2.7 Stable VR Clouds, what's going on ?

[Clogger]

Hi Guys,

 

I run stable and Open Beta. (I mainly play stable), posted here as this is not what I consider a VR bug really.

 

Just seen the news about 2.7 going stable and I am a little perplexed. The clouds in the current open Beta in VR while looking marginally better than initial release still have rendering issues, unlike them looking epic in 2D. (Rift S user at PD 1.5)

 

I got the update notification, so hoped over to the Beta to see if anything has changed and no it hasn't. What the heck is going on ?? I thought VR cloud optimizations were a priority before 2.7 getting a stable release ?? As far as I am aware (could be wrong) in open beta even after the latest patch clouds were still needing to be worked and were a priority. 

 

Am I missing some goldilocks setting here ?? Is the stable release literally a copy of the current Beta build or are the VR issues with clouds sorted in the stable release ?

 

I don't want to update my stable release if I am gonna see the clouds as they are in the Beta as there is no kind way to put it, they look plain bad the majority of the time. Very light scattered clouds look ok but any form of dense clouds, not good. Yes the jittering is gone but plenty of other issues I am seeing in the HMD while my screen mirror looks pretty amazing. 

 

Is this now considered a fix at a later stage by ED ? Or is this as good as it gets for VR 2.7 ? To be clear I have zero issues in 2.5 VR.

 

Edited June 12, 2021 by Clogger

[DD_Fenrir]

Did you delete the fxo and metashaders folders from your Saved Games\DCS folder?

Edited June 12, 2021 by DD_Fenrir

[Clogger]

18 minutes ago, DD_Fenrir said:

Did you delete the fxo and metashaders folders from your Saved Games\DCS folder?

 

 

Not for the latest Beta update, I skipped all beta updates since in the original 2.7 launch which was a fresh install.

 

With that being said have all cloud issues been fixed in VR then?? I have no prob doing some maint if needed or doing a complete fresh install of the beta. But I dont want to update the stable until I see what the clouds look like in Beta really.

 

Thanks for the help

Edited June 12, 2021 by Clogger

[FoxTwo]

The VR cloud jitter has been fixed.

 

Every other aspect of the clouds is still in development and subject to change.

[Clogger]

21 minutes ago, FoxTwo said:

The VR cloud jitter has been fixed.

 

Every other aspect of the clouds is still in development and subject to change.

 

If that is the case, pretty disappointing then that ED would push this to stable then considering this has a massive negative visual impact to the game in VR. 

Edited June 12, 2021 by Clogger

[Frag]

12 minutes ago, Clogger said:

 

If that is the case, pretty disappointing then that ED would push this to stable then considering this has a massive negative visual impact to the game in VR. 

 

 

Did not try 2.7 Stable in VR yet, but would the new skies looks WAY better than the old one anyway? (Even while considering the glitches). Maybe this is the reason why they decided to release these.

[FoxTwo]

26 minutes ago, Clogger said:

a massive negative visual impact to the game in VR. 

 

I think that's debatable compared to the non volumetric clouds we had in the game before that would rotate based on camera angle.

[Clogger]

To me I was under the impression this would not be pushed to stable until they were rendered correctly. Currently they are not for VR. IMHO this should not have even been a consideration to go stable until VR was fully sorted. 

 

I am lucky I suffer no adverse effects in VR, no motion sickness or eye strain, under normal circumstances I can game all day in VR.  With the 2.7 clouds after only a short while I have a head ache and eye strain as I am trying to focus on something that is basically out of focus (distance clouds and horizon seems to have a heat haze) So for me at least while it is nice not having the clouds rotate (agreed) for most situations the game is unplayable with the new clouds unless it is pretty much clear skies with wisps, Of course others mileage may vary.

 

I certainly don't want to be an angry Karen but sorry I can not help but be extremely disappointed with this move unless there is something drastically wrong my end and I am an outlier. 

