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Fellow nerds^H^H^H^Htrekkies^H^H^H^H^Hnerds are aware of the even-odd phenomenon – for nine films, every other Star Trek movie was pretty bad, then the next one would be okay. VR previews are now like that, with VR2 and VR4 being fatally broken. We’re planning to just skip 6 entirely.

Anyway, I broke VR4 – my code to put a loading screen in the Oculus Rift had a side effect of killing the render resolution on the HTC Vive and WMR-based headsets. Since I only have the Rift (Chris has one of everything) I never saw the bug; since I thought my change wouldn’t affect anything outside the Rift, Chris didn’t re-try the Vive.

So, VR5 is now up – this should restore the Vive/WMR headsets to the performance of VR3.

We can confirm that ASW is not working in VR4 or VR5 – we’re looking at this now, but for VR4 and VR5 you’ll see ATW but not ASW, regardless of Oculus debug settings.

(Edit: the first version of this post confirmed no ASW in VR5. ASW is off in both VR4 and VR5 because the native rift SDK is not permitting ASW for X-Plane. A number of commenters were concerned that they would lose ASW by going from VR4 to VR5. You will not! ASW is already off in VR4; if you like VR4’s performance, you clearly don’t miss ASW.)

(Edit 2: We have a very promising lead on the ASW issue for Oculus. We have it working again here but I want to do more testing before I declare victory. We do not need any more information. Nothing you can do on your end will fix this. If you think you’re fixing it by “jiggling the handle” you’re probably just falling into placebo effect. If everything goes well we will have an update to fix this over the next day or so).

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

146 comments on “We Are Now Just Like Star Trek”

  1. Thanks again guys, very quick work to sort the Vive out.
    Progress being made.
    I have just checked and can confirm the ASW is not working on the Oculus.
    VR 6 to fix that NO! lets make it VR7
    Keep up the good work guys.

      1. It´s a team that is with heart and soul behind their sim. I often wonder if they have families, or are a bunch of single aviation nerds working on their dream.
        Just installed VR5 Yesterday evening, along with X-Europe from Simheaven on top of my Ortho4Xp tiles (seems Laminar generously gave them permission to use the X-Plane autogen) and what can I say… My jaw is struggling to get back from China (or whatever is on the other side of the world from Germany). It was a jawdropper… Absolutely… How to describe it is very difficult… WOW! maybe?… Fantastic is to harmless a word for it… Awesome?… Jawdropping?… Like I said, the experience in VR is just not to be described. Made the mistake on my i7 7700K with Radeon R9 480 to set the number of objects on High. Started getting only “light” stutters in a scene with lots of houses (Flying out with the Cessna Skyhawk from a small Airport EDRK Koblenz-Winningen over to the city of Koblenz along the Rhine river), but still totally flyable. With a bigger City though, it probably would go to its knees. Turned down the slider to high and will see how it goes on more flights tonight (went to bed 1 AM – Alarm goes of at 4:40AM!). But it shows that the team is on the right path. Maybe with Vulcan we might see a small performance boost. But its totally flyable for me right now, and no issues other than the totally messed up loading screen in VR. But thats something you can live with, because it goes away after the loading. I love how you can get amazing Scenery (Ortho4Xp, Now X-Europe -probably something to do with the past world2Xplane, not sure how they tie in with that author-) and fantastic free planes like the Zibo 737 all with the super permission of Laminar. Thats the way to go guys! Make this Sim rock! Stick out our tounges at all the Prep, FSW, FS2 and whatever guys. They would have to sink in loads of cash to get their sim looking half as good, if its even possible! And second, they don´t have a dedicated team like Austin has behind them, that asks and LISTENS(!) to their user base. If anyone asks me for a flight sim recommendation today? Without any hesitation: Go for X-Plane 11! Guys, keep up your amazing? Fantastic? Brilliant?… oh what the heck… that jawdropping work that you seem to be married to… 🙂

        1. Thinking the exact same thing. Best developers I know of, of any application, hands down. And X-Europe plus Ortho4XP is killing it!!!

        2. Team, I agree with Peter – nicely worded and thanks for the beautiful description of the VR-over-Ortho-in-Europe flying….ok, I’m doing it. But my point is to add my encouragement and sincere admiration to the development team. I am an avid Oculus VR flyer, real world PP but struggling mightily with trying to achieve that level of realism on another brand….and their updates are MAYBE 6 mo’s if not longer between releases…and even then it is an absolute nightmare. But, upadting X-plane…? One button, smooth. Your updates, communication to the community on this board are amazing. Keep up the great work, we are all behind you and I am looking forward to seeing this become ‘de-facto’ state of the art in VR simming.

