. Thanks a lot for this christmas gift!!! If you know the limitations of, even despite genius, flyinside-xp, this is what i hoped for!
    And this is beta! A bit stuttering and so on…peanuts.
    The Yoke works incredible good. the clicking switches, the Knobs and pulling lever is a dream. Even the fmc is operable. UNBELIEVABLE!
    Thank you so much.
    And now Captains, listen to me: i suggest you to buy a VR Headset. I love my Oculus Rift!

    btw:
    How can i interact with the rudder pedals?

    1. Same here how do you use rudder to taxi??? Did they forget to add this?

       1. I figured it out you need to disconnect your joystick.

    2. Just like with mouse-flying in 2D, or flying without rudder pedals, using the roll axis on the controller will automatically give you enough rudder input to taxi around though you won’t have enough to fight a strong crosswind. Make sure you don’t have any devices attached to your system that have the YAW axis assigned to them…otherwise it’s expecting you to use those for input and won’t auto-add rudder.

       1. I am happy the step to VR is taken now, congrats to the team! However, in a simulator which strives for realism so genuinely, I do not see how moving away from using a yoke but especially from using physical rudder pedals can be a step towards realism – as a RL private pilot this seems the opposite…The motoric interplay between hands AND feet is essential for every pilot, so trying to move away from this hardware as a new development seems… at least doubtful from the perspective of trying to mimic reality or trying to use Xplane as a RL training device…

          1. I think you’ve misunderstood…I was explaining how users who don’t have any rudder pedals can taxi without the hardware. This is a fail-over case, not a recommended setup.

       2. It would be a nice feature to allow mapping the rudder to one of the sticks in the options, so people without pedals can also have manual rudder

          1. We agree!

17. Thanks Laminar for all your hard work right up until Christmas. Merry Christmas to you all. Thanks for the big gift – I feel like a kid again!

18. Great feature added, a nice Christmas gift for the customers. Just make it works without the dedicated controllers. I love my yoke, rudder and throttles. Using the VR controllers might be fun, but not everybody bought them. We are looking for Virtual Reality, not virtual Fun with X-Plane.

19. I am having the best Christmas as a Buddhist. Thank you. From Japan

20. This made me seriously excited, but but – I had already upgraded to 11.11 before I read this news. How can I now get the “Check for beta versions” option? Wait for next update?

    1. You run the installer directly from your x-plane folder and click update – the check-box is available there.

       1. Thanks a bunch – I wasn’t really expecting a reply on Christmas Day 🙂 Thanks for all the great work!

21. ich schreibe mal auf deutsch weil ich deutscher bin und nicht so mit eng habe…
    erstmal vielen dank für das tolle update…

    aber ich hätte gerne mein maus und mein x55 controller weiter besser gefunden.
    aber mit den controller ist es auch nicht so schlecht aber ich sag mal erlich maus und alle normale hand jostick bis pro jostick sollte immer gehen aber sobald man auf VR klickt ist es nicht mehr zu gebrauchen schade 🙁 weil ich habe nicht so ein grossen raum ohne mich an ihrgend was zu stossen mit den handcontroller z.b triebwerk schub ich komme da einfach nicht dran weil da mein pc im weg ist und so weiter…
    aber weiter so ich denke es wird bald kommen… bye bye and ty

    1. Dein normales hardware setup geht auch weiterhin. Wenn du joystick/yoke, pedale und schubregler hast, dann gehen die auch weiterhin in VR. Das einzige was du brauchst ist aktuell einen VR controller um buttons im hangar zu klicken.

22. How do you control the rudder with the vive controller? I’ve tried everything is inoperable.

    1. Please disregard. You need to disconnect any flight hardware such as your joystick for the rudder to work.

    2. Just like with mouse-flying in 2D, or flying without rudder pedals, using the roll axis on the controller will automatically give you enough rudder input to taxi around though you won’t have enough to fight a strong crosswind. Make sure you don’t have any devices attached to your system that have the YAW axis assigned to them…otherwise it’s expecting you to use those for input and won’t auto-add rudder.

23. First, THANK YOU! I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.
    But, I’m running an i7-6700 and GTX1070 and after cranking my graphics way down, it’s still stuttering. I haven’t had this problem with anything else. FlyInside was smooth, for example, even with my normal settings with pretty high graphics settings. Any thoughts?

    1. I’ve got an i7 and GTX1070, and I found that the key for me was to turn the number of world objects way down – to Medium or below. At High, everything was unusuably jerky.

    2. same here, anyone got a idea?

    3. What frame rate are you getting? If it’s not around 35-45fps, you will get stutters. If your frame rate is decent but your Oculus/Vive sensors are not in great positions, you will get interruptions that feel like stutters but is really a loss of tracking.

       1. im having way more than 45 fps, i got a i7 3.4ghz a gtx 1080ti and 12 go ram, but when i look around its like unplayable because of the strutters, i got a occulus rift with two camera and the controllers, feels like it came from the occulus configuration?

       2. I think that’s my problem … I have 2 frontal sensors, and my tracking is flawless in all other games.

          Sometimes I even see the SteamVR grid.

          It happened to me also in ONWARD until they supported OculusSDK.
          But I don’t have that problem in other SteamVR games.

          1. If I change the world objects from medium to low, it goes smooth

       3. I also had to turn autogen way down along with other stuff. I was a bit surprised I had to crank things down so much since this is the first time I’ve had not run smooth as butter on my system. Maybe I need a 2nd 1070?

          1. No, VR is CPU limited, not GPU. That’s why turning down objects helps. Objects are CPU expensive.

             1. Ah, OK, thanks. Guess it’s time for Overclocking.

          2. I overclocked to 4.6Ghz on a i7 6700K with a NVIDIA GTX1070. Interestingly, turning graphics card parameters down seems to have more effect than GPU.

24. Perfect ! This is what makes all the cockpit builders disappointed;-)

    How to use the hotspot funktion? Thx

25. What CPU do you recommend Ben? I have a ryzen 5 1600 at 3.9ghz. I still have the chance to store return and get intel. Any thoughts?
    Thanks

    1. We don’t have CPU buying advice yet, and I wouldn’t even know whether a Ryzen is competitive with an Intel or not.

26. What a great Xmas Present! I tried the VR Beta, it’s a lot of fun, very functional and exciting for what the future holds for X-Plane. I’m using my yoke, and I sit my touch controller in my lap, and when I want to lower my flaps, I grab the controller and lift up the lever, move it down a notch or two till it clicks. Awesome work!!!

27. It really makes me sad to see you guys working on Christmas!
    That’s the wrong way, definitely.

    I hope you had enough time to spend with family and/or friends.

    All the best
    Günther

    1. Everyone else is OOTO.

       I’m Jewish, so the only thing I have to do today is go out for Chinese food later. 🙂

28. As a non-VR user, I still find that there is some difference in the smoothness in this release – for the good . At my age, I fear that I might fall out of my chair in the VR environment. Of course, there are seatbelts, I guess..,but I plan to stay with the flat screen. Your dedication to your mission is appreciated and am pleased that this doesn’t leave the “old timers” out in the cold. The old problem of some forgetting what a beta is seems to still be a problem, but don’t let it ruin your Christmas gift to your fans. Thanks to the Laminar team!

    1. We haven’t evaluated 11.20 heavily for non-VR users yet – almost all of the testing we did was VR-centric. We’re going to do a real “X-Plane 11.20 beta 1” in a week or two once we get some of the non-VR stuff we’re working on in, e.g. new lego bricks, landmark cities, etc.

       But my guess is that we are definitely net positive for performance compared to 11.10. Sidney and I had bit of rendering engine optimization that we kept out of 11.10 due to stability reasons; we’ve been workign on it in parallel, and now everything we have is in 11.20.

       These perf improvements benefit everyone, not just the VR case. VR is really, really sensitive to FPS glitches, so the good news for everyone else is that a sim smooth enough for VR (and we are not there yet) is going to be really pleasant under normal use.

       1. Thanks… If it helps, it’s heavy on CPU and very light on GPU in this configuration, but still very flyable with my meager i7 4770 and GTX 1070.

          1. What do you think it would do with an i7 2600K pushed a bit, GTX1070 and 32Gb RAM?

       2. Are you guys hoping to ship WED 1.7 about the same time as 11.20?

          1. The release of that is not tied to the VR release. It may be before or after.

29. How do you map the buttons on the controller?

    1. At this time there is no way to remap the controller.

30. This is so awesome, thank you for this wonderful christmas present ! I really didn’t expect the vr support to be released on christmas. Is there a way to adjust the scale ? Just did my first flight with the Cessna Skyhawk and found the cockpit and everything in it very tiny. I felt pretty compressed in there and scratched the roof with my head 😉

    1. That is…completely weird? No one else has reported that. Are you using a VR headset other than the Rift or Vive? Do you have any plugin installed that changes the camera at all?

       1. Nope, using a Vive and no mods or anything fancy installed. I’m pretty tall, 1,97m, so that might be one thing. Also, just had a chat on reddit and someone who has flown the Skyhawk in real life told me that this airplane indeed feels tiny, so it might just be normal. I will try other, bigger planes when my controllers are charged 😉 Thanks !

       2. Or he could be just a really big dude.

          Sorry, the eggnog made me say that.

          1. LOL. “The eggnog made me do it” – I’m gonna put that on a t-shirt.

          2. I responded yesterday, but somehow my comment didn’t go through for some reason. If what you mean with big is fat, no i’m not 😉 But, i’m a pretty tall guy (1,97m) with long legs and long arms. So, that might be one thing. Also, someone on reddit told me that he has flown a Cessna 172 in real life and it is indeed really tiny in there. So, what i experienced might just be how it is. At least now i know, that such an airplane might actually be a bit too tiny for me 😉

             1. The 172 is a small plane. It’s like a small Honda Civic. I can’t speak for what you’re seeing but I’ve not seen anyone else complain about this. I’d try a completely fresh install of X-Plane with no plugins and see if that changes anything.

             2. I’ve not flown a real 172, I’m learning in a smaller Tecnam (which I *do* have in XP also), but the scale of the 172 seems a little too big in VR to me. I’m sure this will get sorted out eventually.