 

[Eaglewings]

The cloud jittering in VR was very disorienting taking a lot away from good immersion in VR. Ed having fixed that in the last open beta batch was a big fix for me.
Clouds looks rich and fuller now beside the shimmering on the clouds at a distant.
The new cloud project will continually be a work in progress endeavor same as the whole dcs world project be it stable of openbeta
My take is that they based their premise for moving to stable on the significant reduction of the bugs causing crashes.


i5 7600k, GTX 1060 6g, 32g Ram, Samsung Odyssey plus VR, Andre's Jetseat, Warthog Joystick, TWS Throttle

[SundownSix]

The VR cloud quality is definitely still an issue. ED has still not confirmed whether the quality discrepancy between 2D and VR is a bug or an intentional design decision, or even if the team recognizes that it exists. The clouds still look like “LOW” quality clouds and have little of the definition of higher qualities, even on Ultra.

We’ve had multiple threads about it and ED reps have been asked directly over reddit, but there is still no confirmation or reply that ED recognizes the issue in VR. The only solid and relevant reply pertaining to this was one reply that said it will be mentioned to the team, after the detail/quality issue was getting conflated with the jitter issue.

Then there are multiple users themselves conflating the jitter fix and possible mild quality fix with the detail issue being addressed, when it simply hasn’t. VR cloud still significantly lack detail they have in 2D.

The only hint that it might or might not have been worked on are replies that the quality was improved, but it’s clear it is only marginally better if at all, and does not really address the huge disparity in detail between what Ultra looks like in 2D and VR.

The are still the soft blobs they looked like when 2.7 was released.

It’s be really good to get confirmation one way or another on whether this is intended or a bug— especially as they look very unlike the clouds as they were repeatedly showcased and advertised.

[Clogger]

16 hours ago, Eaglewings said:

The cloud jittering in VR was very disorienting taking a lot away from good immersion in VR. Ed having fixed that in the last open beta batch was a big fix for me.
Clouds looks rich and fuller now beside the shimmering on the clouds at a distant.
The new cloud project will continually be a work in progress endeavor same as the whole dcs world project be it stable of openbeta
My take is that they based their premise for moving to stable on the significant reduction of the bugs causing crashes.


i5 7600k, GTX 1060 6g, 32g Ram, Samsung Odyssey plus VR, Andre's Jetseat, Warthog Joystick, TWS Throttle
 

 

If the clouds are a work in progress then it should stay in Beta IMHO, that is what the beta is for. Yes the game will always be a work in progress but the big stuff shoud be done in the beta. The odd bug here and there making it to stable is no big deal with how much is going on in DCS. We also have to be realistic.

 

Come on if the they were shimmering or performing in 2D like they are in VR then I highly doubt they would even be in the Beta let alone be going to Stable as all that footage of the content creators pushed out in release would have looked bad. The saving grace for DCS VR is the capture footage is not what we see in the HMD as far as promotion/youtube/content creation goes. To be clear this is in ref to clouds only and not the general VR experience. 

 

I am gonna be real here, DCS VR is the best gaming experience I have ever had (I started on a ZX spectrum) but if you sat me in the cockpit now with the current clouds in VR It would be a hard pass as they look terrible for the most part, again this is my take and others mileage may vary. I am not trying to take away from what the devs have done, in 2D they look amazing.

 

I am Still trying not be an angry Karen , lol

Edited June 13, 2021 by Clogger

[Clogger]

Ok I am gonna take a wild stab in the dark as to why this has happened. The Hind is for 2.7 and above and is about to drop soon (I have pre-ordered) The dev team haven't managed to get clouds sorted in VR but have had to push the stable 2.7 release to launch the Hind.

 

If this is the case I understand the team is stretched thin but I honestly hope VR cloud optimisation is a priority and this aint dragged out. 

 

Edited June 12, 2021 by Clogger

[PicklePicklePickle]

I downloaded the first 2.7 open beta when it came out, and had to roll back to stable 2.5 due to the cloud jitter and even with the jitter the clouds only looked marginally better if at all.

 

When saw the 2.7 stable notice I installed it (yesterday) and was pretty blown away how great they look(i'm using the Index). Now, I run them at Ultra and have not tried the lower cloud settings, but I haven't noticed any gross issues with the clouds. At least in my VR setup, they are a huge, huge improvement. And it's not just the clouds themselves, I ran a winter mission and you get a way more realistic limited visibility range below the clouds, as you do in real life with snow fall.

 

Oh and performance was not as good at first until I rebuilt the shaders.

Edited June 12, 2021 by PicklePicklePickle

[SundownSix]

A lot of people post that the clouds now look great in VR, likely because they looked so bad when 2.7 dropped that our collectively standards were massively lowered.