          1. I think your talking about the other Brand that comes from a huge military company. I picture the programmers there sitting in their little cubicles, working maybe 9-5. Who in his right mind (too much scotch maybe? 🙂 But still a marvelous and much appreciated Idea) would up a VR preview to their servers on December 25th (!) as a christmas gift to their users. They deserve a raise (or more scotch! I´m not a scotch drinker by the way… Who started this scotch thing anyway?…). Only a bunch that is fully behind their sim would do something like that. Certainly not this big military company. And their sim is trying(!) to copy ours in terms of the things under the hood (Bad tongues and fan boys try to make us believe it´s the other way around, but we know better…) (they just made it to 64 bit – wahoo! – well it´s a start…), but according to a few reviews of products that are available for both sims, the verdict is that you can just do more with X-Plane. So the product just looks better, and if it is a plane, just flys better because of the generally accepted view (Many reviews come to that conclusion) that X-Plane just has the better Flightmodel. Pilots often say, it feels more natural, more realistic. Therefore keep going along this great path team Laminar! I always say to the guys on the other sims: “Come to the Darkside. We don´t have cookies, but we do have the better sim!” :-)). X-Europe I only discovered after I was looking to see if Tonywob (developer of World2xplane) had maybe decided to continue his World2xplane software. He sadly quit because of unfair usercomments/demands as I sort of heard from the sidelines. Its not nice how some people behave themselves, toward things that they get for Free. Thats where X-Plane also shines. Not only the Laminar Team, but the whole community which invests a lot of time giving fellow users great tools to make X-Plane what it is (See Orto4XP, World2Xplane, Now the X-Europe and other Countries Project (Thanks Laminar for allowing it), The Plane Artists for World Traffic, the Awesome Zibomod 737 (Thanks again Laminar), the countless Legobrick Airport Builders, and I could keep going on and on in this List. In the other sim worlds, you would as you kind of said, have to invest loads of cash to get the Sim looking as good as ours if it´s even possible. But to be Fair to the other Brand, we are guinea pigs (totally happy guinea pigs) with the many updates. Normal users who do not take part in the betas/previews, wait maybe just as long for an Improvement as the other Brand. But hell, who cares. We at least get the chance and we do also get to take part in the development of our sim which is worth more than any pile of gold (or glasses of scotch). :-)))

  4. You guys are doing awesome keeping everyone up to date and working hard to make VR enjoyable for all users. Thanks for all the hard work! Hopefully you guys can come up with a solution for ASW cause I’m among those that are experiencing the issues with ASW not working properly.

    For now, at least for me, the temporary fix is to just go to the Oculus Debug tool and set ASW to “Force 45 fps enabled”. It smoothed things just a little and made the framerate a little better (though not as good as it was in VR3) but still had the ghosting issues.

  5. Thanks for the confirmation that I’m not crazy (about ASW not working)! Thanks also for the quick updates 🙂

  7. Thanks for your continuous effort 🙂 There is a strange ASW bug going on. Been talking to Chris about it, and I bug-reported it now also. I’ll just paste it here, in case anyone else want to try out the same..

    ”
    Ok so now we’ve been doing some testing since VR4, and the ASW bug is still present in VR5.. I have constant judder. The strange thing is that the Oculus Debug Tool says that ASW is active, but the refresh rate is only 45hz (or 45fps on 90hz screens to be more correct).

    Here’s some history. I’ve been a Flyinside beta tester since early days, and Flyinside encountered this exact same bug when they released Flyinside for X-Plane 11.. Flyinside did not have this bug in X-Plane 10… I think that when you (Laminar) made the switch to talk directly to the Oculus, this very same bug occurred in VR4.

    To summarize:
    vr3 below 45fps = unplayable
    vr3 above 45fps = perfect!!!!!
    vr4 below 45fps = playable
    vr4 above 45fps = ASW not working. Shows 45fps without the asw.
    “

    1. This is my experience as well. Hopefully they can fix ASW soon, VR3 was the best one for me so far.

  8. So you guys must have had kind of hard days night! 🙂
    Just to get me sorted: ASW is not working yet, that’s why we have a kind of ghosting or shuttering effect? Simply said: it’s not 100% smooth.

    I have a very high end PC and 1080TI – but I need to reduce the number of objects to low (!) with default Cessna on an Aerosoft Airport. Same with the FF A320 on a default airport. In those cases I got around 55 FPS and it works smooth BUT only, when I turn AWS in the Debug Tool to OFF. In case of Auto or 45 FPS there is a shutter-effect independant from the highest/lowest graphic settings in XP11.

    So one day ASW will create a smooth experience even when it comes to 25 FPS? So that 25 FPS with working ASW feels like 55 FPS as now in 11.20vr5 …?

    Much respect for your tough work!
    Glad to have you aboard!

  9. Thanks for the good news. Until when should VR 5 be available in steam?
    You have it really not easy, but a big compliment you do a good job 🙂

  10. hello! fist of all congratulation and thank you for your hard job!
    i ask you about mouse 3d: as a Flight Factor A320 purchaser, saw that in vr 4, the 3d mouse is completely unusable (not little bit offset, but really out e.i. if i click somewhere on the glearshield i open one of the two sliding windows).
    The problem is that the guys of FlightFactor already told that this is a problem of x-plane software and it is not due to their product, so they are not going to fix it.
    is there anyway to fix it by your side or by our side (maybe with an external plugin)?

    thanks a lot

    Giacomo

    1. Thanks for the status update on the A320. We’re aware of the problem. We do not currently have enough information about the bug to conclusively say whether it is a problem with the A320 itself or X-Plane.