       3. I have had this experience with FlyInside and also DCS (I use a Vive)… for awhile using FlyInside the cockpit would be at least twice the scale it should have been (it was as if I was a baby sitting on the pilot’s seat). In DCS I get the feeling the cockpits a just a bit too large. I never figured out how exactly I got the Rift/FlyInside combo solved and it has never come back. I still feel the scale is slightly off with DCS. I have talked about the phenomenon in both sets of forums; it has been rarely seen and never officially recognized or solved that I have seen. I believe the Rift has a “world scale” or similar command somewhere, but nothing like thit on the Vive that I know of.

          Terry

          1. I had a problem similar to this with Flyinside. I reran the Oculus setup (standing rather than sitting) and everything sorted itself out. I thought by calibrating while sitting down would be fine when flying but I was completely wrong.

             A re-calibration might help.

31. What a great Christmas present. Thank you for all the hard work.

    Now to “unwrap” it and try it out.

    P.S. I hope the LeapMotion sensor is high on the list for hand tracking to replace controllers.

    1. I also hope LeapMotion support makes it’s way in to the code.

       1. Me 2

32. I love LR and VR, more than ever before!
    But one thing prevents me to fly: The rudder isn’t possible to move with my Oculus touch controller. No way to steer my plane on taxi way.

    Is there a way. Can someone do this successful with his HTC or Oculus Controller? If yes, how?

    1. Just like with mouse-flying in 2D, or flying without rudder pedals, using the roll axis on the controller will automatically give you enough rudder input to taxi around though you won’t have enough to fight a strong crosswind. Make sure you don’t have any devices attached to your system that have the YAW axis assigned to them…otherwise it’s expecting you to use those for input and won’t auto-add rudder.

       1. It works!!!
          Thank you…Now i can go to sleep (it’s late in germany).
          Looking forward tomorrow…
          Good Night (:)

       2. A G29 Wheel plugged can interfere with touch controls ?

          1. If you have it configured to have a YAW axis, it will expect you to use it and will not auto-rudder.

33. Hi Ben,

    I was one of the lucky guys who was selected to participate in the private beta and I was also one of those who brought up being able to control the menus and minipulators using the mouse only since so have no controllers, only a headset.

    I just want to say what an awesome team you all are at LR! Not only did you decide to work on Christmas Day and bring this wonderful gift to the community, but you have also listened to the feedback given seriously and put your customers first!

    Where do I send the pizzas? XD

    Merry Christmas, and have a fantastic, prosperous 2018 Laminer Research! You guys truly deserve it!! #BlownAway

    1. We accept Scotch bribes and donations…nothing younger than 18 years. 25+ preferred. 😉

       1. Chris or Ben
          You might want to have a look at this site (3,384 bottles of rare whiskys)

          1. Why does she have to be scotch, English wouldn’t do?

             1. I was wondering who would take that comment in that direction after I wrote it. 🙂

34. This is pretty amazing. I tried to use just the Oculus VR controllers as you suggested but… if I do that, how do I control the rudder? Do I need to map that or something?

    1. Just like with mouse-flying in 2D, or flying without rudder pedals, using the roll axis on the controller will automatically give you enough rudder input to taxi around though you won’t have enough to fight a strong crosswind. Make sure you don’t have any devices attached to your system that have the YAW axis assigned to them…otherwise it’s expecting you to use those for input and won’t auto-add rudder.

35. Thank you for the hard work, I’ve been using x-plane with Flyinside VR for about a year now and I must say that it is much smoother with the native support. The only thing I’m missing is a quick method to reset my view. Keep the good work, no other sim is any close to the immersion of x-plane and as RW pilot I’m “flying” virtually almost every day.

    1. Did you read the blog post? 🙂 There’s a command you can bind to a key or joystick and there’s a “Get in the pilot’s” seat menu option on the controller to do what it is I think you’re asking.

36. Thank you Laminar for you dedication to VR and your promise of a Christmas release. I have been flight sim fan since the ZX Spectrum (along with a few hours IRL) and today is a good day.

    For a first day release this product is excellent, I have been through all the pre-requisites – FSX / P3D with the fly inside plugin and P3Dv4 with native VR, but as we know they have their limitations regarding realism, lighting and other issues.
    I also own the very good Aerofly FS 2 which has native VR, but as I am a helicopter fan and it has none, I tend not to use it very often.

    I purchased the Pro Flight Trainer (which although very expensive (to me) it is an outstanding controller)) and works well with the Oculus touch setup you have implemented. I use only one controller on my lap on the collective side and had no issues flying the aircraft. This is the reason I would not be using the contact points with the touch controllers, it is a great Idea and I did try it as instructed, but 1200 Euros is 1200 Euros!

    Tip – If you are flying from a desk and have two oculus cameras you could consider putting one under the desk, for me both my hands are below the table top when flying, this works well when adjusting controls at knee height.

    Tip – I have also for a while been using “Voice Attack” with VR and assigned all the basic functions to voice commands (if you can say it, and X-Plane has a keyboard command for it, then the usage is limitless).

    I held off buying the flyinside plugin for X –Plane since its release (I had purchased it for FSX and P3D) and finally I can now fly longer than the 15 minute demo allowed! Thanks to the developers of flyinside we now have native VR.

    I have no complaints or issues, this runs fine on my 1060 / i3 and I look forward to further developments – Thanks again LR.

    Note to Fallout 4 VR developers: – This is a fine example of native VR implementation to an existing product, in this case free for its existing users. You should be ashamed of that $60 trash you put out last week!

    1. I was going to spend $60 to try Fallout 4 and get some usability ideas for our own VR development. It sounds like that would be wasted money?

       1. It would have been a waste of money (you could claim it back through your expenses as research?) All they have done is added a VR camera to the game, a few control tweaks and removed anything that would not work in VR, nothing on the scale you already have with this, my personal opinion.
          In its defense – It is fun to run around in a large scale environment shooting things and looking at the game close up, but poorly implemented to be resold as a stand alone VR game.

       2. Don’t waste your time with Bethesda titles where they think slapping some VR controls onto a game that was never designed with it in mind (plus charging full price for it) is going to make any kind of great experience. Find better titles (probably mostly cockpit titles), or engage your community instead. 🙂

          For example, Oculus Home & Dash “2.0” (currently available by opting in to the beta through the settings) is a good source for some UX. They’ve managed to cram a lot of features in a very usable UI – basically you don’t need to take the headset off anymore, and you can control a lot of things even on the desktop using just the touch controllers. (It also allows now you to bring in external windows from other applications).

          Maybe Elite: Dangerous is worth a look – while it supports VR very well it doesn’t necessarily integrate VR like you guys have (it has no Touch support), but it’s still widely regarded as one of the very best VR experiences. It has a lot of UI for the user to deal with, and support for all kinds of inputs (mouse, keyboard, game pad, joystick, trackir, etc). So as a user you need to map some of your inputs to be able to navigate the menus, but you can for example set it up to “focus on gaze” so you can just look at the panel to make it appear, the buttons you set up become active for that panel and then you can navigate it. Once it’s set up and you know to find your left/right/etc inputs without thought it’s very, very quick to use. If you do have a look at it, first go through the tutorials and get set up without VR.

          Ultrawings might also be a good title to have a look at. This is a flying game which was developed from the ground up with VR in mind, and even the menu screen has you sitting at a desk, tapping on a tablet for the menu, tapping on pictures on the wall for some settings. It’s all very natural and fun. The game in itself integrates Touch much in the same way as X-plane now does.

          I also love the experience of Lone Echo. While not necessarily something that translates well to a cockpit flight sim, it just shows what Touch is capable of when used to its full potential. For example, to examine an item you activate a wrist mounted scanner by sliding an element on your wrist. Then you point your scanner and click, and a holographic tab pops up. That tab then can be dragged out with your other hand, and becomes a tablet which supports touch in itself (dragging up and down to read the info, etc).

          Most of the UI interaction you’ll find in games and experience is “point a laser at an element and click (or touch and click)” – it works, and is certainly good to have. But I’m not sure most of these titles would also give you good inspiration for what works within a cockpit simulator in combination with the UI requirements that you have.

          As for some personal UX recommendations:

          * Do more with the buttons that we have on our Touch controllers (and Vive Wands, have no experience with those though) and follow the common “standards” that are used. Make them a natural extension of our hands. For example, right now the grip buttons that both controllers have aren’t doing anything from what I can tell, so switch picking up the tablet to that grip button. Currently it’s very awkward to manipulate it with the trigger button both used for grabbing it and manipulating the screen, plus it’s non-intuitive as every other Touch application would use the grip button for manipulating the object.

          * On the same note, teleporting is awkward and I find myself constantly struggling between that and trying to access the menu, I keep hitting the wrong buttons. Imo, teleporting should activate by just moving the thumb stick like it does in the new Oculus Home. (Maybe that same approach doesn’t work so well with Wands though). Having to hit the B or Y button and then use the thumbstick to navigate the menu is also weird, it doesn’t feel natural. If you could teleport by just moving the thumbstick then maybe a click on the thumbstick could switch to accessing the menu instead. At the moment I don’t think the XP touch controls are intuitive – serviceable, but not intuitive.

          * More tightly integrate Touch (and I guess the at-some-point upcoming Knuckles for Vive; perhaps even haptic gloves in the future). I’d rather see virtual hands than a weird combination of touch and wand controllers in VR, and grabbing a dial on the dash could have you use your fingers to grab hold of it instead. While it’s very natural to manipulate the dials as it is right now, I think having actual virtual hands (or virtual gloves perhaps) would make it even better.

          * Positional audio … the haptic feedback and sound from manipulating the dials is great. What seems to be missing is that the sound isn’t coming from the location where my hand is when I manipulate a control.

          * Tablets. If you need to cram more UI in the cockpit, you can either have floating menus like you already have, or use tablets. They’re easy to pick up and put aside, they “natively” work well with touch or point and click type interfaces, and the user can be in control of where they are (which can help if say the Yoke is getting in the way). They’re also already a part of cockpits nowadays, so not immersion breaking. You might need to introduce a menu to spawn new tablets though in case they get lost, maybe add a flick of the wrist to toss them aside and despawn.

