Please Help a New Guy to Get Flying!

After 18 months of occasional frustration and long periods of nothing trying to get an ancient joystick to work (not Windows 10 compatible...) I finally got a new VKB Gunfighter Pro and now have all controls setup and working. Yipeeeeeeee

Now all I need to do is figure out how to get my oculus rift working and program all functions to my joystick, throttle and other controllers and then start learning to fly this thing.

Any help anyone can provide on this is HUGELY appreciated!

Here are some things that have me stumped right now, gotta get this stuff figured out.

1. When using the rift, how can I get the game to display on my TV monitor in full screen as if I was not in the rift. Currently, the game is in a boxed window and all the rift motions effect the view so that when I want to look at a menu and make changes it is very difficult. Basically I have to try and make changers from inside the rift and using the keyboard then is very hard. I would prefer to set the rift aside and use the regular monitor. I have a cockpit I built, it is on casters so I roll it in from of my wall mounted 65" 4K display and would prefer using that for making setup changes and such but cannot figure how to make it do this. For example in Project Cars I can just set the rift aside and use the in game menus like normal no sweat on the big screen. How can I do that in DCS?

2. VR Mouse lock ? What is that, how does it work and where do I find it in controls?

3. I have played around with VR settings and adjusted the pixel density to 1.5 and even 2 but it does not seem to make any difference at all in game? It seems that none of the visual changes I try have any effect on the in game look at all? Does it matter what screen resolution I choose? Will it slow down rift performance if I have 4K enabled on the big screen or should I do a lower resolution on the big screen?

4. Oculus Tray Tool -- what is that, where can I download the latest version and does anyone know of a basic guide or tutorial to help with that?

5. This one is a biggie.... When I am sitting the plane playing with controls and I want to access the controls menu, I hit the escape key and choose Controls from the menu - this opens the controls UI. When I am done making changes and I want to go back to the plane and try them out this proves impossible. I click the "OK" button at the bottom of the screen but it does nothing. There is no way to get out of the controls menu UI, I am stuck. Ok does not work - Cancel does not work, the little X button at the top right does not work. I have to exit to window and close DCS by right clicking the tool bar icon to close the program and reopen it.

Also maybe related.... when I first launch the plane, NO controls work at all. Nothing - nada - no controls at all. After I click on stuff and hit escape to access the menu (but not go into the controls menu or there is no way out as per above) and then go back in the plane the controls will suddently start working. Very strange.

6. When I am in the plane and I want to exit out to the main game menu, there is no way to do this either. I hit escape that opens the menu, I choose exit and that takes me to a debriefing screen. It is impossible to leave this screen. Clicking "close" does nothing. The only way to get away from the debriefing screen is to take the rift off and use the mouse to right click the DCS icon in the tool bar and tell it to close and then relaunch the game from scratch. Frustrating.

7. How can I get sound in the oculus headphones? The rift display works but no sound and no luck trying to find any adjustment for this in game. Is it possible to have the headphones AND the main speakers both work? In project cars this is impossible and that sucks.

Thanks again for the help, no way I could get this all figured out on my own!

Fangio

PS - any old Warbirds or Air Warrior guys around here? I was HUGE into online flights sims 20 years ago or so... remember paying $4 per hour and having $400 monthly bills in Warbirds!

Hi mate. Here are the answers your after however pop on our Teamspeak later this evening and we will happily help you out.

1. press left alt and enter

2. puts a dot in the middle of the view and thats your mouse pointer :)

3. no the resolution is already selected for you - PD is great but most like 1.4 (keeps fps loss to a min)

4. dont worry you will not need this for dcs

5. the left alt and enter will fix this

6. again the left alt and enter should sort this out for you

7. i dont believe you can run both but i might be wrong. however the settings will be within windows, click the home button and type sound - then click on sound - under playback select the rift as primary device and your good to go

Come and say hello to our group, we are a public community which are here to help anyone at anytime. :)

Our Teamspeak is 85.236.100.125:11517

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1. I just rest my Vive on my ICP housing (F-16 Pit). and the view is centered enough for me to work the main menu while looking at the screen (setting up controls and whatever).

2. mouse lock? or "use mouse"? one just keeps the cursor contained withing the game window. the other dockes the cursor to the middle of you view. and you can bind "right click" and "left click" to allow you to operate the cockpit without mouse (IIRC it's a Rift SDK "requirement"). without it the mouse works "as expected" within VR (IMHO, better for cramped pits, where you cant really put a specific switch in the center of your vision)

3. Pixel density does a lot. It will be noticeable in trying to read small text (like M2K radar or A10 Hud). it does affect performace, as you need to render higher pixel count frame and down size it. 1.5 is a good place to start, if you see no performance impact. congratulations, you can bump it up even more.