      1. If i can help you in someway to solve it, ( tests, video, screenshoots and data) just let me know

  11. with vr5 more gps on the scenna 172.impossible to stabilize the image. In vr permanent zoom and a huge headache.I find myself completely crashing with this correction. So more vr and problem with the latest update of oculus rift the handles are not stable.

  12. Ben as I stated yesterday just a quick side note judder is completely fixed , however once you put the checkmark in to the vr option it goes to a lower resolution setting, the startup screen during loading is stretched and doesn’t fit on the screen and once fully loaded you can see the difference in quality as far as resolution images.

    downloaded vr5 just now same issue as above using a oculus rift when I look under monitor settings on resolution it says default setting not sure if this is what it should be at .

    Thanks Larry

  13. I’m probably one of the select few who would like to know why LR has taken this route with VR (from 11.10), when there is still a lot wrong with, in need of attention, or still broken with, the base XP sim? I’m in 11.10 right now and still experience issues or see things that could really use quicker attention, rather than toying with goggle-driven controls. 🙁

    -Load times
    -FPS
    -Weather
    -Seasons

    I’m not saying VR isn’t important, but I’d expected the LR team to focus on solidifying the sim before branching out. Whatever happened to the other development news of late?

    1. We are doing a lot of things at once with multiple developers. 11.20 is a release vehicle focused around VR. So all of the blog posts and release notes are about VR. We are not posting day to day notes on things being coded that are not scheduled for immediate release and aren’t done yet.

    2. Well, those goggle-driven controls have already brought us quite a boost in FPS for sure (and may bring more FPS optimizations in the future)… They also bring X-Plane to a new level which attracts more people to the sim. I, for example, temporarily ditched X-Plane in favour of Aerofly FS 2 because of its VR implementation. Flying on a 2D monitor just isn’t comparable with flying in VR. Now X-Plane has taken back the crown and I don’t want to go back to AFS 2.

      More people using X-Plane 11 means more funds to work on bigger and better features. So even non-VR pilots will probably get something out of this VR specific release in both the short and long terms.

      Also, the platform isn’t really up-to-date when it doesn’t support VR right now. Think about all those 3rd party weather solutions, they still don’t work in VR. Having VR in the platform allows those 3rd party suppliers to start creating solutions that work both in 2D and VR. This is why you don’t want to wait too long to support upcoming technologies with your platform. Think about what would have happened if Windows would have supported USB devices only since 2017…

      Maybe VR is for early adopters right now, but it will probably be mainstream in a few years, with better resolution and a wider field of view. Implementing it now will assure you that people buying into VR in a few years (that might also include you) will get a perfectly working experience.

      One question: Did you already try VR in X-Plane?

      1. Well said. Many thought VR was just a passing fad, but it looks like its here to stay. The other sims have it. so X-Plane must also have it to succeed on the Market. And we don´t want something just half heartedly thrown into the sim, just because everyone else has it. We want the best. The best attracts users, more users mean more developers, more developers mean a better ecosystem and an even better sim. Which then drives our team to peak performance. Win win for all. If the base of our sim becomes really good, think of what these incoming developers will then creat out of our sim. It bogels the mind. Just look at PBR, Dynamic Lighting, and and and…The laminar guys are probably working on dozillian 🙂 things at once right now. Not only VR. Vulcan has been said before that its an ongoing process, maybe even working already on a new ATC (which is a very huge Task, and maybe just providing good plugin points to let third parties come in (Like Pilot2ATC or others) would be a better way to go. Who knows what is going on between the holy sim walls that Austin has provided to keep the rain off his diligent little gremlins. Patience. All will turn out for the good of all… Good? No way! The most Fantastic for all! Just wait and see.

  14. What a journey! So is it safe to believe that as an Rift user, I would not only see no benefits of updating but actually see degradation? Should Rift users just stay on VR4?

    1. No. ASW is equally “off” in VR4 and VR5. If you used VR4 and you like what you see, you don’t care enough about ASW – go use VR5 and enjoy.

      If you use VR4 and are annoyed that ASW is off, update to VR5, there’s no difference in perf, and the sim will stop nagging you.

  15. Just be clear. If we are an Occulus user, and like the ASW update (which by the way made my VR experience 100 times better), we should not upgrade to VR5? If we do upgrade from VR4 to VR5 we will lose ASW functionality. Is this understanding correct?

    1. There has been a few posts about this (mine included) and I think the issue was that we THOUGHT ASW was working in VR4 when it actually was not. Therefore, there’s no change in going to VR5 at this point. I assume they will work on ASW ina future update.

    1. We expect a net performance improvement from 11.10 final to 11.20 final. We have some things to add to 11.20 that aren’t VR related coming soon.

