WOFF is just fantastic. He is not wrong though, boy for a playable WW2 or WW1 flight sim that uses modern graphics capabilities. Drool.
FYI, WOFF is on sale again if yāall missed it last time!
If I own the original, looks like I need to repurchase completely to get the UE?
Ayup, they had a discount for previous owners, but that was when UE first came out.
DCS Normandy has a release date: late May. Obviously, I donāt expect them to actually hit that date, but at least it exists now.
In other news, Leatherneck Simulations, the team behind the MiG-21 and Viggen, has split into two separate teams: Magnitude 3, which retains the Leatherneck trademark, the MiG-21, and the in-progress F4U Corsair project, and Heatblur, which keeps the Viggen and the in-progress F-14.
So thanks to @scharmers grousing about how Iāve never played it on my podcast a couple of days ago, a copy of Secret Weapons of Normandy is on the way from ebay. Really excited to try it out. :)
Itās a lot of fun. Thereās a bunch of naysayers, who I think were expecting a continuation of the design of the old SWOTL, but in terms of pure cinematic flying around, itās great.
I love pure cinematic flying around!
Wow, youāre totally right! I got it last night and it took FOREVER to install (four disks, who does that?). Once I got playing though, wow thatās fun stuff. Did the tutorials and the first mission, and wow, more complex than I expected, but in a fun way. Canāt wait to play more and unlock all the goodies.
Stuff in SWON is usually straightforward, but thereās definitely times when you get that happy situational awareness overload, just like in XW/TF. Totally Games was awesome at their best.
Sigh, they totally were. Gah, this was their last good game wasnāt it?
Il-2: Battle of Stalingrad has received VR Support! Iāve tried it and itās really amazing.
Flight sims in VR give me a new sense of āscaleā that I didnāt realize was missing from 2d flight simming. I really feel the world around me and how far away things are, and being able to simply follow a plane with your head as it flies around you is amazing.
On the downside, when youāre trying to check your six you canāt really see that far behind you without twisting your whole body or swiveling your chair, which is difficult when youāre playing with foot pedals. Aces High III has dealt with this with snap views working in VR. I donāt think snap views work in VR with IL-2, though there is apparently a workaround (hit your view center key while your head is turned all the way to the side and you see out the back of your plane).
I have a new computer I just got - a 7700k intel processor and GTX 1060. I set to allow quality degradation to keep 90 fps, which activates until I hit the āHā key to hide the hud and then the game is smooth with nice graphics.
So VR headset tracking canāt be scaled like TrackIR so that you donāt have to physically look 180 degrees behind you to check 6 all the time? That would get pretty tiring if head movement is stuck at one-to-one tracking especially if youāre doing a lot of dog fighting.
BTW, whatās it like doing aerobatics with a VR set on? Iāve read that thereās an innate tendency of not wanting to do crazy stuff like fly inverted under a bridge because the realistic sensation of being in the cockpit you donāt want to risk getting yourself killed.
If you scale VR so itās not 1 to 1 it will make you sick. So yeah, that is a problem for VR flight simming especially because you donāt get a full field of view in your periphery vision.
The first time I flew my plane into the ground in VR it scared the shit out of me. But after a dozen or so times itās not as physically scary as it was, but it still feels a bit unpleasant. :) I have read about a guy who always closes his eyes when heās about to crash, though. So I guess it varies per person.
I think Aces High III does it perfectly though, snap views + VR are the way to go imo.
You also donāt want the game switching / snapping views away from where your head is in VR. Doing something different from what you are physically doing in VR is a formula for nausea for most people.
Sigh, there goes my weekend :)
But, to be honest, itās that way in real flying. I understand what youāre saying, I have a TrackIR, but donāt have VR yet. I know as gamers weāve kind of cheated through that with gaming RE: camera views and whatnot. Flipping a tophat to check your six is 100% easier than what it would have been historically and honestly should be in-game.
Iām always reminded of cockpit videos where you see pilots straining to see as far back behind them as possible, as well as checking rear view mirrors in jets, etc. Weāre spoiled playing air sims, to be honest. Nice to hear the view center key trick, though.
How is VR on view scaling for distance? Is there any mismatch of head tracking to direction within the game, either temporarily or over time (i.e. does it get skewed sometimes?)
VR is slightly limited due to a lower field of view and loss of peripheral vision though (not sure how it compares to combat pilot helmet!). This, and the optics, also limit how much you can rely on moving your eyes while keeping your head stationary, so you tend to move your whole head around a bit more than perhaps you would in reality.
Not really, in my experience - itās solid on Rift. Thereās a āreset viewā function, but Iāve found this is generally used at the start of a session to āsetā your position, and also again whenever you remove/wear/adjust the headset during play.
Iāve yet to try VR. But this has me really excited for the possibilities.
Me too! I so desperately want to try my hand at VR software but Iām not ready to shell out for version 1.0 of the hardware.