5&6 - sounds like you are missing a button. maybe on the right side of the menu (for controls) and on the left for exit debriefing.... I have none of those issues, menus are very straight forward.

4&7 - I can't help, I'm with Vive. but you will probably find some "sound mirroring" option in the Oculus tool to allow the sound to be sent via HDMI to the headset. (same as with any other oculus game.)

After 18 months of occasional frustration and long periods of nothing trying to get an ancient joystick to work (not Windows 10 compatible...) I finally got a new VKB Gunfighter Pro and now have all controls setup and working. Yipeeeeeeee

 

Now all I need to do is figure out how to get my oculus rift working and program all functions to my joystick, throttle and other controllers and then start learning to fly this thing.

 

Any help anyone can provide on this is HUGELY appreciated!

 

Here are some things that have me stumped right now, gotta get this stuff figured out.

 

1. When using the rift, how can I get the game to display on my TV monitor in full screen as if I was not in the rift. Currently, the game is in a boxed window and all the rift motions effect the view so that when I want to look at a menu and make changes it is very difficult. Basically I have to try and make changers from inside the rift and using the keyboard then is very hard. I would prefer to set the rift aside and use the regular monitor. I have a cockpit I built, it is on casters so I roll it in from of my wall mounted 65" 4K display and would prefer using that for making setup changes and such but cannot figure how to make it do this. For example in Project Cars I can just set the rift aside and use the in game menus like normal no sweat on the big screen. How can I do that in DCS?

For true full screen, press ALT+Enter. Even though you may have full screen selected in the GUI, it is not truly full screen. This will expand the view over the monitor fully. However, it is only the view of one eye ( left ) so there will still be some restrictions, you won't see everything on the monitor.

Best thing to do in this case, if you want to mess around in there on your monitor and have full access, use SkateZilla's DCS Updater GUI Utility.

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=160053

It is not only great for updating/cleaning/repairing DCS, you can also use it to launch DCS in Non-VR very easily. I use it all the time and love it.

2. VR Mouse lock ? What is that, how does it work and where do I find it in controls?

In the controller setup menu, click on the VR tab. Click on Use Mouse, and click on Cursor Confined to Game Window. Also note you can select some more options in the UI Layer. To get to it click on the module listing drop down and scroll down to UI Layer. Here you can set VR-Zoom and VR-Recenter to a button/buttons. Both are very handy to have. In there you can also assign a button to left mouse click, right mouse click, and mouse scroll wheel forward and backward. I use the left mouse click assigned to one of my buttons pretty regularly.

3. I have played around with VR settings and adjusted the pixel density to 1.5 and even 2 but it does not seem to make any difference at all in game? It seems that none of the visual changes I try have any effect on the in game look at all? Does it matter what screen resolution I choose? Will it slow down rift performance if I have 4K enabled on the big screen or should I do a lower resolution on the big screen?

It does make a difference, although may not be as obvious as you might expect. I find 1.5-1.6 about the max for good results, anything beyond to be diminishing returns for the performance hit. Also regarding your monitor, you should have it set to it's native resolution for best results. You can even set it lower, but I find it does not really give any noticeable improvement on performance. Resolution in the Rift is of course fixed and can not be adjusted. Currently in Normandy with 2.1.1, with the lower performance, I lowered mine to 1.3.

4. Oculus Tray Tool -- what is that, where can I download the latest version and does anyone know of a basic guide or tutorial to help with that?

Awesome tool. I use it to set power savings off for my Innatek USB 3.0 PCIe card, set max power on everything else, and set profiles per game for things like PD ( for games that do not have in game setting for PD), ASW settings ( I actually prefer DCS with ASW Off) , and audio switching ( makes Rift default audio when Oculus Home starts, returns to my default audio ( SoundBlaster for me) when exit Oculus Home. I have the Tray Tool set to launch at windows start up. Love it. It also has a user manual that comes with it that goes into some good detail.

You can get the latest version here:

https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/47247/oculus-traytool-supersampling-profiles-hmd-disconnect-fixes-hopefully/p1

5. This one is a biggie.... When I am sitting the plane playing with controls and I want to access the controls menu, I hit the escape key and choose Controls from the menu - this opens the controls UI. When I am done making changes and I want to go back to the plane and try them out this proves impossible. I click the "OK" button at the bottom of the screen but it does nothing. There is no way to get out of the controls menu UI, I am stuck. Ok does not work - Cancel does not work, the little X button at the top right does not work. I have to exit to window and close DCS by right clicking the tool bar icon to close the program and reopen it.