      1. ground handling fix for tail gear aircraft i hope is one please… also please we need something done about much CPU the water FFT effect uses

        and MORE AA options

    1. I noticed, but assumed it had to be that way to gain the performance increase, but after playing for a while it’s the first time ever I’ve felt sick while using VR.

  19. Hi Ben,
    Any idea when the ASW fix will be sorted… I know what a question 🙁
    days, weeks, months or when it’s done it’s done.

    PS great work on the Vive fix 😉

  20. Hello!
    I don’t know if this is the right place for my question or suggestion.
    But first of all, a big thanks to the LR Team. X-Plane with VR feels absolut great. As a Student Pilot, I can. Say it is really “as real as it can get” and it helps me a lot for getting used to cockpit work, checklist and emergency procedures.

    I also have nearly no issues with VR5. Its smooth and works fine with my oculus. If ASW is going to work in the near future, it will me more smooth of cause.

    But here is my question:
    Is it possible to map a Key on the oculus touch controller for an external program. Right now I’m trying to get a push-to-talk funktion with Teamspeak 3. (no IVAO or Vatsim or similar). Just Teamspeak3 which allows to assign a keybord button to PTT. But I could not manage to map a key (for example the “+” key) to the handtrigger on the oculus touch.
    Any Idea. Or is it possible to have this function in the future?
    I tried some script with Autohotkey, but it doesn’t work me.

    Regards
    Thomas

    1. The VR controllers are treated just like joysticks that execute sim commands. You can create a custom sim command with a plugin and just bind it to the controller like any other command.

  21. Rift user here, anyone else “feel” that the touch controller is slightly “disconnected” in game from its real life counterpart ? It’s there and it moves, but it feels somehow strange ! Other than that, and when I move my head it also feels weird with strange ghosting on the dials and displays, it’s alot smoother, even with stormy weather, good stuff !

    1. I feel the same thing. It’s like if there is a lowpass filter that was added to filter fast movements of the headset and the movements of the controllers. It create a “laggy” feal when doing fast move. Could is just be that the filtering bandwidth is too much reduced on the movement filtering.

  22. Awesome improvement for us Oculus folk, thanks for the great work Ben and the team. I find ASW set to off with debug tool provides the smoothest experience (VR4). One thing I have noticed though with the new Oculus API is the head position in VR seems to “swing” a little when looking around, especially back and forward motion, almost like the surroundings don’t stay completely still and move with you a little. Anyone else have this?

    1. I find that happening if the headset lost tracking momentarily. Make sure your sensors are in an unobscured location. It can also happen if you look away from them and you lose tracking temporarily.

      1. Thanks for the reply Chris, I don’t think it’s a tracking issue as it’s there consistently. I’ve checked and reconfigured my sensors which haven’t moved position as they’re perminantly fixed to both corners of the room on brackets pointing downward to the centre which I believe is the optimal setup. Nothing to obstruct their view. It appeared right after updating to VR4 with the Oculus API. I seem to remember the same thing with Flyinside but not in Steam VR. Not that I’m complaining though! I’ll take the native Oculus support and the performance improvement it brings over Steam VR any day 🙂

    2. As I said in another comment reply, I am feeling the same thing (it was not there before Beta 4). As if the filter bandwidth of the movment filter (low pass filter frequency for heatset position and controller position) was changed when they went with Oculus SDK directly. It could be great to be able to change the frequency of this filter and increase the filtering frequency (thus increaseing the bandwidth to permit a little bit more faster movements).

      1. I thing when ASW will be enabled, the laggy feeling will be reduced or will disappear. Will see soon.

  23. Is the 3d mouse pointer meant to flash. Kind annoying and not easy to use keypads on fmc for instance.

    1. +1 on this, I’ve mentioned it before too. I wonder if it doesn’t happen for others. For me it flashes continuously, even when not moving the mouse.

      1. Originally I had two mouse cursors, far and near flashing from one to the other. Now it starts off with two, then settles to one but and thats flashing. Shame as it spoils a otherwise pretty decent VR Beta.

  24. Again, waking to this update. (From the other side of planet Earth).
    Had a gut feeling about ASW being broken. But still, yesterday was a new dawn for X-Plane vr.
    Nevertheless, good work guys and gals! May the Force be with y’all!
    (Now running to update!)
    Thank you for working hard and drinking lotsa coffee!

  25. classic Ben.
    fix one thing. break 30 other things. don’t know who is a *MORE AWESOME programmer. you or austin.

    1. Hey man. Not nice. I work very hard for my insults and if you are gonna just change them whats the whole point of me insulting you. please change back my insult.

    1. The VR runtime can take some time to load and start tracking the headset. If you’re using SteamVR, you can shorten the time by opening ahead of time and making sure your headset is tracking. If you’re on Oculus, I think it is what it is.

