Helios vs Ikarus for touchscreen cockpit

Hi all,

I’m new to the forums (as a poster) but not to DCS. I’ve read a massive number of posts here on Helios and Ikarus, but would love to get users' opinions/suggestions on which one is better for my use case:

- I run DCS now on one 2560x1440 monitor (using TrackIR).

- I want to add a 1920x1080 touchscreen below the main monitor to a) better see instruments/MFDs, and b) interact directly with cockpit controls without using a mouse (e.g., push MFD buttons, flip toggle, turn rotaries via touchscreen).

- I fly UH-1, P-51D, F/A-18C, KA-50 and A-10C (so far all SP, not MP yet).

- I'd rather not have to make my own profiles from scratch, at least to start. And the less editing of .lua files, the better. (As it is, I seem to spend 5x as long preparing to fly DCS as actually flying).

- I also hope not to take a large performance hit (I’ve read that both Helios and Ikarus can hammer your CPU and cause double-digit frame drops). Currently I’m running on an i7-6700K at 4.3 Ghz, GTX1080 and 32GB RAM.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations and expertise!

One day I hope to figure out Ikarus. But the few times I tried it I couldn't figure out how To swap monitor much less how to resize a damn profile...

Never figured out how icarus works. Helios is working great in 2.5.6, it is updated and you can get totally awesome ready to use profiles for all the modules on captain zeen website. I have a 4 screens configuration with 3 touch screens. Happy with Helios for the last 8 years.

Thanks both! BaD CrC, do you notice a performance hit from Helios? I know that adding a screen will affect performance just from the GPU driving more pixels, but have you ever looked at CPU utilization when running Helios?

Thanks both! BaD CrC, do you notice a performance hit from Helios? I know that adding a screen will affect performance just from the GPU driving more pixels, but have you ever looked at CPU utilization when running Helios?

Hellios itself doesn't give a noticeble performance hit for me. But exporting DCS screens (MFDs etc ) Will have a noticeble one, that however should be acceptable on most systems.

Thanks both! BaD CrC, do you notice a performance hit from Helios? I know that adding a screen will affect performance just from the GPU driving more pixels, but have you ever looked at CPU utilization when running Helios?

There are three separate things going on:

1) extra viewports for those things that can't be accessed via the export.lua interface, such as radar screens, MFD contents, etc. These are rendered by DCS and it uses more power to render more of them. Helios has nothing to do with these, but pretty much every virtual cockpit that uses Helios also uses these to get the "live video" sort of stuff. Unfortunately, people call these "monitor exports" or "exported view ports" which is super confusing, because they don't use the export interface of DCS at all.

2) Helios runs as an export.lua plugin script executed by DCS. This script is very efficient and even if you somehow managed to create so many updates per second that it becomes a problem, you can configure it to just send updates less often. In reality, this is never needed.

3) Helios runs as a separate PC application, usually on the same computer as DCS, because that's where the extra viewports are rendered on the screen. Some adventurous types use extra software like Iris to send the extra viewports to another PC, then you can run Helios on another PC. But usually you don't have to care, because Helios is a separate process and any modern CPU has a bunch of idle cores that DCS doesn't use. So you will not notice any CPU impact what so ever. In the future, when DCS uses Vulkan to actually use all your cores, then Helios will be competing for them, but it isn't anything major and you will have more cores before that work ever gets done (sorry ED, that was a joke! kinda…)

source: I am a developer on Helios in the BlueFinBima fork.

Thanks derammo, that's extremely helpful! I've been wondering about the merits of running Helios on a separate computer, and it sounds like they are minimal at best.

(Now I just need to get my touchscreen working. I made the mistake of installing the firmware update for my brand new HP e230t, because it was only giving me limited touchscreen capability. Immediately my HID-compliant Touchscreen Device driver

disappeared from Device Manager, I lost all touch ability, and no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling the HP driver, deleting ghost drivers, cleaning my registry or even reverting to a Windows install state prior to connecting the cursed screen will bring it back. Weirdest thing I've seen on a PC in a long time. Just when I had Helios completely figured out too...)

Helios is just generating interactive 2D pictures requiring very little computing power. It wont slow down a PC. What you need is to really optimize the amount of pixels you want DCS to generate. When you create your viewports to output your displays, you need to consider the total surface of screen space you want to use for that (main outside view+cockpit displays) and make sure this total surface is kept to a minimum.

So what I hear you saying is that I am totally justified in upgrading to a 2080Ti even though DCS runs fine (and I'm sure will run fine even while creating viewports) on my 1080, right? Right?

Me tonight: "Honey, BaD CrC says I need a 2080Ti. I tried to reason with him but he insists. Looks like patching the roof is going to have to wait, but that leak is nothing a little duct tape won't cure..."

Lol. Well I don't know about the 2080Ti raw power for DCS , but the 11 Gb of VRAM is certainly well used with DCS. It's not maxed out, but pretty full.

I run my extra viewports on a separate graphics card. I just threw a GTX 960 or some such junk (he he) in there to run my extra screens (touch screens) and that's where i render the extra viewports. So yeah, the nvidia driver is pushing a large screen area, but not to my primary card that just renders the main 3D view.

