Posts by whitav8

    IPACS Support,
    Thanks for the feedback and I am glad you are already using bump maps on the aircraft - some more emphatic than others I suppose (the tire squeal marks on the runways are a little underdone maybe) - so it's great that the ability to have them is there for sure. Yes, it would be nice to have a little more bump map definition on the aerial images but at least they are quite sharp - they look better than 1 meter - maybe 0.5 or even 0.25? Thanks again!

    Dave

    Aerofly FS2 has some of the most realistic imagery and appearance for any flight simulator - especially in VR (as well as smooth performance!!!). There is one concept that I haven't noticed being used yet that I have seen in War Thunder that really adds to the looks of some textures on roads/taxiways/runways/terrains - bump mapping. It also helps with the rivets on the plane's wings. I like to fly low above the ground (please add a heli soon!) and bump mapping helps make areas really look great.

    Thanks for such a wonderful flying experience!

    Dave
    P.S. Could you provide some palm trees for Southern California

    @OP,
    Make sure you look through the topic on this forum about exponential control. Jan provides some great detail on how to edit the tmd file for any given aircraft so as to make the control sensitivity just what suits you best. Our joysticks do not have the same physical feel as the real aircraft and so we have to adjust.

    Dave

    Jan,
    Thanks again for the exponential settings tutorial. I did apply them (0.2 to 0.3 P3/P1 changes) to the Extra 330 and that made it feel much better for me to be able to fly smoothly. I can tell from flying the f-18 that my joystick is functioning well but the Extra has amazing responsiveness and I needed to settle it down near center stick. Anyway, your help made a great difference and it it is really nice to be able to customize it.

    Dave

    Jan,
    Thanks much for the time you took laying this out for all of us! I did look through the extra330.tmd and found this entry for the ServoLeftAileron:
    <[string8][object][servoclassic]
    <[string8][Name][ServoLeftAileron]>
    <[string8][Input][AileronTrimmed.Output]>
    <[float64][Speed][20.0]>
    <[float64][P0][0.004]>
    <[float64][P1][0.4736]>
    <[float64][P2][0.0]>
    <[float64][P3][0.05]>
    <[float64][Position][0.0]>
    >
    I will try the change value that you gave for an example (0.15) - so P3 becomes 0.20 and P1 becomes 0.3236. I assume that the value for input is scaled from -1 to 1.0. I tried plotting the function and it looks like I need to try at least 0.3 changes so I get about half the movement in the early going.

    Thanks much for the details!

    Dave

    I made some measurements that might be a little helpful - and that is for the Render Scale Factor additional performance times. I set the Renderscale to 1.0 and then increased the performance load (used the 747 at KSFO on 1L with ULTRA) until the FPS was just right at my sync rate (DK2 75fps). Then I started increasing RenderScale and measuring the drop in FPS. Finally I calculated what that meant in frame period and the delta - here are the results for my Nvidia 970 at 1405Mhz. Here are the results:
    RenderScale fps period delta(milliseconds)
    1__________75___13.3____0
    1.25________71__14.0____0.75
    1.4_________63__15.8____2.53
    1.5_________60__16.6____3.33 <<This is where I like to run for clarity/performance
    1.75________42__23.8____7.14
    2___________37__27.0___13.69

    For you with CV1, this means that you have an 11 msec budget (1/90) and using 3.33 for the Render Scale is a big chunk but perhaps with a 1080, that is reduced considerably. If you test with the nonVR mode that you are seeing maybe 250 fps with your settings, that implies that you are using roughly 4 msec per eye so with VR, you get a total of 4 + 4 + 3.33 = 11 which is right at the budget. This is simplifying things since your CPU/GPU is different and there are probably more pieces of computing, but this gives you a way to think about getting a smooth flight sim. At least with Aerofly FS2 we have a chance even without ATW/ASW of getting a really smooth, fluid flying experience. We can adjust the graphic settings, aircraft, and location first in nonVR mode to get to the 250fps target and then adjust Render Scale to stay under the 90fps budget.

