Best Flight Simulator?

[gkarris]

has anyone experimented with flight simulators and VR headsets?

I tried one once at a flight fest at a local airport. The Civil Air Patrol had been donated an Oculus Rift and the youth used the MS Flight Sim X plug-in for it.

It was cool - you can just look around and fly, but I was flying a Trike with a stick and the controls were a yolk with the throttle in a different spot - you can't see the controls (unless you match them).

I believe a triple monitor solution is better...

 

[Huntn]

I tried one once at a flight fest at a local airport. The Civil Air Patrol had been donated an Oculus Rift and the youth used the MS Flight Sim X plug-in for it.

It was cool - you can just look around and fly, but I was flying a Trike with a stick and the controls were a yolk with the throttle in a different spot - you can't see the controls (unless you match them).

I believe a triple monitor solution is better...

The best advantage a VR dogfighter has is the ability to look over your shoulder, but control wise, manipulating controls, a mechanical joystick and throttle and ability to visually reference your notes, I believe would be better until they can institute equivalent virtual controls. The problem there you are not physically holding something like a joystick where you can actually feel buttons and have the motor memory to select them.

 

[garnerx]

Prepar3d v4 has a pretty good VR mode built in. In previous versions VR was a bit of an afterthought and you'd have to rely on third-party plug-ins to make it work, but for them to have made a native VR mode indicates that they see potential in it for flight sims.

I still prefer it in 2D mode though. Control issues aside, getting it up to a high enough framerate to work well in VR means turning down the graphics settings and disabling add-on scenery, airports, weather and so on. I've got something like 120GB of add-ons, which makes it look amazing on a normal monitor, less so at 20-30fps in VR.

It's definitely worth trying, you can save different graphics profiles for VR or standard, and disabling the add-ons isn't quite the chore it once was if you have mostly Orbx scenery. A vanilla P3D install with no add-ons can easily hit the 90fps target on a decent PC.

 

[conan321]

Best simulator for Mac is X-Plane