          Sorry for being super-lengthy, but I’m a big, big fan of VR and a big fan of good UX 🙂

          1. awesome sauce right here

          2. I agree with every constructive comment that was raised here.

       3. Have you tryed Ultrawings ?

          They have good ideas for recenter in VR and rudder … but I’m new to flight sims and I don’t know if that would work on real planes

    2. I have an i7 / 1060, and I have constant interruptions/stutter

       Can you share your settings? from x-plane and SteamVR …

37. Great job LR! Now i have a problem, when I go to check the box to enable VR, XP11 automatically crashes. Any thoughts?

    1. Have you installed SteamVR? If so, have you opened SteamVR first and done its little setup and walkthrough? This seems to be a common problem so if doing that solves the problem for you, please let me know so I can figure out how to prevent this from happening to others.

       1. Hi Chris, per your instructions I tried. I do have SteamVR as i use HTC Vive. Still could not get this to work. 🙁

          1. Hi. The solution to this is to start X-Plane without Steam VR running. Then tick the VR box in the graphics settings. Put on your Vive and have a great time!

             Ed

             1. Same problem. When I check the “Enable VR hardware” XP loads for 2 or 3 seconds and crashes. I’ve had my Vive for a year, all set up, definately works. I tried with SteamVR running and without SteamVR running. I’ve tried changing graphics settings to pretty low (running a GTX970). Updated drivers a few days ago (for the Fallout 4 release)

                I haven’t gotten into VR successfully yet in XP despite probably 10+ attempts so far. Anything else I can try?

                Suuuuper excited to try this! Thanks for all the hard work! This is the best Christmas present I got this year (well…. when it works, it will be. I’ve tried FlyInside (works) and if this is any better, it will be great!)

          2. I had this same problem… uninstalling FlyInside made the problem go away !

             Terry

             1. Thanks Terry!

                I tried to uninstall FlyInside and it didn’t uninstall cleanly (maybe because I had moved the X-Plane directory since installing FlyInside). So I decided to just do a new XP install, and it works! Thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction!

                I LOVE IT! This is what a flight sim should be. I feel like finally it the interface won’t be getting in my way. I have never had so much fun in a sim, or felt so connected to the aircraft.

                Also, that Ultralight is super fun! Thanks again XP team!!

       2. Very exciting that the beta is out, many thanks! Also have this problem of crashing when checking the VR option. Steam VR installed and runs all my other VR apps fine. Look forward to when its fixed 🙂

          1. Did a clean reinstall and working, really fantastic. Now I need to figure out whether it was FlyInside or SkyMaxxPro that caused the problem… Afraid to reinstall SkyMaxx for fear of messing up the VR again. Has anyone else tried this?

             1. If I were to guess, SkyMaxx should have no effect on VR startup. FlyInside might though I know of no reason why the two can’t coexist. I’d be very curious if you can reproduce your issue again. If you can, please let me know how so I can look into it.

38. So, how do you get the mouse to work in VR mode? I would say that at least 50% of Oculus owners (me included) don’t own those expensive hand-controllers….

    1. Step 1: Read the blog post again, carefully.
       Step 2: Wait.

       1. Step 1: Assuming you have a CV1, don’t hesitate for a moment and buy those really not-that-expensive Touch controllers. They cost only £99 and come with a sensor (which is £59 on its own), which should get you a 2nd sensor and thus more reliable tracking for a 180 degree sitting or standing experience.

          Before I bought myself a Rift earlier this year, I thought “room scale” was a fad. I thought Touch was a gimmick. I thought I was ever only going to be playing cockpit games.

          Now I wish I had more space to swing my arms around. As it is right now I’m at risk of either hitting a wall or hitting my house mate. But Touch is fantastic, it’s like you have your hands in VR and it’s really intuitive when done well.

          A mouse and VR simply don’t work well together. It’s okay if all it is used for is constrained to say controlling a pointer on a limited size 2d plane (such as the whiteboard in the hangar), outside of that though it becomes a pointless device.

          1. I have the touch controllers from the start…. and used them
             with the vr update, but i don’t like it …. so i hope mouse support will come in the future.
             And i think i am not alone.

39. thank you verryy muchhh work alot smoother then flyinside !!! 🙂
    Thank u u u!! !

40. Very cool. Congrats on getting something out the door this year that has had such a great response. I’m waiting one more VR generation before taking the equipment plunge. That said, earlier this year I did a lot of work for a fellow implementing VR training in the cockpit environment, and we found that one of the key limitations in a 3rd party aircraft occurs when the “panel” type manipulator is used. The 3D position of the manipulator fingertip (Flyinside + Leap Motion) would not translate to the 2D x,y position that the manipulator requires on the panel.png where the control was located. Hopefully this is something you fellows are working on, Ben, and have under control. So to speak! 😉

41. I had the same problems, I deleted X-Plane and download a fresh version, everything good now.

42. I am in Australia so only got this news on boxing day. Also, on an iMac so will have to wait a bit longer. Have just read all of the above posts with great interest and excitement while having a relaxing breakfast in bed with my wife after a hectic xmas day with extended family. She is feeling somewhat neglected! It all sounds fantastic. And your dedication is tremendous. I continue to be an XP addict. Congratulations to you. Cheers.

43. Amazing job!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Much better than flyinside and great performance! I’ve been waiting this update for years! Flying using VR is a revolution. With a tiny space I have a big cockpit and all functional. Thanks, thanks, thanks!!! Best Christmas gift!! 🙂

44. I have an I7 7700k and 1080ti and it’s ok in say the Cessna at med/high settings but stutters still. In the Boeing or M42 the cockpit rendering I think makes it super tough for the environment rendering and here comes the stutter. I really hope for better VR optimization in the future. With a 7700k and 1080ti it should blow the frames away. It crashed several times in the more intensive cockpits. Kept “running out or memory” and crashing etc. I run 32gb of Dominator platinum 3200mhz ram and a other super fast components like m.2 ssds. If I can’t run this at high settings without stutter and crashes who can? I’m upgrading to the 8700k next week, but I have very hope that will help either. Just needs better optimization. Great first run, can’t wait to see it move forward!

    1. hi,

       same here, and I have an Titan xp, VR needs to be optimized, with fly inside with everything maxed out it ran smoothly, no stutter.

       keep up the good work !

    2. Turn down your World objects setting; I personally can’t run it above Low without my performance tanking. This autogen setting really kills the performance in VR – they are aware of it.

       1. Still, here’s to hoping they can optimize this. World gen on high or Max makes the game feel like… well, like reality. Low world gen over big cities doesn’t look or feel right. Hopefully they can offload more of this stuff on video cards over time. My i7 7700K with a GTX 1080 and 16GB of RAM loading the game off of an SSD still only runs VR smooth with low world gen and medium to low settings on everything else. I know with HTC or Oculus VR you are pushing around 4 megapixels every frame and that’s a lot of pixels to calculate, but I bet there is a lot of room for increasing framerate performance, at least on higher end setups.

45. Woohoo! Just ordered an Oculus on Amazon JUST FOR THIS. Now that this is out, I’m hoping the beta phase will move quickly so you can get to the (important) matter of transitioning to Vulkan.

46. Pingback: X-Plane 11 Virtual Reality-Support in der Public Beta Phase | Flusihome

47. That´s amazing news. I already tried out vr. Using knobs and everything else with touch controllers work pretty good. Before I was flying with flyinsidexp with SkyMaxx and world traffic on. No stuttering at all. But now even without SkyMaxx and world traffic there is stuttering. I really appreciate if you could spend more time in getting graphics rendering much smoother. But for a beta it´s an amazing job so far. Thanks a lot and Happy Xmas.

    1. First time ever I reply to myself:). After another day playing around I can say that the airport scenery has a big impact on the vr behaviour. Camera is shaking at aerosoft EDDF but not at EDDH for example. But at EDDH the head started shaking after turning on world traffic 3. I run this game on a 6700K with 16 GB RAM and GeForce GTX 1070. It should be enough for running a game like this in high resolutions like it does with oter vr games. I´m absolutely a noob in developing things. The Team of LR did a great job over the last few years , especially over the last 12 months. A lot of improvements. But hopefully we will see better graphic solutions instead of telling everyone to drop down the resolution at our hardware.

48. Please please please stop forcing us to use the rift controllers. I would be so much happier if I could use my mouse, keyboard, HOTAS and/or yoke as usual.

    Trying to grab or push things with the rift controllers just feels ridiculous.

    1. +1

    2. I think you *can* use your HOTAS, and Keyboard (assuming you can see it with the headset on), it’s just that mouse isn’t supported yet. You don’t have to fly using the touch controllers.
       I’ve been having a few crashes since updating today, I haven’t got as far as connecting all my HOTAS stuff again, yet, so I can’t give any tips, sorry.

49. @Magnus Sandqvist
    +1 Please. This issue with controllers needs fix!

    All other flying titles – P3D, DCS, IL-2 and even War Thunder has the option to use mouse and HOTAS/Yoke as usual.

    The price for a set of controllers (in Sweden) is around 200£! I was very happy to see native VR being worked on, but as of now this native solution is inferior to FlyInside.

    I sincerely hope that the makers of X-Plane can come up with better native support than this. There are some cool ideas, but the execution of them is not there yet.

    Looking forward to see further development on VR support, cause this controller debacle was a massive dissapointment from my point of view. Hope to see a regular mouse support soon.

    1. The price for a set of Touch controllers on the oculus.com store is £99 UK or €119 to Sweden, and that includes shipping. Most of that price is actually from the sensor which is also included and costs £59 on its own. Touch controllers are a great addition for anyone with a CV1, a *must have* for anyone interested in VR on the whole and not just seated cockpit games exclusively.

       1. You are missing the point. Touch controllers should not be mandatory for VR. Still a bunch of money that should not need to be spent. It does not matter if they cost £50 or 400£. That is just a very poor decision by the makers of X-plane. Again, no other developers are doing this when it comes to flight sims.

          I also don’t think that touch controllers is a *must have* item, in that case the controllers would have shipped together with the headset. I personally know at least 15 people with VR headsets, and none of them have the touch controllers.