Likely because you are not in true full screen. Once you have DCS loaded, press ALT+Enter to enable true full screen. All buttons should then be available to you as expected.

Also maybe related.... when I first launch the plane, NO controls work at all. Nothing - nada - no controls at all. After I click on stuff and hit escape to access the menu (but not go into the controls menu or there is no way out as per above) and then go back in the plane the controls will suddently start working. Very strange.

That is very strange. Not sure I have seen that before, perhaps might be related to not being in true full screen I am not sure, see if true full screen helps this as well. If not, you might try a DCS Repair ( SkateZilla's utility makes that very easy).

6. When I am in the plane and I want to exit out to the main game menu, there is no way to do this either. I hit escape that opens the menu, I choose exit and that takes me to a debriefing screen. It is impossible to leave this screen. Clicking "close" does nothing. The only way to get away from the debriefing screen is to take the rift off and use the mouse to right click the DCS icon in the tool bar and tell it to close and then relaunch the game from scratch. Frustrating.

Again this one is probably related to not being it true full screen ( ALT=Enter). See if that fixes it.

7. How can I get sound in the oculus headphones? The rift display works but no sound and no luck trying to find any adjustment for this in game. Is it possible to have the headphones AND the main speakers both work? In project cars this is impossible and that sucks.

This one is easy. Any game ( that is not run from within Oculus Home), the audio will always default to your default sound device. Like in my case, my SoundBlaster Z soundcard.

Two things you can do :

1: Always change your sound device to Rift Audio before launching DCS. In Windows 10 mine has a sound icon on lower right of system tray, I can click it and it brings up a listing of my sound devices, I can select Rift Audio from there, and then voila all sound goes to the Rift Headhpones. But no sound on my speakers.

2: You can use the aforementioned Oculus Tray Tool and select the Audio Switcher option. From there you can choose Rift as your audio device when Oculus Home starts, and your default audio device when Oculus Home exits. Then you never have to worry about changing audio to the Rift before launching DCS. I would oftentimes forget, and go dang have to exit DCS, then change audio to Rift, the launch DCS again. If I had a nickel for every time I did that lol. And again, I have the Oculus Tray Tool set to launch upon start of Windows.

Also as I understand Oculus does now support audio mirroring, for playing sound in both, but I have not checked it out to try it so not sure how to go about using it.

Edit - did some searching sounds like you just at Oculus Home (desktop), go to Settings, Devices, click the Headset and select "Both (audio mirroring)" in Audio Output.

Hope this helps you, and welcome to the Rift Club! Great times ahead!!

Great info here guys. OP, thanks for the post, and to the contributors with your insight. very, very helpful!

Also as I understand Oculus does now support audio mirroring, for playing sound in both, but I have not checked it out to try it so not sure how to go about using it.

 

Edit - did some searching sounds like you just at Oculus Home (desktop), go to Settings, Devices, click the Headset and select "Both (audio mirroring)" in Audio Output.

Unfortunately Audio Mirroring with the Rift only works if you're launching apps using Oculus Home, and since DCS doesn't have a Native Oculus Store App, this isn't an option.

I've used VoiceMeeter Banana to accomplish this in the past so that I could output sound to a Bass Shaker and it works ok.

I was getting ready to help this guy.......then I saw all the answeres and explanations. What a great community this is. Tnese people helped me out so many times. Not only here but also on avsim forums. The flight and simulation community are a great bunch of smart, helpfull people!

THANK YOU to everyone for all the help! I went flying in the TF-51D for over an hour last night - 4 takeoffs and landing without a crash. Yipeeeeee! I pretty much have all my controls working now and most of the important stuff mapped to a controller. Flying in the rift is fun but checking 6 and low resolution seem like they will make online play a big disadvantage. We shall see.

I am just getting started on trying to optimize the graphics and get it to look as good as I can. Getting OTT now and will play with that as well as other settings.

Thanks again - awesome to get such great help!

THANK YOU to everyone for all the help! I went flying in the TF-51D for over an hour last night - 4 takeoffs and landing without a crash. Yipeeeeee! I pretty much have all my controls working now and most of the important stuff mapped to a controller. Flying in the rift is fun but checking 6 and low resolution seem like they will make online play a big disadvantage. We shall see.

 

I am just getting started on trying to optimize the graphics and get it to look as good as I can. Getting OTT now and will play with that as well as other settings.

 

Thanks again - awesome to get such great help!

:thumbup:

Fantastic, now you are in for many hours of fun.

Enjoy!!