VR - Is it really going to be a success? Or, thanks Time for starting a discussion!

It wasn’t anything obvious I’m afraid. I took things down from max settings then put them all back up I think :/

Worth it in the end though.

Well for me, E:D blacks weren’t particularly black in the CV1 anyway… the S seems pretty close but it’s hard to tell. Which I guess is a good thing. But it’s been a little while since I played E:D in CV1.

It’s easier to tell how improved text legibility is, and how few god rays there are now! :)

There’s also none of that purple fringing you’d get around the edges of blacker objects.

Yeah, I’d have thought the reduction in god rays would far outweigh any issues with the black level.

…if there even are any issues. I don’t think E:D has good blacks.

In Death has this fairly high contrast score panel, and it’s really black in the S. Far blacker than E:D’s space:

My Rift S showed up yesterday so I was able to take it for a spin. Text is so much more legible. I can actually read my desktop while running virtual desktop. The cockpits in DCS and IL-2 are really clean and easy to read now. For some reason Valve has been crashing about every other time I run VR, but this is right after I installed the latest nvidia drivers, but I feel there is a correlation.

Overall I like the Rift S a lot better than my Vive. My one big complaint is that the FOV on the Rift S feels very small. I’ve always had good peripheral vision, and I’m getting a weird effect like I’m looking into a large tube. I didn’t have this on the Vive, but specs suggest there is very little difference in FOV between the two. From what I read Vive is 110, and Rift S is 105.

I have never played Lone Echo, and it was the first game I tried. I spent a solid 2 hours in that game before the controllers glitched, and stopped working. Hopefully these issues will be resolved since this is such a new piece of hardware.

IL-2! I can’t get enough of this damn game in VR.

You know, I hadn’t even considered the god rays! I’d trade almost anything for them being less pronounced.

As for the black quality, I only ask because lower-quality blacks is just something that I keep hearing in reference to the S and E:D is something that has a fair amount of it. :)

I ordered the Quest, so I’m going back and finishing a couple PSVR games I haven’t tried yet before I sell it - Moss and the Psychonauts VR game.

I’m honestly thinking of stopping playing moss on PSVR because the tracking from the camera is frustrating. I don’t recall this in other games like Astro Bot, but in Moss specifically everything is always wobbling around or swaying a bit.

Don’t know if this would help, but I had to uninstall/reinstall SteamVR to get the S to work there. Still shows up as a CV1 with 3 tracking cameras and displays the old controller models in your hands - but at least it works!

As @TurinTur said, I think a lot of that comes from people who hear ‘LCD’ and immediately assume the worst… it may be a little bit more washed out, but it also avoids that OLED black smear/purple fringing effect you get between area of high/low brightness.

I don’t know about that - IL-2 is an amazing experience in VR but it’s obviously tacked on and doesn’t take full advantage of the medium. There is no support for touch controls, and it forces you to use mouse/keys in the front end.

Other sims like Elite, DCS, Dirt Rally, Project Cars 1/2, all let you operate the entire game from a controller.

I think this was just people on the Internet looking for potential things to hate before the actual product is available. :)

The black is plenty black in the Rift S. Maybe a bit more really-really-dark-gray than the OG Rift because LCD is necessarily lit at least a little unlike OLED. But the increased clarity and the lack of god rays more than compensates for the slightly more illuminated background.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m trying this now - fingers crossed.

IL-2 has an optimized engine, and the WW2 combat subject matter translates great. I’d stand by my statement with the amendment “Few if any flying games take advantage of VR as well, and flying games are great in VR” IL-2 sucks balls if you want to paint on a virtual canvas :)

Except if that canvas is the skin of a Fokker D VII’s wing and you are painting it with your Lewis gun.

So amend it, @Anklebiter, Il2 BoX rocks for painting virtual canvas!

This simple hack really helps the cable feel much lighter, especially when playing standing up. It does get in the way of the tightening knob a bit though.

For the Rift cable I just pulled a bight of the cable and stuffed it in my pocket (or belt, or waistband) so there was a little slack between there and the headset there’d be no downward tension. If the S cable that much heavier?

Right. Precision is a virtue so let me amend my amendment.

I will support the statement. “Few if any flying games take advantage of VR as well, and flying games are great in VR. In addition to flying, IL-2 may be good for virtual kinetic art and a variety of other activities which may or may not be covered in this or preceding statements.”

It does feel a fair bit heavier, yeah. You solution sounds like it would work too - assuming one is wearing pants. ;)

For those folks who just picked up lL-2 Sturmovik and are enjoying it, what controls are you using?

Thrustmaster warthog stick mounted on a foot of sewage pipe. Saitek pedals on the floor. Warthog throttle unit on an ikea kitchen step at my left side. When I put on the rift, I’m in the cockpit.

Lol, you’re the one guy I wasn’t asking. Fun link, though.

I continue to struggle to understand how to be a casual or intermediate fan of this genre. I played and loved Strike Commander and Aces of the Pacific (among others) way back when. Now I want to get into some flight sims in VR but I don’t have a joystick anymore. (RIP to my dear Flightstick Pro. Played Doom with that thing until I had a callous on my finger.) Maybe I should just invest in a mid-level joystick? I’m at a loss with this genre and have been for well over a year.

P.S. I’ve got the new Vive controllers on pre-order. Those might work nicely in a simulated cockpit.

Ok I get it :D try the thrustmaster 16000m model. It has the same guts as the warthog, so you get that 16bit precision you need to shoot the swastikas off of those nazi bastards.

Il2 does not work with VR controllers AFAIK, but there’s a couple flight sims/games that do, and it’s said to work really well. Try VTOL VR for shooty bang bang sim action:

and this if you find yourself ogling the clouds and landscape more and find the fokkers more of an annoyance than fun.

This is the stick I talked about. You don’t need to buy an entire set because it may be too nerdy to get all that, just the stick should get you going.

Be sure to bind a button for VR zoom and another one, perhaps on the base to VR recenter.