          1. I agree with you that they should not be mandatory…and they won’t be. It was never our intention to ignore them forever. I will say you are sorely missing out by not using the controllers. They are not a simple 3D mouse cursor. The feedback you get by moving your arms and hands and doing the physically accurate gestures really connects you to the aircraft and really increases the believability of the experience. But to each their own.

             1. Seriously, this. Touch controllers make you feel like you are there. The future of VR development is going to revolve around making you feel like you are there (or like there is right here, with the ultimate goal of AR), and seeing your body moving in VR just as it is in real life really makes your brain struggle to not believe you aren’t there in the scene. Defocus your eyes a bit and at cruising level flight it’s hard to not think you aren’t really in a plane, flying.

          2. I’m sorry that you misunderstood me. I never said that the VR experience should be Touch exclusive. I’m all for supporting each and every possible input method as long as it makes sense.

             What I was getting at is that the Touch controllers make a fantastic addition to any Rift CV1 setup, and it’s unfortunate the Rift originally came out without them (they’re part of the package now, and have been for about a year). But they’re readily available now and really not all that expensive. CV1 owners who are not using them are really missing out on a great experience. Plus there’s more and more VR experiences coming out that simply require them.

             If all you are interested in is flight- and racing sims, sure you don’t really need them. If however you also like to experience other things, there’s just nothing like it. They’re fantastic input devices.

50. Very good news!! Thanks Chris and team.

    It’s a pitty not in linux for the moment but I understand… for the moment I’ll try it on a Win7 installation… if it’s so good than peolple say… I’ll copy all x-plane custom data from linux partition to win one.

    Again, good job and merry christmas!

51. Great job only issue I have is stuttering using a pretty new computer powerhouse rearranged all touch rift cameras does not matter where the location still has stuttering, graphics turned down , other than that no issues here.

    thanks keep it rolling

52. Fantastic work! I’ve been using X-Plane 10 with Flyinside, as the the microstutters I was getting in 11 were too distracting. I’m running an i7 7700 and a 980Ti. I used your settings in the video and X-Plane VR works near flawlessly, and the graphics are stunning. I’ve flown the Cessna, and the 737-800 and being able to grab the touch controller and reach over to adjust the flaps, speed brake, wipers, etc is great for developing muscle memory for training… and it’s a lot of fun! I’ve been waiting for this update, and you’ve delivered beyond expectations. Keep up the great work.

53. Pingback: X-Plane 11.20 Beta Now Avaliable - Adding Native VR support - Flight Sim Nexus

54. initially i got the VR headset for DCS where they have a curser appear in the middle of your view point when ever you move your mouse. So you just look at what ever knob or switch you want to manipulate and then click and drap the throttle or scroll the wheel to change freqs etc. Then when the mouse is not being used after like 3 seconds the curser disappears. I personally would prefer this method as your arms won’t get tired. I’m old, disabled & do have hardware attached to my desk. ie a Yoke and Throttles. I know you intend on implementing something simular, so thank you for keeping us old guys in the now ; ).

    Thanks.

55. THANK YOU!!! This is already working SO much better than other VR options… I am excited to see the feature grow and develop. Turning knobs, using throttle and mixture, flipping switches, etc all feel so natural and work exactly as expected. Took a flight in the 172 and was very pleasantly surprised at just how intuitive the controls are.

    Again, thank you to the development team for making this a reality!

56. Seeing this made X-Plane 11 an immediate purchase for me. Well done! 🙂

57. To free us from even the Oculus Rift or Vive controllers, something to look into would be the Leap . It tracks your hand movement in real time and attaches to the front of the Rift.

    http://www.leapmotion.com/#112

    Here’s a demo of using it in a flight sim:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf-zLCmwsEk

    Shows a lot of potential.

    1. I don’t own a VR head set yet but when I do this LEAP option seem to be more natural motion with the caveat being no physical feed back. Now if there were some blue tooth gloves with vibrators that gave your feed back that would be the Cat’s !!!

58. Great Job!
    Much better than other VRs!
    Is it possible to use an SLI-array?
    Please add the latching focus for the collective in helicopters, too.
    Where ist the Ground Services menu?
    Happy new year!

    1. X-Plane doesn’t support SLI. The ground services menu can be brought up from the “Advanced Menu” on the controller.

59. I really can’t believe how easy and hassle free it is interacting with the 3d cockpit, exceeded my expectations and then some, flight sim’in feels all new to me again, great job. Couple of suggestions from me

    1.Select fight setup on monitor – I find myself putting on the headset, setting up the flight only to take off the headset again as the loading time is fairly long. If I could have the option to setup and flight and just put the headset on when its loaded it would be good (not a massive deal would just be nice)
    2.Night flight performance – Noticed while flying at night my performance dropped a lot
    3.Pressing the board in the hanger orenents it towards you – I play in a room with 1 sensor and loose tracking if I look behind me. Often the board you interact with in the hanger facing the wrong way, would be nice if when I touch say the legs of it, it turns itself to face me
    4.Precise turning knobs – Just an idea (and I have not really thought this through) but maybe holding trigger as we do now and turning knob moves it faster but holding trigger and placing thumb on track pad moves the dial slower

    1. Regarding #3, you can always press the menu button on the controller to reposition yourself in front of the whiteboard. If you start the sim with the headset anywhere but on your head, the initial direction can be wrong which is why you’re not “in front of it”.

60. Tried this with Windows Mixed Reality (specifically, Samsung Odyssey) since SteamVR now supports it. It actually works pretty well except for a couple minor glitches. I’m reporting them here instead of filing a bug because I know you’re not officially supporting WMR yet, but I thought you might want to know anyway.
    1. The screen stutters significantly. I don’t think this is lack of GPU because I’m running a 1080 Ti and I’ve turned down my graphics settings.
    2. The controllers are not being rendered on the screen.

    1. I was hoping someone would comment on WMR! I’m glad to hear it works at all. VR is very CPU intense, and the 1080 is probably bored. Try turning down your objects, reflection level and shadow details. I’m not surprised the controller doesn’t draw. We only support the Vive and Oculus at this moment but that’s something that will change soon.

       1. And I’m glad too. I’m not terribly interested in pure VR, but it would be nice to merge my physical cockpit with external views presented in a mixed mode “augmented reality.” That way I get the best of both worlds: the tactile feel of real controls with the ability to see my real hands, and the world outside my cockpit rendered in X-Plane. I have high hopes that this will happen eventually, and replace the need for multiple projectors and PC’s to create a complete visual experience.

          1. That would be great ! But is it possible ?

             Mixed Reality draws virtual objects OVER real scenery (a virtual alien sitting on a real chair, for example).
             Can it be turned around; drawing a virtual scenery BEHIND real objects (blank cockpit windows) ?

61. I understand from many of the replies that the mouse interaction with XP is disabled when in VR mode and that Ben in the blog suggests not using hardware controls, but are the hardware controls – yoke, rudder, tpm, …- also disabled in VR, or can one still use them? I cannot picture using the controllers for the VC rudder pedals and I cannot conceive flying without them.

    1. You still can use the hardware controllers.

       1. yes ,but it’s impossible with a320 or other plane “mod”

          1. No, hardware controllers (joysticks and pedals and yokes) should work absolutely fine with any aircraft. They are unrelated to VR. The mouse is not “disabled” it’s just never been implemented. A mouse is 2D but we’re in a 3D world in VR. It doesn’t “just work”. It requires engineering solutions which we’re looking into.

             1. I’m finding it hard to even imagine how a mouse would work. Theres a lot of voices saying ‘mouse’ but i think David Cross’s idea DCs’s ‘mouse face’ would work nicely with hotas (maybe allow a d-pad to set the mouse cursor at a user-preferred offset).

62. Thanks for this beta! I did try with the Touch controllers and had fun adjusting knobs & levers in the cockpit. And surprisingly, I was able to land the 172 fairly softly using just the Touch controllers. Transporting around the plane and using the virtual iPad was fun as well.

    On the down side, graphics were very buggy and warpy, and often the view would change to the Steam room while Steam did whatever the hell it is Steam does. I’m guessing that 90-100% of the graphics issues are due to using Steam VR with Oculus hardware, because currently I use FlyInside as my VR interface and it’s all smooth as butter on higher settings.

63. I very excited about the work on VR, but was greatly disappointed to find we’ll have to fly online, thru Steam. Do I understand that correctly?

    1. No…you do not have to fly online and you do not use X-Plane through Steam. You only need to install Steam to get SteamVR which is a service that allows us to talk to the various VR Headsets without having to reimplement each one individually.

64. Just ordered Rift after reading this :)))

65. Have been also looking forward to this – didn’t think it would come so soon.

    My touch controllers have been lying unopened in my garage since I got my rift bundle in August, as I had no need for them playing DCS, Il-2, Assetto Corsa and Elite Dangerous.

    I now have a compelling reason to get them out. Now if only I could fast forward through my holiday so that I’m back home again 😉

    Thank you.

66. I’m seeing two sun’s or is that some kind of lens flare effect.
    Steam VR also draws a green circle around you, not great for immersion, especially at night.
    Has anyone tried upping the super sampling in steam vr settings, as on standard 0.6 the quality is appalling.
    I’ve been spoilt by flyinside, high graphic setting, SS 2.0 and I can move my head without the image tearing apart.
    P3D and XP11 sofar have failed to equal a third party add on for VR.

    1. Submit a bug report with screenshots of the sun’s. 0.6 is not the default for supersampling, 1.0 is.

    2. YEah – the two suns is a known bug – the ‘glare’ around the sun is misaligned with the sun…which is…weird?

67. Please note: The following is not intended as criticism in anyway. Getting VR into XP at all is a huge achievement for which I genuinely congratulate the dev team.

    I’m using Oculus and so far, the intermitent judder is wrecking everything.

    GTX1080
    i7 CPU
    16Gb Ram, etc

    The problem seems to be caused by Steam VR, as other games that do not use SVR are unaffected. Furthermore, the performance when in FlyInside is actually much better than in the previous release of 11.11; so at least that is something.

    To be clear, I uninstalled FInside and downloaded a vanilla installation of the new XPvr before running my tests. I used no addons or plugins.

    I have no doubt that LR have their reasons for using Steam VR as it probably means producing only one core set of code for both Rift and Vive. However – and I know this is only a preview of XPlane VR and by no means a finished product – currently the performance is dreadful and the sim is unplayable if you require any kind of detail.