Subjective judgments of looking “good”, or “great” since the jitter fix again just continues to muddy the issue. And since ED hasn’t really directly acknowledged the issue, this continues to give them false data points about whether the issue exists or remains.

Comparing directly with 2D and how much better they are supposed to look in screenshots and promotional material shows that the clouds in VR remain blobby and lacking detail in comparison, especially when close up.

[Clogger]

15 minutes ago, SundownSix said:

A lot of people post that the clouds now look great in VR, likely because they looked so bad when 2.7 dropped that our collectively standards were massively lowered.

Subjective judgments of looking “good”, or “great” since the jitter fix again just continues to muddy the issue. And since ED hasn’t really directly acknowledged the issue, this continues to give them false data points about whether the issue exists or remains.

Comparing directly with 2D and how much better they are supposed to look in screenshots and promotional material shows that the clouds in VR remain blobby and lacking detail in comparison, especially when close up.

 

It is a bit of a tricky one as like you say it can get a bit subjective. I was trying the instant action missions and it all depends on the type of cloud formations to how bad or good they can look. 

 

Hornet, instant action , free flight , Syria. To me it all looks bad. Massive shimmer and heat haze on the horizon and at distant clouds which causes me pretty bad eye strain.

 

Viper, instant action, landing, Caucasus. It looks ok 

 

To me anything with dense clouds or clouds around mountains etc.. look pretty bad i.e shimmer and what I would describe as heat haze. There is also the appearance for me that a lot of the clouds are not sitting correctly in the sky, especially the first layer (quite difficult to articulate).

 

If I lift up my HMD and look at screen mirror, the difference is stark. They do look epic.

 

I certainty don't think any of them look great in VR. 

 

Being realistic we all know the level of fidelity we get in VR is not going to match ultra on 1440p or 4K , but in general I am more than blown away daily in DCS VR.

 

55 minutes ago, PicklePicklePickle said:

I downloaded the first 2.7 open beta when it came out, and had to roll back to stable 2.5 due to the cloud jitter and even with the jitter the clouds only looked marginally better if at all.

 

When saw the 2.7 stable notice I installed it (yesterday) and was pretty blown away how great they look(i'm using the Index). Now, I run them at Ultra and have not tried the lower cloud settings, but I haven't noticed any gross issues with the clouds. At least in my VR setup, they are a huge, huge improvement. And it's not just the clouds themselves, I ran a winter mission and you get a way more realistic limited visibility range below the clouds, as you do in real life with snow fall.

 

Oh and performance was not as good at first until I rebuilt the shaders.

 

 

That's good to hear, thanks for sharing. 

[UncleZam]

16 hours ago, Clogger said:

If I lift up my HMD and look at screen mirror, the difference is stark. They do look epic.

 

Wait a second. It is the same picture showing in the VR and in the screen mirror. In this case it sounds like VR resolution or refresh rate is not up to your standards.

[Lange_666]

20 hours ago, Clogger said:

Ok I am gonna take a wild stab in the dark as to why this has happened. The Hind is for 2.7 and above and is about to drop soon (I have pre-ordered) The dev team haven't managed to get clouds sorted in VR but have had to push the stable 2.7 release to launch the Hind.

 

If this is the case I understand the team is stretched thin but I honestly hope VR cloud optimisation is a priority and this aint dragged out. 

 

 

 

Form BIGNEWY:

 

[Clogger]

1 hour ago, UncleZam said:

 

Wait a second. It is the same picture showing in the VR and in the screen mirror. In this case it sounds like VR resolution or refresh rate is not up to your standards.

 

No it is not the same picture, the only way you can see what the head set is actually displaying is by looking through a headset. I am happy with the res and FPS my HMD outputs.

[Burt]

If we can only run our HDM in 2d mode like them cats at MSFS do in a video posted last week it would be golden. But for now we just got to take what it gives us. My G2 looks great but yeah the cloud could look a hellavah lot better.

[SundownSix]

 
No it is not the same picture, the only way you can see what the head set is actually displaying is by looking through a headset. I am happy with the res and FPS my HMD outputs.

It is definitely the same picture. The mirror image is the frame buffer of one of the eyes copied and then resized onto the screen. It would be prohibitively expensive to re-render a VR mirror image in better quality.

The VR mirror might look better to you because of the filtering due to resizing or some other difference between display and HMD, or some combination of both.