  28. so to get this straight,

    at the moment in vr4 and vr5 asw is non functional but using directly the rift sdk.

    so that would mean that pulling a sharp turn will give this almost blurry jumping look to the landscape making it hard to focus, giving the user the impression almost like the left and right eyes are not synced?

    there is also a black “frame” that appears to follow my view if i turn my head, eg. if i turn my head left its like the the first cm of view is a black bar until renders, this happens in all driections

    in a way its worse in vr4 than in vr3 due to this almost vibrating fast movement problem, ill have to keep my bucket near me…

    any eta on when ASW will be fully implemented?

    1. Yes I get “a black “frame” that appears to follow my view if i turn my head,” it’s a sort of a
      small black horizontal line.
      We will see if the ASW fix resolves that as well.

  29. I was over the moon with VR4. Yesterday I flew a few hours before tea – fantastic. After tea, (unfortunatley I allowed it to update to VR5 wthout backing up – kicking myself).
    I couldn’t fly at all, the cockpit dash moved with my head everything was shaking, the oculus head performance had shot back down into minus 1xx. I was almost sick for the first time in VR.
    I gave up!

      1. If it’s a placebo, why was it working the day before when it came out, then it worked for a good few hours perfectly before I had my tea. Came back after tea, updated to VR5 and no longer working like it was?
        I made no changes at all since setting it up in VR4 the day before; yet it wasn’t useable, the FPS definately dropped a lot after the update.

        1. I don’t know what you saw prior but I’m 100% confident that there’s nothing changed between VR4 and VR5 that would change performance for Oculus users. It’s more likely that you have something running on your system that’s stealing resources that wasn’t running the other day. I have some things in my tray that like to autostart and if i forget to shut them down, they can change performance for example.

          1. I tried again last night to look more closely. I noticed that I am getting like a darkening/shadowing moire effect in the left eye. I also see lines and small amounts of replication appearing as well as the cockpit dash moving with my head movement.
            All other VR programs are working with no problems, I even start x-plane without having Home or anything else running.
            In task manager my graphics is running at about 45% and processor about 30% so neither are fully utilised but FPS remains maxed at 45.
            Is there a pref or anything that could cause this if it’s not the changes?
            As I said it seemed pretty much perfect in VR4.

          2. 45% processor is for all of your cores. X-Plane mostly just uses one so you’re at about 90% CPU utilization. I’d do a basic install of X-Plane VR5 into a separate clean folder with no plugins or add-ons and see if that works better. If it does, then some configuration, or plugin or addon is giving you issues.

          3. I installed a new copy of VR5 but it still giving problems.
            The most obvious is if I move my head up and down the blue boxes on the gps430 and the bottom blue line on the 530 move up and down as well which feels really weird.
            The black moire I saw outside the plane goes if I don’t have visual effects on maximum (which is what I used in VR4).
            I also tried dropping all settings to minimum but apart from not looking good it didn’t remove the effects on head movement.

          4. If the new copy of X-Plane has no plugins, add-ons or 3rd party aircraft then I’m not sure what else to tell you other than to file a bug and include your Log.txt. I’ve not heard of anyone else with these issues so it’s either something specific to your machine or you have an uncommon mix of hardware and drivers that have a flaw.

  30. Using latest VR beta with a 7700HQ and 1060. Without VR enable i get 60-80 FPS but at the same area when i enable VR i get 25-30. Is this normal? Even if i remove the scenery i dont get better..

    1. Yes that doesn’t seem too far off. Do you have supersampling enabled too? That would cause some big hits to fps.

  31. Hello,

    Great work with all of this – Thank you.

    Regarding ASW not working:

    Using the Oculus performance HUD with “Async-SpaceWarp Stats” this reports under VR4 and VR5 that it is active and working? Is this a false reading?

    I would expect to see “Not Active” if it was disabled or not working.

    Thanks

    1. If you read it, you’ll see it’s active but the number of frames that fail ASW is going up like crazy. Also if you watch horizontal motion of the controller you’ll see there’s been no compensation for translation.

  32. I find it so interesting that us rift users saw so much performance and stability in VR4 thinking it was due to ASW when in fact it was not. Are we to assume this was all due to the removal of the Steam VR layer? If so, that is fantastic. Were there any other perf tweaks?

    1. Probably yes – in particular, you’re not seeing ASW with weird timing from Steam. At least, that’s our least bad theory .. we have limited visibility into the interaction of SteamVr and the Oculus SDK. I can say that it’s the move in SDK and _not_ the addition of ASW that’s helping, in both VR4 and VR5.

  33. Your last post stated, “Oculus users will no longer need SteamVR.” Then why am I getting an error in the latest beta stating:

    SteamVR was unable to initialize:
    Hmd Not Found (108)
    Error code 108 (VRInitError_Init_HmdNotFound)

    I already submitted a bug report because my HMD kept getting disabled, but this just popped up as I was getting ready to close the software.

    1. Are you 100% sure you’re running VR5? Check the splash screen on startup. If so, try reinstalling the Oculus runtime. Maybe it got messed up somehow. The only way we’d try and run SteamVR is if the Oculus runtime wasn’t available.

      1. Jeff – I had the same when I enabled VR on first start-up in VR5 (after having uninstalled SteamVR beforehand). A reboot of the PC resolved it.