    Steam VR always sucks the life out of frame rates anyway. Even on my rig, the 45fps was only just being met…but it was the judder that was the problem and re-running Steam VR setup didn’t help.

    Perhaps LR should have followed Frontier (Elite Dangerous) and made VR independent of Steam. If this performance does not improve, I can obviously go back to FInside of course, but I would much rather use native VR.

    I have to say though that I am disappointed that I have had to lower all my settings to almost nothing, dispense with addon scenery and…there is no mouse support, which is crazy. For example, it is actually impossible to retune the radios in the C172 as the Touch controller doesn’t interact with the tuning knobs on the GPS.

    Having tried the Touch controllers for piloting the plane, I have junked the whole idea and have gone back to my joystick. Touch are great for XRebirth VR spaceships but have no place in flying conventional aircraft. The day I see a pilot with his hand in his lap instaed of on a yoke or flightstick, I’ll change my mind.

    I have no doubt that in the end, LR will find a solution to this judder problem but in the meantime, it looks as if FlyInside will have my company for some time to come. Actually, I’m quite glad I bought it now, even though I complained about the price at the time.

    Maybe Vulcan will be the answer.

    A valiant effort however and one that I am sure will eventually develop into a usable VR system.

68. Better in the Oculus or the Vive if one had to choose?

69. Please help – maybe I’m kind of dumb – but where on earth I can find 11.20? I have a steam 11.11, I changed in steam settings into steam beta update, restarted the computer and…where can I find this 11.20 acces?

    1. Go to your X-Plane directory, find the installer.exe, then run that. There’ll be a check box to enable betas. Check that, then continue with the installer.

       1. thanks-I discovered that in game settings in steam (not general steam settings) there is another beta “availability”

70. Wow you folks really knocked this one out of the park. Well done!

    If this is the preview, I can’t wait for the full release.

71. Alas, I have just discovered that there is no way to access the ATC window from within VR…thus making the whole thing pointless as a flight simulator.

    I do hope this will be fixed at some point; after all, this is supposed to be a simulator and not a game such as Aeroflight FS2. And yes I know, this release is just a preview and not to be remotely taken seriously.

    I tried to get ATC up on the xpad, but to no avail. I did get the map though, however it was unreadable as I couldn’t get rid of the wind direction markers all over it.

    Oh well, back to FlyInside I guess…for the time being anyway.

    Still stutters by the way, though I did discover that that the stuttering is slightly reduced if you turn off Windows Defender ‘real time’ protection. Not sure how that helps though as it turns itself back on after a short while.

    C’est la vie.

    Maybe the next release will be more encouraging. I will, of course, stick with it as LR – unlike some other devs – do actually take their users’ comments seriously.

    Keep at it chaps.

    1. I noticed a little trick… At least with the default ATC XP11
       I could open the ATC window from my monitor (not in VR) This window showed up in my VR. It would stay in the middle of my VR view. But I could manipilate that screen like I could do with the Tablet.
       I attached it to my left window.
       Hope it works for you

       1. I tried what you suggested but could not find a way to move the window. It just sat right in my face! How did you ‘manipulate’ it?

          1. Reach forward with the controller and touch the window. You can grab it and drag it around, resize and reshape it etc.

             1. Thanks Chris; very helpful, especially the border resizing. I was sure there had to be a way.

72. Is it necessary to have a Steam Account to use VR in X-Plane?

    1. You need a Steam account to get SteamVR, which is free. You do NOT have to have gotten X-Plane via Steam – you can use a product key from LR or a DVD set.

       1. And for those usinfpg Mixed Reality headsets,
          1 SteamVR launches;
          2. the Mixed Reality Portal….then;
          3. You launch X-PLANE 11.20vr1 yourself, then
          4. Once in the hanger, I’d advise setting graphics sliders to the low side, these;
          5. Choose enable VR on the BOTTOM CHOICES… then
          you will see https://youtu.be/Ky62JiDCHD0

73. Why would you only support the VR controllers and not the XBOX controller used like it is with flyinside??? Those of us that had it tuned just fine that way are now SOL and can no longer even use the xplane software in VR without purchasing the controllers!! Dropped the ball on that one guys!

    1. Here’s the key points from the original post:

       “This is a preview of our VR support. This is not the final product. This does not contain the final set of features.”

       “We DO plan on adding features that will make things easier if you do want to continue staying attached to your desk. Early tester feedback has made it clear that features such as mouse-pointer interaction as well as Headset Mounted Device (HMD) pointers are useful features to have. This will allow users to take advantage of the visuals of the VR headset without having to use the controllers to click on things.”

       1. the mouse is especially for aircraft not compatible vr currently.

          I would have loved to steal my a320 in vr and I’m not even sure moddeurs have a VR headset to update are plane.

          otherwise I prefer to actually press the buttons with my controller htv live 🙂

74. Hello Ben, Chris and team.
    Stellar, and I do mean STELLAR VR. I’ve haven’t had success using Flyinside with touch controllers, not the case here, locks onto everything, every controller, every input, every time. AMAZING! Well done guys.

    Couple of things.

    I tested my plugin with the current VR system and you’re definitely locking off the plugins camera access to pilots_head_x/y/z and psi/the/phi. Ben mentioned you could write this to offset the camera base freeing up plugin access. Please do this, it’s so important.

    Another thing I noticed was although the headset is locked off, the 2d output to the monitor is not. My plugin manipulates all axis of the camera which, weirdly when using VR, show perfectly on the standard 2D monitor but not at all in the headset. I thought the 2D monitor only showed the left or right eye of the headset. If I’m right (and it’s not Christmas over indulgence) you’re rendering the x-plane scene three times!

    All the best guys, thank you very much for everything so far and special thanks to Ben and Chris. Your commitment is above and beyond and I expect to see you both in the next Marvels movie.

    1. If you’re right, that would mean the current rendering load in VR is one third to one half more than it should be!

       1. Unfortunately, It’s looking like I’m completely wrong.
          I tried to recreate this today and couldn’t. It seems if there’s very little movement of the headset and it’s off your head slightly (detector not active) then X-plane releases the camera to plugin access after 15 seconds.

          I think I’ve tried to see what was on the monitor by shifting the headset away from my eyes, after 15 seconds my plugin has kicked in, I’ve immediately popped the headset back into place triggering the VR camera control locks. I’ve taken it from that the 2d screen was showing a different rendering than the VR screens.

          Sorry to all.
          I shall take my place on the naughty step.

          1. I think what you’re seeing is: if the headset loses ‘tracking’ then the VR code will stop driving pilot head position and the plugin might take over. Put the headset on top of your head like a hat to get natural movement while watching the main screen.

             BUT. DO NOT assume that the current behavior is ANYTHING like a stable plugin interface. We’ll post something once we’ve sorted out how plugins can legally interact with the headset.

             What are you trying to _do_ with the camera, exactly?

             1. Hi Ben.
                It’s a camera motion controller based on human motion rather than the more usual wobbling eye on a stick. It’s at quite an advanced stage. A couple more features need adding along with an interface rewrite for the 11 look. Fingers crossed, there’ll be a VR control section in there too. 🙂

             2. Hmmm….if the plugin simulates what the human body does to position the eye or head, it may not be a good fit for VR. The problem is that the user has another source of this information: their actual body.

                My experience with the VR headset is that anything that moves the head other than me physically moving my head is a little weird.

                There are two ways we can allow plugins to interact with the VR system.

                1. Move the virtual room. Motion of the user’s head in the virtual space acts normally, but how this is mapped to the x-plane world can be customized. This is similar to how our ‘teleport’ works now – you’re changing where in the x-plane world the origin of the user’s VR play space is.

                2. Move the user’s eyeballs. Once we find the user’s head location based on the VR headset, we _further_ change the camera position based on plugin code.

                I haven’t ever coded this second thing on purpose, but I’ve tried it by accident when we’ve had buggy 3-d setup code, and it’s really, really painful — like, way worse than just “slewing” with constant motion while sitting in a chair. The VR companies went to a ton of work to try to make sure the micro-changes of the camera at 90 fps match headset movement – sticking anything into this end part of the pipeline is probably a bad idea, so it’s likely something we couldn’t allow.

                What this implies is: if we do (1) then you are moving the user’s desk chair rather than their head.

75. What is the release date of the 11.20 non beta ?

    1. “As soon as it’s done”. That’s literally the most accurate answer I can give. Laminar Research is usually feature and quality driven, not date driven.

76. Dear X-Plane Team,
    thank you for that Christmas present. You’ve done a really great work with X-Plane 11 and now the VR support. THANK YOU!!!

77. Just a little bit of feedback, VR is working pretty well for me so far. I set up a new clean beta install, copied over my joystick config files and everything worked first time in VR. I turned down options to get a smooth fps and had a good experience. I haven’t used the touch controllers yet, but XP11 switches quite quickly between VR and 2D, so it is easy to set everything up first in 2D then launch into VR. All you need to do is press enter on the keyboard and you are good to go. All my hardware works as expected.
    I find the image quality better in some noticeable ways compared to flyinside, namely cockpit interiors render much smoother and more detailed. Overall it seems brighter and clearer than flyinside.
    On the topic of smoothness, even AeroFly FS2 is quite stuttery when run through Steam VR, most noticeable when you move your head from side to side in the cockpit. This disappears when using Oculus VR mode, so there may be an issue that is more to do with SteamVR than XP11 itself.
    Overall a very positive first step for VR, looking forward to further developments in the future.

    i5-6600K/Zotac GTX 1070 AMP/Win10 64bit/16Gb RAM/Asus Xonar DX+ Beyer DT990 pro headphones/LG 34″ UM65 @2560×1080 Thrustmaster Warthog + VKB pedals/Oculus Rift CV1

78. Pingback: X-Plane Public VR Preview Released! « simFlight.NL

79. VR did not work at all for me. as soon as I checked the box the program crashed, I filed an automatic report. I hope it’s fixed in time for me to use the new Pimax 8K 200° FOV VR headset I ordered. 🙂 I’m looking forward to removing the HTC Vive SCUBA goggles forever LOL.