Works fine with the exception that I run with vsync on and so my crappy 60Hz touchscreens are limiting everything to 60fps. That's fine for me, I never cared about more frames as long as it doesn't drop.

There is one comment up above that said you could get double digit frame drops with Helios or Ikarus. This sort of statement needs more context. Yes, if you are talking about dropping from 120fps to 105fps or something like that, then yes I could see that happening. Because if your export script is set to export every frame (instead of every so many milliseconds like Helios export script is) then you would in fact slow down significantly because your per-frame time slice is super short. So don't do it that way :). And if you are in an fps competition, then of course you wouldn't run a Lua script at all.

derammo, how do you get DCS to send the view ports through the second graphics card? Is it an edit to the monitor.lua? [ <---pretending to know what I'm talking about]

derammo, how do you get DCS to send the view ports through the second graphics card? Is it an edit to the monitor.lua? [ <---pretending to know what I'm talking about]

I don't think DCS knows jack about it :)

My windows desktop happens to span multiple Nvidia cards. Then I set DCS to a window size equal to my entire desktop and configure a viewport that is just the main screen (yes monitorsetup lua, standard stuff.)

I guess the Nvidia drivers are smart enough to realize the main 3D viewport is only on one card and so it renders on that card without involving the other one. This is pretty cool, because if the extra viewports were one big graphics context then it would not work. But it just happily cruises along, rendering the 3D view on the main card and all the rest of my desktop on the other card.

I do know the cards have to be using the same driver for this to work. So you can't use a different card family (like some Quadro you have lying around) or some old card that can't use current driver. That's why I went to my local discount parts place and bought the cheapest Geforce that worked with latest drivers that I use for my main.

There is one comment up above that said you could get double digit frame drops with Helios or Ikarus. This sort of statement needs more context. Yes, if you are talking about dropping from 120fps to 105fps or something like that, then yes I could see that happening. Because if your export script is set to export every frame (instead of every so many milliseconds like Helios export script is) then you would in fact slow down significantly because your per-frame time slice is super short. So don't do it that way :). And if you are in an fps competition, then of course you wouldn't run a Lua script at all.

I had just read about the frame drops elsewhere on this forum, purportedly associated with heavy CPU utilization (hence not related to the rendering of viewports but attributed by the poster to Helios). I'm relieved to hear it's a non-issue.

Take a look at my blog in my signature. IKARUS offers far more customization. You can build you own panels, buttons to create custom touch screen interfaces.

More specifically: https://guppy.home.blog/2019/07/19/intro-to-ikarus/

Take a look at my blog in my signature. IKARUS offers far more customization. You can build you own panels, buttons to create custom touch screen interfaces.

 

More specifically: https://guppy.home.blog/2019/07/19/intro-to-ikarus/

That's super interesting. As a Helios developer, I would love to know what you think Helios can't do in terms of customization. I mean you can use any images you want on the controls, so I am not sure what you think is not possible. If you know some specific limitations, please let me know so we can see about correcting it.

That's super interesting. As a Helios developer, I would love to know what you think Helios can't do in terms of customization. I mean you can use any images you want on the controls, so I am not sure what you think is not possible. If you know some specific limitations, please let me know so we can see about correcting it.

Perhaps that might be a question of intuitiveness... For the life of me I could not figure out how to build custom interfaces within Helios; not through the UI. I could move around panels, but in terms of creating something similar to what I did in IKARUS... it seemed impossible unless you were developing things behind the scences, in the code. And that might be the difference here.

Perhaps that might be a question of intuitiveness... For the life of me I could not figure out how to build custom interfaces within Helios; not through the UI. I could move around panels, but in terms of creating something similar to what I did in IKARUS... it seemed impossible unless you were developing things behind the scences, in the code. And that might be the difference here.

Helios could definitely use some more documentation and maybe some training videos. For example, to make "green outline only" buttons, you would choose a button (I used a Tactile Square here) and then paint your own images to use.

I'm no artist, so this looks like crap:

I had been a long time Helios user for many years. There is a learning curve! I also dabbled into IKARUS a couple of years back. As I recall, I seem to remember the attraction to IKARUS was the more high fidelity graphics compared to Helios. I admittedly struggled with getting IKARUS running. At the time, it was not as intuitive as Helios for me. I have not dabbled in either for close to 2 years. With DCS updates etc, I found that Helios needed frequent maintenance. I just gave up one day as I am not as sharp as some of the other members that use it. I was dabbling into VR, but that is not working out for me. I am going to go back into Helios I think. It is a great piece of software, and is greatly appreciated,, You just have to keep up with it.Its outstanding once you have it dialed in! Good luck

I struggled to get Ikarus implemented,,, jumping all over the globe to find pieces of broken instructions. There is alot of info out there to help fill in the info that you NEED to do a successful install ,you just have to find it. I wound up falling back on some Helios instructions, which turned into re-installing Helios again. Helios was much more intuitive, and I have it running!