        1. Thanks Chris and Alex for your input. I did confirm I’m on VR5, and rebooted after install. However, this morning it is working fine after another system restart. Maybe some random process killed Oculus Runtime yesterday and forced Steam? Anyway, it’s purring like a kitten now. 🙂

  34. LOVE VR! On VR5 – I’m using Rift and hand controllers are unbelievably smooth on the yoke/stick! Takes some getting used to not feeling the hardware. After flying around a bit, thought of these 2 VR-Enhancement Requests: (Not bugs – but will put on bug reporter if that’s where it should go)
    1) Using hand controllers, want to be able to latch onto the throttle as well. Landing most planes is a stick and throttle operation. Have to look down to find the throttle with the hand controller on short final…. (work around is to hold the trigger).
    2) Using Rift hand controllers, The stick/yoke, when unlatched, should move to the trim forced position. Not sure of the math involved, but all sticks/yokes tend to have a pitch spring position physically affected by trim position, or a force-feedback position caused by pressure on the control surfaces (and trim tabs). Aerodynamically stable aircraft also tend to revert roll close to center. Currently, holding the stick, then de-latching leaves the stick in the last position – basically overriding any trim settings. (Any way to route force feedback data into VR stick position?)

    Great job team!

    1. I mentioned this in a previous post and got a reply that they were “on it.” Releasing the yoke should defintiely return it to the neutral position. Without this there isn’t a need for trim. ALso, when using the yoke, if they added haptic feedback the further you moved from neutral, it would allow for trimming via feel (once the vibration stopped) and also knowing where “center” was. I am sure things like this will be added eventually.

  35. Just a little idea for the loading screen: it could be cool if the loading screen was like a pilot waitingroom of some sorts with smoking coffee and some flightplans on the desk. Just to get the feel of being a real pilot 😉 Just an idea

    1. my loading screen involves getting smoking coffee for real cos it takes like 5 minutes to load KSEA lol.

  36. OK…I have read through as many of these as I can and i have submitted a bug report but was wondering if anyone else is having the issue i am having. When I release the joke it starts jumping in and out, is that ASW or something else?

    2. Well my issue was my issue….so many joysticks…so little time. I had an XBox controller connected and forgot to unplug it….oooppps. Works great now

  37. I hope your lead for ASW pans out. I definitely notice it in the 737 where I have to reach over and grab a switch (which I do often because it’s such a large cockpit and I don’t have a copilot). I guess I could use the laser grab feature to avoid moving around too much, but hey, I gotta get my daily exercise in somehow, right? 😛

  38. Regarding Edit 2: do you feel that ASW is a notable improvement on lower framerates (sub 45) or do you hardly notice a difference (or is it even worse compared on to off)?

    1. Sub 45: it’s definitely better on. I don’t know how ‘noticeable’ I would call it – I can tell you that end to end the Rift SDK + ASW is significantly happier between 22 and 33 fps than the Rift via SteamVR was.

    2. I can see the effect of no ASW when flying fast & low or pulling a hard bank.
      When I fly slow and easy (as you should it’s not that bad)
      I can as you would expect move my head from side to side / up & down without any problems at all.
      Looking forward to the ASW fix.
      PS the 1080 did struggle with SteamVR no matter how I tweaked.

  39. Good work on oculus sdk, but I still think that the 3d mouse as it is implemented right now is the major issue to enjoy vr for people like me who doesn’t like hand controllers interactions. We need a smaller, “single plane” 3d mouse… I don’t know how to call it exactly and I’m sorry if I always have to talk of other sims, but the only way I can explain it is that you should try DCS world free clickable tf-51. That’s the sort of mouse we need. For now, I’ll try to give give another chance to hand controllers.

  40. Loving VR5, especially the zoom mode (which I know came earlier, but I didn’t play for a week or so.) I can finally read the GPS and some of the light switch labels on the 172!. Two asks:

    1) Is there a way to manipulate controls while zoomed? I want to turn GPS knobs while zoomed in, but the Oculus hand controller doesn’t seem to want to activate anything.

    2) Until you can get together a full “charts in VR” feature, I’d love a mode for the “iPad” that just displayed a canned PDF file that the user can edit. That way, I can build a PDF with my checklists, approach plates, etc, and keep my head in the game for the entire flight.

    1. Love this idea. Could we just drop a pdf into a directory and have it show up on the “xPad”.

  43. VR5 is crashing to Desktop with all SASL Planes

    I see on the Forums there are other users with exact problem

    [SASL] Found no-self-enable option, waiting for the Aircraft Plugin Manager or for manual enabling
    G64: 68.322: Livery Changed:() Folder:(Aircraft/Flight Factor/757 V2 EXT BETA/)
    –=={This application has crashed!}==–

    Regards
    Lawrence
    PS Yes I Did do a Bug report 🙂

  44. I’ve asked this question before, never received an answer, why do the colors in X-Plane look washed out and frankly dull ?, and it doesn’t matter what time of day it is.