    1. disregard my previous comment, the problem was the fly inside drivers were still active. Once those were uninstalled everything work perfectly. I am blown away by what you guys have done, but I would like to have seen mouse support Ala the way it is handled in DCS this n hopefully that will come later. iit’s difficult to waive controls around when you’re seated and in an enclosed cockpit. 🙂

80. This is amazing! I just did a walk-around an S-76 and was sort-of preflighting the R22! I’ll have to try in a plane next but overall this is pretty amazing.

    I recognize that the onus is really on the aircraft developer, but I was wondering if there’s a setting I can change to get a bit of help on the R22: Clicking and holding on the collective only adjusts throttle, not treating it similar to a yoke where I can move it. It works great with the (admittedly official and updated 😉 ) S-76 to control the collective. I was wondering if there was some setting I might be able to adjust to work around this with the touch controller until Dreamfoil updates the R-22 for 1) X-Plane 11 and 2) VR.

    Thanks for all your work!

    1. I don’t know what your hacker-level is but if you’re willing to toy around with stuff, you can create a _vrconfig.txt for the aircraft like we have for our planes which augment the behavior of existing manipulators. If their manipulator is appropriate and just needs a little tweak for VR you’ll succeed. If they’ve done something naughty like used a knob manipulator for a collective, it might not be possible without fixing the manipulator itself in the OBJ.

       I can’t walk you through this but we will have official documentation in the near future.

       1. Thanks! I’m looking at some example (or rather, actual..) *_vrconfig.txt s for the default aircraft. I’ll see what I can do. Hopefully I can get there before you release documentation 🙂

          Thanks for letting me know about the knob manipulator too. I’ll try to figure out how it’s built (familiarizing myself with plane maker is next on the list, heh). I’ll see what they do and if it’s anything wonky. I think part of the problem is they also implemented the twist throttle which is in the same grabbing region so they’re probably two different types of manipulators there.

81. Congrats on a very impressive VR « preview »!

    This is by far the most functional and immersive VR flying I have done and it is absolute bliss. I love how seamless it is to switch from 2D to VR. The control implementation is second to none.

    One suggestion for rudder pedal implementation: put ailerons on left-right tilt and rudder on twist (or twist while a button is pressed (?))

    How good is it? It’s going to bed at 5:30 AM good! 8-D All serious flight simmers must seriously figure out a way to get their hands on a VR system.

    THANKS LAMINAR!

82. Congrats on what is an absolutely incredible step for Laminar Research! A couple of things myself and others have noted:

    It’s somewhat stuttery, even at VRMM (and without scenery). Managed to complete a circle at Boston at around 25fps. No motion sicknesses. Aircraft was flyable
    Fog is screwed up a bit on the right eye
    Being seated and using the whiteboard: the whiteboard points upwards
    Would be nice to have two hands on the yoke, so the average input can be taken

    These are just my first impressions of what I think is a fantastic feature, and with the Rift Home 2.0, monitors will be a thing of the past!

    1. Hello,

       If you have a Rift – turn off ASW in the debug tool, this stops all stuttering for me, I have posted a little guide below .

       Thanks

83. Hello,
    For people with performance issues and stuttering you can try this: (Oculus Rift)

    1. Open Oculus Debug Tool. Normally located: –
    C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-diagnostics\OculusDebugTool.exe

    2. Under the Service options – Set the tool to:

    Pixels Per Display Pixel Overide 0

    Asynchronous Spacewarp Disabled – This is causing the main stuttering on my PC

    ** If you want to see the real-time FPS in your headset for tweaking change the following:

    Under Service – Visible HUD Set to: – Performance
    Under Performance HUD options Set to: – Performance Summary
    Close the Debug Tool

    3. Start Steam VR:

    Choose – Settings – Developer

    Set Supersampling to 2.00

    Leave all other settings to default values and close settings window.

    Close the Steam VR app.

    4. Open X-Plane and change the settings to: (these are subjective as Oculus ASW causes the stutter).

    Visual Effects Medium
    Texture Quality Maximum (No Compression)
    Antialiasing 2X (Shadows on scenery un-checked)
    Number of world Objects Medium
    Reflection Detail Minimal (Draw parked aircraft checked)

    Exit settings

    Restart X-Plane (If requested on the settings page) – Go Fly.

    *This is working at an acceptable trade-off between un-disrupted smooth flight and stable visuals for my system / aircraft / location.

    – i7 3930K @ 3.20 GHz
    – GTX 1060
    – 16.0 GB RAM
    – Dreamflight Bell 407
    – Over Scotland with HD Terrain Mesh

    **Be aware Oculus ASW does not always stay disabled, so check before each X-Plane load.

    ***Your own experience may be different, but hopefully it will put you in the ball park.

    Best regards

    1. I’ve been meaning to look more into ASW as it’s been my suspicion that it’s causing some issues for us. I would discourage people from starting with supersampling set to 2.0. That’s going to increase fill rate dramatically…I’m amazed it works at all on your 1060.

       1. Hello,

          For some VR applications Oculus ASW has always caused stuttering such as P3Dv4 and X-Plane with the flyinside plugin this is 100 % reproducible and works as it should for Assetto Corsa and I think Project Cars.

          The above is the super-sampling setting from Steam VR and not Oculus, level 2 seems to work fine? It is scaled from 0.6 to 5.0 – with 1 as default.
          I am aware this is a Vive settings panel, but it seems to work better than the Oculus super-sampling settings. (Oculus debug tool).

          My GPU usage sits at 50 – 60 % @ 54 c with 4194MB of textures loaded.
          The CPU holds staedy at 30 %, this is with the settings mentioned above.

          Does X-Plane have any native super-sampling built in that we do not know about?

          Off topic – please fix the night vision goggles, someone must have noticed you can not see out of the windows in VR by now? – Thanks

          I hope this helps

          1. If YOUR system can run with supersampling set to 2.0, go for it, I just caution recommending that everyone start there. I’ve not heard anyone mention night vision. Please file a bug!

          2. The settings for “supersampling” in SteamVR and “Pixels Per Display Pixel Override” (or Pixel density) in the Oculus Debug Tool achieve the exact same thing. It’s just that they are named differently, and the values do not follow the same scale.

             For Oculus “pixel density”, you’d mostly want to stay at or near 1.0 if you can’t cope with the performance loss, 1.3-1.6 for a nice image improvement if you can handle the performance, above that you enter diminishing returns territory and a really significant loss of performance (at 2.0 you’re rendering 4 times as many pixels). For the supersampling setting I don’t have any recommendation, never played with it.

             Some more detail at: https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/30436-pixel-density-supersampling-steamvr-oculustraytool-and-oculu/

             The Oculus Tray Tool makes it easy to change the pixel density for Rift users: https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/47247/oculus-traytool-supersampling-profiles-hmd-disconnect-fixes-hopefully/p1

             1. Tried Simon Rowe settings, must say, alot better then before, smooth 45FPS I5 4690 non K version GTX 1080

84. Awesome Christmas Present Guys! Thanks. Married to your Work it seems. After ruinning my PC with an Update for my Tax Return Program, I have to wait till I get my system running again to try out this goody and unwrap the present. Thanks Laminar! Happy Christmas and also a Happy New Year!
    As to the Yoke Control (as I said not Tried it yet), let us Grab the Yoke with the triggers as one would a real yoke. Let the trigger go and you have the Hand free to turn a dials or switch a switch, move the throttle eg. Can’t wait, can’t wait… Stupid Taxes…

85. Well, after two full days of playing around with VP11 VR, I have come to the conclusion that it really is the SteamVR platform that is the cause of such lousy FPS performance when using Oculus Rift. Vive users may be having better luck but XPVR demonstrates once again how the Rift hates SteamVR and how SteamVR seemingly hates the Rift.

    I realise the VR is at a very early stage and I hope what follows below may prove to be useful feedback.

    As I don’t have lab-grade equipment at my disposal, I carried out a ‘real life’ test; something (so I understand from the dev’s comment on the blog) that Laminar have not actually done. LR apparently use some kind of VR test simulator.

    Anyway, using FlyInsideXP and the default Cessna Skyhawk, I ramped up the graphics on the CPU side; ie. number of objects and reflections (the GPU settings like HDR, shadows, etc at 80% don’t worry my 1080 GPU). So then, Objects to 80%, reflection detail to 10%, parked aircraft on. There were no problems at all. No judder, no weird effects at all actually; just smooth, smooth flying. CPU core totals were between 40-70%, GPU at 60-70% according to Task Manager.

    I tried the same graphics settings using XP’s native VR (I appreciate it is still only in alpha, at least I hope that is the case!)…and suddenly I was in a world of pain. The sim was unusable. The CPU in particualr was having a really bad day.

    With the expertise of LR available, because XP is undoubtedly the best sim available imo; one would therefore expect and hope that native VR would be at least as good as FlyInside…but at present, it isn’t even close once you turn up the graphics. And graphics are very important, especially for VFR flight.

    The only games that give me any trouble at all on the Oculus are actually those that use SteamVR. Coincidence? I doubt it. There is something about SteamVR that seems to kill the Rift stone-dead, especially on the CPU side of things.

    As I understand it, for example, Oculus activate their timewarp technology individually per frame, on demand. Video can be upsampled from effectively any achieved FPS to 90 FPS. SteamVR on the other hand uses a fixed rate of 45fps. Correct me if I am wrong please.

    Interestingly, Using FlyInsideFSX, even FSX, with high graphics settings, MyTraffic and loads of additional scenery, cloud textures, etc ran as smooth as butter; and FSX is almost entirely CPU dependent. So the Oculus SDK obviosly works.

    SteamVR was and is designed around the Vive, not the Rift. In my experience, whatever I play, if it uses SteamVr I always get sub-standard performance from the Rift.

    This may seem simplistic, but the Rift SDK was made available so that it could be used by developers, not sidelined. Forcing the use of SteamVR, something not even designed for the Rift, simply because it happens to be more convenient for the developer is, to me anyway, unreasonable when SteamVR seems to denegrate the Rift’s performance so dramatically.

    I am not a developer but I am, perhaps more importantly – like many others on this thread – a user and purchaser of XP. I am also a huge fan of XP and have no doubt at all that the native VR will improve over time…but presently it is almost unusable when using anything other than very low-level CPU-dependent graphic object requirements.