    IPACS Support,
    I really appreciate your response to my question! As far as the 75fps, it is the Vsync for my DK2 - not CV1. I have 6 i7 cores running at 4.2 Ghz and an Nvidia 970@1450Mhz

    It appears that the trender time really can't easily be used to measure how many milliseconds the CPU/GPU is taking for each eye. I also would like to know how many milliseconds the Render Scaling takes. Is there any chance you have variables that might be better printed out than trender?

    I will try Other VR instead of SteamVR (is there a way to set that up - maybe with options to the shortcut to the bin64/aerofly_fs_2.exe - instead of using steam to start it?)

    This performance question just started after I loaded everything recently including the HIRES imagery which is really great. I noticed other forum topics asking if something was introduced in the Sep16th release that perhaps has slowed down performance. That lead me to trying to test things carefully. The immersion experience that Aerofly FS2 provides when the FPS is synced at 75fps (in my case) is so much better than DCS World and FSX/P3D. Flying is silky then and much better than with ATW/ASW attempts to improve it. Please, as you add functionality (AI,ATC,weather,traffic,etc...) try to use other cores so as not to slow down your wonderful 64-bit OpenGL performance!!

    Thanks for a great start on a tremendous flight sim

    Dave

    Using the information provided from the Cntrl+F1 option printout in the lower lefthand corner, I wanted to compare VR versus nonVR to see if the Devs think that these results are expected. I picked an area north of Santa Barbara with the Learjet at 6700 feet or so just doing a gentle turn sitting in the right hand FO seat. Not completely Ultra settings but almost and a Pixel density override (render scaling) of 1.5. Vsync was OFF for the nonVR with a monitor resolution of 1920x1080.

    NonVR VR
    tsync = .2 tsync = .26
    tcompute = .23 tcompute = .57
    trender= 2.96 trender = 12.51 <<< seems high but maybe that is what you get when Vsynced to 75fps
    fps = 254 fps = 74.92

    I also had the Performance HUD on/off from the Oculus Debug Tool and saw that the performance headroom when looking sideways (away from the instrument panel) was about 6% but when looking at the panel was 0% or maybe -2% - therefore there is a very small margin for keeping my DK2@75fps happy with no stutter. (Is ATW implemented? )

    I realize that I can turn down some of the settings to get more margin - that isn't my question. I just wonder if the Devs think that the render time which I would expect to be double for stereo plus a little more is correct - but maybe trender is just not "correct" when you sync to the Rift framerate - but when I synced the nonVR to 120fps (8.33 msec period), the trender is still the same (2.8+-)

    My concern is simply wanting to have the same "outrageously" fast performance in VR as I get with nonVR - except for the factor of 2 eyes plus some other processing due to "supersampling" and whatever. I tried setting supersampling to 1.0 and trender still stayed at 12.5 or so. BTW, where is MSAA, FXAA, Aniso set? Also, with SteamVR, are the VRcompositor process and VRDashboard process part of the performance issue? I don't think there is a way to run in VR mode without Steam.

    Thanks for a tremendous flight sim - especially for VR!!

    Dave

    @IPACS and others,
    Thanks much for the great responses to my request for exponential. Mainly my issue with a fairly decent joystick - the Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas X - is that is is difficult to get small control movements. There is a fixed mechanical deadzone in the stick itself and then the control movement starts so it is hard to feel the center position and then apply a small control. Exponential might help. I liked your comment "We could instead publish simple instructions on how to tweak each airplane to have different behaviour for people who need this. It can already be done by manually editing the TMD file." Yes, I would appreciate some basic comments with a simple example about this. It seems that the TMD file could really provide some amazing capabilities for aircraft customization - it appears to be a complete aerodynamic/primary controls/system config file with lots of math capabilities.