    1. The gamma on most of the VR headsets is “whack”. Some headsets are ‘blah’ looking, others are cranked up and you get color banding.

      1. non-VR looks “bleak” as well, especially compared to xpl 10, as if there was some sort of desaturation or whiting of applied to textures.
        I remember submitting a bug for this when xpl11 was in early beta. xpl 10 has much more vivid colors.

        1. Exactly, the colors are bland, not knocking X-Plane 11 at all, to me it has the most potential of the “new” 64 bit sims, just the colors could be more vibrant seems.

      2. Are these Gammas adjustable? I have an Oculus and notice and overly washed out look when gazing upon the horizon. Nothing too crazy, but would be nice to adjust this.

          1. I wish there was. Dealing with the banded clouds at night is the only rough part of VR for me. We Need Dithering!

        1. This is atmospheric scattering—an effect you see in the real world too! If you hop in an airliner (or, heck, even just climb a high hill), you’ll see that colors get washed out toward the horizon; things you see 100 meters away look much sharper and vibrant than things 1 km away, and likewise the limits of your visibility will be even less vibrant.

  46. I’ve had Oculus since last summer, tried FlyInside, but shelved it waiting for the native version. Downloaded VR5 into new copy of XPlane, and the first thing was everything was out of alignment. Resolved that, and entered the 172, only to find myself ‘sticking out of the top’ of the cabin. used the arrow keys to get back inside. But is there a list or website that guides ‘new’ users into getting everything properly set up?

  47. My oculus touch controllers disconnect and don’t work in vr5, but work flawlessly in oculus home. In x-plane I can see the controllers but none of the input works, I can only click menu and switch between oculus home and x-plane menu, but cannot click inside x-plane. In vr2 all worked good, then I’ve used mouse and hotas, and now wanted to try touch again but they don’t work anymore. Very annoying. This vr test is far away from perfect and It’s getting frustrating…

    1. If you’re frustrated running a set of preview builds that we expect to be too unstable to even consider a “Beta”, you should probably stay on the stable update cycles.

    2. Hello,
      I had the same mesaventure and fussed before finding. You need to activate “VR Mouse cursor” then “VR hardware”. Once in the hangard, go with the mouse in “Joystick”, and there oculus touch reappear and we can recalibrate.
      I hope this will help you.
      Good luck to the developers and testers!

  48. Hi Vive users and LR,
    Although VR5 has me flying again and I am delighted. It seems to be stuck at 1.0 SS regardless of what setting I set SteamVR to.

    Is anybody else experiencing this?

    Thanks

      1. Shut off for the night now (UK), but I have a several restarts between VR5 install and posting. However, I will try again tomorrow with Steam set default SS 1.0, start XP. Close everything, restart pc. Then try Steam SS at 3 (which is what I normally run) and let you know.

          1. I’m getting the same, CPU and GPU load is affected but the visual fidelity is not. Multiple restart attempts, same as Ian.

          2. X-plane restarts and/or pic restarts don’t fix it in VR5. I’ll wait for VR6 to hit steam and let you know after that.

  49. Not sure if this kind of feedback from an XP noob is valuable, if not, feel free to discard this comment:

    I upgraded from VR2 (I think) to 11.20VR5, running the latest Nvidia driver (391.01).

    I’m seeing a lot of missing gauges, for example in the Baron and the King Air. Instead of dials and needles, they just show a white texture. I have disabled all plugins to make sure they don’t interfere (and because XEnviro made fps tank in VR). The issue is present in VR as well as “flat” mode. No idea what’s happening here.

    When you asked for input about control methods, I suggested some form of gaze control, because I’m a HOTAS user. I also claimed that you just needed to provide a mouse pointer in VR and I would be able to control anything using my stick and some clever AHK macro. Well, you proved me wrong. To be able to use a mouse plus macro as a replacement for gaze control, the mouse pointer would have to attach to the user’s pov. Instead it attaches to the cockpit, which is fancy, but doesn’t allow me to control anything without letting go of the stick.

    A general comment: As someone coming from “the other” sim, I don’t understand how XP devs and users tolerate the “burning planes” in the sky. Well, I assume they are aircraft, they could as well be world-ending asteroids just before impact. That’s not how contrails look in my part of the world. (I got XEnviro because I hoped it would “fix the sky” for me. Still hoping for that day to come.)

    Thanks for reading,
    Marc

    1. Hi:
      I’m on vr5. Like it so far. I think that VR users have to get into the mind set that graphics trade offs are part of the deal. I remember when I first got TrackIr. It blew me away. That was years ago. Then I added the 2nd and then the 3rd hi res monitor. Then the nvidia parade of the latest and greatest. Intel Cpu’s ditto. The flat screen eye candy grew and grew with each iteration of XP. Then Ortho4xp. Then Alpilotx v4. All of a sudden Xmas 17 gets me a Rift. There is no going back to my flat. If real estate is location , loaction , location. VR is immersion, immersion , immersion. I’ve been simming for decades. I know what’s coming down the pike. Better and better. All we simmers have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride. LR rules!!