    The empirical evidence at least, suggests that SteamVR may be responsible.

    System: i7, GTX1080, 16Gb RAM, SSD, etc.

    1. After starting X-Plane, go to C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-diagnostics\OculusDebugTool.exe and open that up and disable Asynchronous Spacewarp and let me know if that improves things at all.

       1. Hi Chris and thanks for taking the time. It’s appreciated.

          ASW is disabled and always has been.

          Again, on medium (objects)the sim flies ok with the occasional judder when you move your head. On high objects, the judder is worse and on maximum, the sim is unusable.

          Now in XP with SteamVR, what is interesting is that no matter what the object setting is, the CPU – according to Task Manager – never uses more than 24-34% of its capability. One would logically expect CPU usage to increase with the higher object settings but it doesn’t. It is almost as if something is throttling CPU usage.

          On Flyinside, the CPU usage increases, though not by that much. At max objects (including added scenery and clouds, parked aircraft, etc) the CPU is at 39% and the GPU around 55%. There are no figures on Flyinside in Task manager that I can find, presumably because it is a plugin to XP.

          It is a puzzle and as I said in the post above, limitations only show up in other sims when SteamVR is being used.

          If there are any other tests you would like me to carry out, just let me know. I have tried SteamVR with projection on, always on, off and so on. I’ve run out of permutations!

          Thanks again for your help.

          PS: Incidentally, when the XP VR is actually working, the actual HMD definition is better than Flyinside.

          1. Are you sure you’re checking the debug tool when X-Plane is running? Mine was disabled until X-Plane started, and then it switched to Auto.

             1. Yes. I always check the debug tool status once xplane is running. ASW always starts in Auto when XP launches and then I turn it off.

          2. The 25-35% CPU limit is pretty normal – if you have a 4 core machine “25%” means 1 core is maxed out…depending on where you’re flying and other settings, there may not be that much background work.

             1. So is it possible to get X-Plane to use the other cores as well? Seems like an awful waste of resources to me, but I am not a programmer..

                The current situation means that 75% of the CPU’s potential capability is unused. No wonder it is struggling with heavy 3d object settings.

          3. Same here as Roger – Oculus Debug ASW disabled after starting a flight and still a lot of judder even at low scenery. Fantastic start with VR, but honestly, for me, not near as smooth, judder-free and high fps in exactly the same flight situation as when using FlyInside.

             1. Hi Lennard

                Glad to know I’m not the only one!

    2. Something that may also help: SteamVR has it’s own kind of “my frame rate isn’t good enough, please make it smoother” implementations called Asynchronous Reprojection and Interleaved Reprojection. They are however not as good as Oculus’ ASW, and they should be disabled when using a Rift.

       Start SteamVR, and click on the little downward pointing triangle to go to the settings. Then navigate to Performance, and turn off both “Allow asynchronous reprojection” and “Allow interleaved reprojection”.

       This is something that should really be more widely advertised, I guess.

       1. I would not recommend tweaking anything just yet. X-Plane has override control of these settings. We need to investigate this more before making official recommendations.

          1. Well, turning those options off is a recommendation made in general for Rift users using SteamVR, and not specific to X-Plane. You don’t want two systems both attempting to smooth out the framerate, they’re going to get in each other’s way, possibly introducing worse rather than better results such as overcompensation, and it’ll cost additional performance … if you guys are overriding those settings, please investigate at your earliest convenience without this override in place or give us an option to test it. 🙂

             1. You don’t get double “smoothing”. OpenVR works by passing the textured frames to the Oculus Compositor via the Oculus SDK. That’s where ATW/ASW happen. We’re still looking into this though. My fear is that everyone hacks their settings, then we make a change and now if they don’t hack back all of their settings they will continue to flame us for issues caused by their MacGuyvering. 🙂 And if MacGuyvering isn’t in the dictionary, it should be!

       2. I find disabling Oculus ASW and Steam VR’s two whatever they call it actually somehow works and I get a perfectly smooth 45fps. If I don’t do this it tries to go hell for leather and the fps is all over the place, resulting in a lot of judder, so with everything set to off who’s controlling the ASW ?

    3. I agree, like I posted a few days ago, even FS2 stutters in steam vr mode, so you might be on to something.

86. Zoom function found!..11.20vr1 don’t really use it but have seen a lot of discussion. Sooo
    The = key zooms in…and – returns…thats “=” and “-” without quote marks. And Laminar…well done..still blown away and love what is happening in our X Plane world

87. I noticed something that could be improved… because I’m an awful pilot 😉

    “You crashed! New Flight / Continue?” only appears on the monitor but not in VR. I think that would be useful at least for me within the headset’s context 🙂

    1. Yeah that’s a known issue. The solution is to never crash…..ever….I’m kidding. 😉

88. As posted in the steam discussions:

    I just had a go, but there are couple of quick things that nagged me.

    1. The default seating position is too high
    2. It’s too hard to adjust this as you have to go into the ‘advanced menu > view > move’ to adjust this.
    3. The seating position isn’t memorized, but once this is implemented you’ll also want an easy way to reset it back to default.

    4. The controllers using wrist action might be handy against fatigue but it is counter intuitive and too sensitive. So please do seriously consider normal yoke grabbing action, plus maybe for wrist control a sensitivity setting.

    5. I think the hard colored green controls are a bit too intruisive to the experience. Maybe some use of transparancy might be an idea? Give it more of a glow or aura around the controls in use or pointed at.

    For the rest… I’m absolutely enjoy the experience. So absolutely hats of and thanks for all the hard work so far, and absolutely all the best to everyone in the office to 2018.

    1. 1) If you mean “a little high” then yeah maybe you’re taller than me. If it’s WAY off and you’re not 7 feet tall, you should rerun your room setup. It might not be calibrated properly.
       2) That’s not the easiest way. The easiest way is to use the arrow keys on your keyboard or bind general commands up/down/left/right to your joystick.
       3) Yeah it’s not implemented yet.
       4) It’s a well known gripe
       5) They are already 25% transparent but we might make it an option or improve the appearance at some point. There are a lot of higher priority items first however.

       1. I would like to see the colour green changed to blue. Represents the sky nicely, you see.

89. Please all i ask for is mouse support..i have yoke throttle and rudders, all i want to be able to do is tweak certain knobs and press buttons very quickly and efficiently when required, just like i have been doing using Flyinside for along time. Using touch controllers seems cumbersome and gimicky. Nothing like the feel of a yoke and throttle when flying in vr for proper immersion.

90. It is actually possible to use X-Plane with pop-up windows in VR. It can be done with the virtual desktop in Rift Home 2.0, and eliminates the need to keep taking off the headset.

91. Very Nice. I am glad I am bought the game. Thanks for the christmas beta!

92. Hi,
    It is amazing indeed. I find it better than flyinside. touch control is brilliant.
    As suggested I am able to keep solid 45+ fps, but I have a lot of shuttering, but not kind of loosing frames, but image is blankin out, or sometimes (mostly when teleportin) it’s going to empty steam room. GPU is “only 1070” but I have fairly good processor i7 4.2GHZ 6/12 cores.
    It somehow does not look like performance problem, but I might be wrong.
    But everything else looks amazin. I am loving it and somehow I don’t get motion sickness like I do in flyinside (even with that shuttering)
    So, what is worth upgrading ? GPU or CPU ? 😉

    1. I actually read one of the comments about disabling ASW and looks like it helped. I also did upscaling to 2.0. I get solid 31 fps/HZ in oculus HUD. and controling the aircraft is amazing I absolutely love it.

       1. I find disabling ASW in Oculus Debug Tool actually makes it work !

93. Can’t find an xPad anywhere in the default Baron. Where/how do you access it?

    1. If it’s not on one of the yokes, is it near your right shoulder?

94. Can’t seem to find the xpad in the default baron or the king air. how do you activate it?

    1. Please don’t double post.

95. Thank you so much for the great added feature of VR to xplane , for me that makes it the complete package , the implementation is great , the touch controls are very good except the yoke control.

    It would be great of you remove the blue/aqua circle around the cockpit seat.

    please share your recommended hardware specs as well for Xplane in VR

    1. I second that. what is about that blue circle ?

       1. Those are hotspots. They only show up when you teleport so you know where your head is going to end up.

          1. I think the blue circle people are referring to is the chaperone circle of Steam VR? Very annoying but I think there is now an option to turn this off in the Seam VR settings menu if I’m not mistaken. I did this a while back but needed to edit the steam config file to get rid of it.

96. Thank you very much for the native Vr support. Just did a short flight from Chicago to south west Michigan and actually felt I did the flight for real!!!!! Awesome job. Looking forward to the optimisations. Using the touch controls for flight is perfect in my opinion, moving the touch controller up and down for the in Andy out movement works very well and not tiring when you place your rest your arms on your lap then use the wrists. Please don’t change vr controllers for hands I think they would be too distracting. I think the green glow of the controls when touched need lowering though. Can be very distracting at dusk and night flights.
    Well done LR.

97. x-Plane 11.20vr1 crashes when I select Enable VR Hardware option in settings.

    I am using Steam X-Plane 11.20vr1 beta and Oculus Rift. Reinstalled, Steam X-Plane, and SteamVR. Prior to that, uninstalled FlyInside XP… No Go for VR.

    SteamVR small window reports “Ready,” and recognizes all Oculus hardware, in green.

    Tried it with, and without, SteamVR, as well as, other combinations, such as;

    X-plane 11 -> to Settings + Enable VR Hardware ===> Crashed
    Steam VR + X-plane 11 -> to Settings + Enable VR Hardware ===> Crashed
    SteamVr on + Oculus on + X-plane 11 – to Settings + Enable VR Hardware ===> Crashed

    x-Plane does not automatically starts SteamVR.

    Has anyone experienced this issue, and was able to resolve it? Perhaps, Steam, and X-Plane settings, with examples?

    Thank you.

    I6700K – GEFORCE Titan X Hybrid (980) – 32GB Ram – Oculus Rift

    1. Do you get an option to send us a crash report? If so, fill out the form and let me know what your email address is so i can look it up.

       1. Yes, I did. I sent it several times. I used the same email as the one requested for this posting.

          Thank you.

