Many thanks Jayne it is good to know that feedback is being seen, I was also a bit worried as there have been no comments on VR in dev streams or roadmaps for several months.
I disagree with some of the comments saying that MSFS VR is too difficult to set up, too long to start a flight, or requires another 1-2 generations of GPU development. You can have an excellent flying experience (far in excess of 2d!) in steam gauge aircraft with relatively common and affordable hardware (eg 2070, Quest 2 or old Rift S) by utilising Render Scaling and/or DLSS. As the prices of this base level of hardware continue to fall, I can only see more simmers making the switch to VR. I do run airliners with my 3090 and Quest 2, although it is just on the boundary of acceptable performance + glass cockpit legibility.
I completely agree with all of wheeliemonta’s post above in that VR is breathtaking now, but urgently requires some relatively simple bugfixes which would be immediately apparent to any tester who tried to make a complete flight in VR - and especially using VR controllers. I don’t think it should be considered as a large commitment of developer time - it feels like 95% of the VR work is done, but that final 5% would make a 50% difference to user experience!
If the team does look at this thread my immediate suggestions on VR controllers are:
- Allow tilt control on yoke/stick such as in other sims like VTOL or XPlane, there is a wishlist topic for this. This gives MUCH better control, comfort and removes catastrophic tracking loss when you turn your head to look out the window. It is unusable in current form - and therefore to use VR controllers at all, you also need a hardware yoke/stick which then negates the purpose of VR controllers (seamless 3d immersion) as you will need to fumble blindly between different devices.
VR controllers: please let us tilt the controller to move/tilt the joystick - Make the throttles on multi engine aircraft move together when grabbed with VR controller, by default for all aircraft. This was added as a fix in SU8 (I believe), but it does not seem to be applied to all aircraft by default, meaning most third party aircraft including most of the new official aircraft that came with the 40th anniversary update (eg A310) do not have it, and it is therefore impossible to safely take off or land in these aircraft. Additionally, don’t make the throttle jump to an extreme position on tracking loss. “Last tracked position” would be best, but even just going to 50% throttle would be better than 0%.
- Allow both controllers to be active at the same time
- It would be good to have more consistency on cockpit interactions. Some switches require “primary cockpit interaction”, others require “cockpit interaction increase” bindings, some need to be grabbed and physically moved with the controller. However I have found most instruments generally useable with some trial and error of the different inputs, and I imagine it could be time consuming to fix all aircraft. So I put this as lower priority than the other suggestions above.
Other things I don’t think have been mentioned on this thread-
- Glitching horizon, I got an alert this bug thread was closed yesterday with the message “resolved in SU12”, however I just tested and it is still the same for me
Jumping grey walled border/artifacts on horizon in VR - Objects (especially airport objects like windsock, carts etc) disappearing and reappearing at close range on head rotation. There was a bug thread for this although I can’t find it now, I can provide examples if needed.
Thanks and looking forward to improvements and more VR flying !