      1. I think the OP was talking about actual missing textures. I have seen this in the C172 as well missing the GPS textures. I think we need to submit a bug

  50. Dear X-Plane Devs,
    if I would like to start with VR, what vendor / hardware do you recommand (e.g. concerning best performance under x-plane or brightest future in x-plane)? Comparing to graphic cards: I opted for NVIDIA because AMD is clearly the worse choice for X-Plane. Would you or the readers please give me a clear recommandation?
    Thank you very much!

    1. We’re not offering much in the way of recommendations at this time though I would loosely say, don’t skimp on the CPU power and if you’re looking for NVidia, get a 1070 or better.

    2. I get that, always getting an error message from the wife saying “you always have your head in that thing!”
      I will have to take care when VR6 is up, practice saying yes.. emmm.. could be or the classic just a min………….
      Even LR devs are unable to resolve the above error.

      1. Buying her flowers seems to make the error occur a little less often, it also seems you can click away the error much more often afterwards without crashing the sim. Might be a placebo effect though. I’ve never managed to totally get rid of the error without having to sleep on the couch. Devs should make this the main focus of 11.30, ATC can wait, especially if it will be voice activated as that will probably make the error message even worse.

  52. Where can I find some info on using X-Plane with AR not full VR? I want to continue to use my hardware (yoke, switches, Simionic G1000 panels, etc.) but what would be great is the ability to have wraparound visuals. Essentially I want to replace my monitors with an AR overlay. I have a quad monitor setup now to get around 160 degrees, but you still can’t look back over your shoulder in a traffic pattern without more than 180 degrees. It seems to me that this is what is more applicable for real flight training – more than VR. I don’t want to use any of the VR controllers – just the real hardware as you’d find in an actual plane.

  53. I just finished watching a lengthy presentation by Nvidia CEO, (he sure likes to repeat himself a lot) LOL but after watching that and looking at the new technology on their website, I have a question. About the future of VR in Xplane. Will you possibly be implementing the new VR SLI for OpenGL for VR rendering quote from Nvidia’s website “VR SLI for OpenGL is accessed through a new OpenGL extension called “GL_NVX_linked_gpu_multicast” that can be used to greatly improve the speed of HMD rendering. With this extension, it is possible to control multiple GPUs that are in an NVIDIA SLI group with a single OpenGL context to reduce overhead and improve frame rates. .” BTW , I also ordered the NVIDIA TITAN V which brings me to my second question, you think you guys can make use of the advanced technology of this card specifically the 640 Tensor cores ? for What ? I don’t know I’m not a programmer. But the technology is very intriguing. In what it can accomplish with AI learning, I don’t know how this translates to Xplane, hence the questions. Let me conclude by saying you guys are doing amazing stuff. I and a large group of my fellow flyers cannot wait for you to solve the last hurdles for precision formation flying so we can bring our virtual airshow circuit to Xplane 11. and get off of the restrictive platform we currently use. Best wishes to you guys.. Keep up the good work!

    1. Dual GPU VR isn’t a priority for us right now – basically it requires coding dev time like all other performance improvements, but it has a pretty bad “payout” for our users on average because it requires _two_ GPUs. Given that two small GPUs is only useful compared to one big one for VR and other specialized apps, users are better off spending their budget on a single bigger GPU, which means that the only users who will have dual GPUs are ones whose GPU budget exceeds the price of a single high-end enthusiast GPU. The Titan V is currently $3000 so supporting acceleration via 2 of them is going to hit only users who want to spend $6000 on GPUs.

      Our resources are better spent finding other ways to make VR faster, e.g. optimizing the rendering pipeline to require less GPU power.

      1. I think you misunderstand my question, with regards to the Titan V, that particular GPU is only available as a single card solution. SLI is not supported on a hardware level with that card. so, There is no possibility of using 2 of them. But I was referring to cheaper solutions such as dual GTX 10x series cards such as the 1070/1080/TI which I now own 2 of in my current rig. and is much more common GPU solution among PC enthusiasts and flight simulator users. The price of dual card solutions is significantly cheaper than a single Titan V. but that only becomes a viable purchase performance wise, If OpenGL SLI for VR is implemented. Otherwise, your original premise of purchasing the largest single card holds true. For most average users. This will be a 10x sseries in multi card configuration. And only this configuration of dual cards running OpenGL SLI for VR can reach and even greatly exceed the VR performance level of a single Titan V. which is the reason why I asked the question.

        1. Right – except we don’t need an entire GTX 1080 Ti per eye, and if we did, we could look at making our code less demanding on the GPU – that would be the dev time we spend.

          The headsets will grow more pixels and the GPUs will grow more powerful. Right now the GPUs are keeping up.

  54. VR6 we have working ASW, thanks guy
    PS I had to enable it (auto) in the oculus tray tool.
    Will test more later but it’s looking good

  55. AWS is working perfectly and it removed the “laggy” movement feeling I had since VR4 🙂 What a good week-end to come . . .

  56. Pingback: VR Support for Plugins is Here! | X-Plane Developer

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