[Clogger]

Ok so I updated to 2.7 stable earlier and had a play, while no means exhaustive thought I would share instead of only bitching lol

 

I stuck to instant action action missions and picked some that had denser cloud formations.

 

The clouds do take a little more horsepower to run so I lowered my PD from 1.5 to 1.4 (Rift S), this didn't seem to make any visual difference in the cockpit so a few extra frames got back for free I guess.

 

I messed with various settings graphic settings, kept them and then only changed cloud quality in each mission. 

 

Planes used Hornet, Viper and Tomcat.

 

Caucasus-Landing (Day time)-Viper, overall no mater what cloud setting used this mission did not look good, the whole Horizon had shimmer and haze, clouds did not look good at all.

 

Caucasus-free flight-Tomcat- setting clouds to ultra reduced all shimmer , clouds looked good. Below ultra I started to see haze/shimmer

 

Syria-free flight-Hornet - This mission has some pretty dense cloud formations, setting clouds to ultra reduced all shimmer and started to look pretty epic.

 

The Ultra setting is expensive in terms of performance though for me, on the lower cloud settings the FPS was significantly higher like way higher. 

 

My take away, the clouds need some work (I am sure it is on the list), I guess it depends of the type of formation but for any of them to look good on my hardware they need to be on Ultra and some look iffy even on ultra, but on the Syria mission they did look good. 

On the lower settings I couldn't really see an disenable difference between low-standard and high, it's only when setting to Ultra that things start looking a lot better. The lower 3 settings are unusable for me. 

Clouds do lack slightly less detail compared to the on screen mirror , In ref to the above this is my only real time visual gauge, and rendering in a HMD is off course going to look better in more powerful head sets like the G2 I assume.

 

The issue I can see for myself at least is for Helos (which I fly a lot), you are closer to the ground and FPS is lower, admittedly you aint cloud surfing in a Helo but having more FPS drains in the background isn't ideal.  Yes you can make missions with very light clouds or clear skies which I will do for learning the Hind but I don't particularly want to have copy missions to lower the cloud density or mess with campaigns. 

 

I think it would be nice to have Ultra clouds not be so expensive in terms of performance and also the lower end cloud settings become useable with out the haze and visual distortion, if not for those on lower end hardware this may fast make the game run like a pig in VR. I think I am on the limits now with a 1080ti + 8700k, ideally I would not run the clouds at ultra, no different to lowering other settings I guess. Hardware upgrades at the moment are not exactly easy with the pricing out there !! yikes lol

 

If there is VR feedback from others that would great, especially those with more technical know how within DCS. I am sure it all helps make a better product.

 

 

Edited June 14, 2021 by Clogger

[AlpineGTA]

I think my experience is similar to yours. Basically, to sum up briefly, the clouds look their best on Ultra but there's a definite performance hit. If I set clouds at anything below Ultra I notice a horrible pixilation at the horizon when flying above or between layers. The lower the setting, the closer and worse the pixilation looks. I'm running clouds set to Normal for the best compromise between visual quality and performance.

[Baz000]

For me the clouds in VR look pixelated on the edges on clouds far away, at higher altitude above the cloud ceiling this is drastically less pronounced. And the definition and contrast and overall quality of the clouds looks absolutely nothing like how epic they look in 2D, even when set to ultra.

 

The one really good thing recently is the cloud warping and jittering is drastically reduced to almost zero. I still notice some strange cloud movement but it is really only noticeable on clouds far away. This has been my observations in VR with HP Reverb G2.

Edited June 16, 2021 by Baz000

[Bootcher]

The clouds in 2.7 VR have almost killed the game for me , I’m considering abandoning VR and going back to 2D. I cannot believe ED would release the clouds like this. VR for me was the only way to fly. Sadly looks like I might be heading back to flight simulator .

i7, 32GB, 2080Super, HP Reverb Pro, SSD.

[Svsmokey]

2 hours ago, Bootcher said:

The clouds in 2.7 VR have almost killed the game for me , I’m considering abandoning VR and going back to 2D. I cannot believe ED would release the clouds like this. VR for me was the only way to fly. Sadly looks like I might be heading back to flight simulator .

i7, 32GB, 2080Super, HP Reverb Pro, SSD.

You can always revert to an earlier version...