          1. Yeah I see them. I’ll look into it.

       2. Yes I did, and I sent it every time it happened. I just sent another report just now and I wold like to sent you a jpg file with print screens of the step by step I took.

          It is under the same email used to sent this posting.

          How can I send you the file?

       3. Hello Chris,
          I sent several reports. I just sent another one, in the past hour. Hope your team received them, and is able to find a solution.

          Thank you.

    2. Hello Chris,

       I sent two replies, however, I do not see any of them posted following your comment. Were you able to see my posts?

       Thank you.

98. +Not a complaint, just an observation, some settings in the Graphics section might not do what you expect, for instance I get better performance using the HDR setting than the lower ones in Effects, and unchecking Shadows on Scenery gives me much better in cockpit shadows. Also, ASW is a bit weird, I sometimes have to force disable it in the Oculus Debug Tool for it to work, otherwise it tries to go above 45fps and gets very juddery, my advice for anyone experiencing judder is to enable the ingame frame rate counter and make sure ASW is working correctly to lock you at 45 fps, on the whole it’s an amazing experience ! Thanks alot.

99. Hi, I tried searching here but it seems like I can’t find the feedback regarding sky colors, they don’t appear correct. The stars at night too seem to dislocate themselves at certain times, mostly when I am in the middle of the turns. The reflections have changed too, dynamics lights are missing!? The size of the controller seems too large, can we reduce it! it’s something that really bothers, I dont want a huge controller around when flying. And yes, DCS VR is one of the things that you guys could look into for making the experience better!

    1. The Gamma of the HMD displays is “whack” to use a technical term. They are responsible for the crazy sky colors. I think the Vive might be worse than the Oculus. I have not noticed reflection issues. The controller sizes are rendered to be about the size of the real controllers. You can’t hide them or change their size. Your hands have the same problem in real life. 🙂 What specifically do you like about DCS that we’re missing or is it “mouse support” that has been discussed ad nasuem?

100. Happy holidays to fantastic (understatement :-)… ) guys at Laminar. Hope you all made it safely to 2018 with no dangerous flying.
     Been using the past few days after my PC destroyed itself, to build a New one (kept the Radeon RX, watercooling, powersupply and case, but had to replace the Board, CPU -> now a I7-7700K and new 16Gb of DDR4-3200. Not something I was planing to spend over christmas, but what everyone doesn’t do for their hobby… :-)…). Then installing everything again, and then testing the wonderful christmas present you all gave us. It still is a bit buggy here and there, but who cares. It will all get worked out. And the experience is just amazing!
     But I do have a few thought towards VR however.
     1) Big problem: Space! Most People that fly with Hardware, have to move close to whatever they mounted there yoke and throttle quadrant on to. That makes using the VR controllers almost useless as you keep hitting your desk, yoke, quadrant, or whatever. Pedals are ok as they are safely tucked under the desk. Also, try reaching out to the parkingbrake lever between your legs and then findIng that the controllers lose tracking because you are sitting so close to the desk so that they Fall into a blind spot from the basestations. No Idea what problems the Oculus people are having, because they only have a camera sitting somewhere before them on their desk. Cool would be a kind of mouse control. There is always an invisable mousepointer that follows your direction of looking, and as sooner as you activate the mouse, a little hand comes in view with which you can manipulate the dials, knobs, levers and so on that you are looking at, like you do with the VR controls now. Same green boxes, but only mouse controlled. A mouse has a left button, right button, scroll wheel, and wheel button. So getting some type of control like the VR controllers (which is very well implimanted by the way) should not be so hard. Turn the knob, turn the scroll wheel. Pull the Mixture lever, move mouse back. Push in, mouse foward. Rightclick brings up the circular menu like on the VR controllers. Scroll wheel to move between the menu selections and Leftclick to select. Teleport – select position with the left button, scroll wheel controls the direction, like the pad does now. Let go of the left button -viola: teleported. And so on. Your Software designers probably have better Ideas than I do.
     2) Reading in the Cockpit: I haven’t found the sweetspot in the settings so that I can read everything on the dials, switches, levers in the cockpit with my vive. Often have to lean very very close to read what’s printed above the switch for example. Ok after a while you get to memorize where everything is, but wouldn’t it be cool if you touch the switch, it turns green like it does now, and above it the labeling appears in large easy to read lettering floating in the air, or a round magnifying glass appears, magnifying what is writen there. Just a thought. No idee what that would do to the FPS. When the hardware gets power full enough some day, we won’t need it anymore, but until then…
     3) I have been Reading that many people want the traditional Yoke control. Grabbing it with the triggers, and then moving it like a yoke. Left/Right, In/Out. Let go of the trigger in one of your hands, and then that Hand gets free to manipulate something. I too am a friend of this type of control. Its more logical, over the joystick type of control you have now. I often find myself wanting to pull back on the yoke, and nothing happens, till I remember you have to tilt the controller. Maybe you can have both types of control, to please everyone.
     4) Oh, and when there is time (I know, there is so little, and you wanted to get the beta out for christmas), the Planes in the VR Hangar look like -pardon- s..t. Need better textures, and better overall graphics. Its the starting place for the top technology VR, and the graphics have to match. Maybe the Hangar could be used someday to select your Airplane?
     Just a few Ideas. Otherwise I think its fantastic, and X-plane is on the way to be come the best simulator on the planet. 🙂

     Greetings from Germany.

     1. 1) Already solved. Solution coming in the next release.
        2) Try turning up “Supersampling” in your Oculus or SteamVR settings. Be careful to only touch ONE place and not both as they are additive. If you have a decent video card you can increase the texture resolution of things a bit and get clearer text without hurting performance. If you are already bottlenecked on your GPU, then doing this will make things judder of course.
        3) It’ll be an option at some point
        4) Yeah they’re low-res but the Hangar needs to load FAST and not consume a ton of resources. It’s just supposed to be environmental.

        1. WOW, someones working and not on Vacation. Thanks for the reply. My first working day is the 8th of January. Got the rest of the week for flying… 🙂 Been testing the whole evening yesterday. Went to bed very late (or early deppending on the way you look at it, but flying in VR is just so fantastic). Had trouble finding any serious Bugs. Also found out that complete virtual flying with a virtual yoke is aweful. Went back to my hardware yoke and hardware throttle, and it was a dream. Only I couldn’t switch anything because of lack of space. But you said something is coming. Good. Thought if only the pointy end of the virtual controllers were a bit longer, then I could reach things. Could make a small tray next to my yoke to keep my Vive controller on, and then grab it when I need to use it. Flying with Hardware is just so much better. The plans to sell all my stuff have now been canceled. Even my radio panels I can sort of use blindly. Think when the knuckles controllers for the Vive come out, that will also change things a bit as they sort of get strapped to the hands.
           Only thing I noticed with FPS, is that when you resync World Traffic 3.0, then X-Plane gets unplayable, but that’s not your ballpark.

           Happy New Year by the Way…

101. First of all thanks a lot for this beta preview … 2018 will be promising for VR flying ( not for my home cockpit that start to feel shy ;-).. installed a second copy vanilla and tried some fly with my oculus rift ( gtx 1070 and I5 overclcked to 4.2) … with low settings thinks are very immersive and not a lot of lag… I had a crash in middle of a LOWI to LSZH with the stock c172. without touching anything ( I was in descent)… so for me things are promising but I’m afraid performance management is the key … with clear sky and the Cessna in a low detail scenario it’s already at the limit … keep motivated for your tremendous work laminar ! And Happy new Year !

102. Dear all…I made some additional flights and would like to report strange artefacts when adding cloud layers . Case 1) If I select the weather “marginal VFR” on the ground , other planes looks “double” very strange binocular effect. Case 2) if I use scattered cumulus in flight is see also a kind of double bands artifacts as I get close to the clouds

     Hope this helps ( would be better to have another channel to report beta bugs )

     1. Please use the bug reporter: http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html

103. I’m a happy player of flight simulators such as DCS series and Il-2 BOS, and I was waiting for X-plane 11 native VR support to buy it and finally fly a civil aircraft in VR. With 11.20 beta release, I have bought X-plane 11 on steam with holiday sales and with the default settings it is quite smooth and a very good graphics in VR (i7 6700K + gtx 1070), but the absence of VR mouse interactions makes it almost unplayable! Using oculus rift touch controllers may be something to try, but it is no way as accurate as using a hotas + pedals, and x-plane 11 claims to be a simulator, it must be accurate! Fly with touch instead is pure arcade! The problem is that if I want to play using my hardware, I must put the HMD off, grab the touch controller, then put HMD on, interact with menus, then visor off again to put the touch away and then again visor on to fly… it’s totally immersion breaker! Not to mention that I have to assign as many clickable items as possible to my hotas, since the only way to click them is by means of touch controllers, and I don’t want to use them. There is absolute need for mouse interactions, both with menus and with clickable cockpits! I have tried to fly 2D, but it is completely another (worst) experience, there is no other way to fly except in VR, once you’ve tried it. So I’m sorry to say that, but for now I threw 40 euros out of the window, and I feel forced to come back to DCS mouse-clickable cockpits. I hope to fly x-plane 11 soon, when I can use a mouse.

     1. Hi,

        First, relax. Mouse clicking is coming in the next release.

        Now, there is something I totally do not understand (and Chris does not understand) about what you have said…maybe you can explain it, because others have said it to.

        – The mouse requires one hand. A single touch controller requires…one hand. Both of them require you to let go of ONE part of your HOTAS setup…you can mouse and yoke, or you can mouse and throttle, but you can’t mouse and yoke and throttle all at the same time unless you have three hands.

        So…how is mouse interaction going to be better than controller interaction? It seems to me that both will require exactly one hand, leaving two feet and one hand for physical hardware.

        – The difference between the mouse and controller is: you can SEE the controller in the HMD, even when not holding it. I don’t have to take off my HMD to pick up a controller if I leave it somewhere reasonable (e.g. within sensor range). By comparison, my mouse is NOT visible in the HMD, so I have to lift up the HMD at least a little to find it.

        So I am very confused by your comment because, while we ARE putting in mouse interactions, I don’t see them actually fixing any of the things you are complaining about.

        Can you explain this in more detail?

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