I like to fly water planes and when youre sitting on water near the shore and look at the shoreline, the reflection of the trees/buildings on the water isnt consistent and it drastically changes when you move your headset around. On 2d screen, it’s perfect and clear. In VR, there’s some strange artifacts and changes that occur when you aren’t in motion, but are simply moving your headset. It ruins immersion. The reflection of a building could cut in half when you simply look slightly up and vice versa. Something is wrong.
I haven’t tried this yet, but what would happen if you stuck your head outside the window? Would you still have the phenomenon, or is it related to the window reflection as I suspect?
Setting shadows to ultra did improve it. However, the issue still occurs when one of your eyes is blocked by some part of the plane (struts or w/e), and there are gaps where the shadows are supposed to render but do not. So there are shadows missing on one side of the eye, which creates those weird effects. The shadows do not render properly when one eye is partially obscured. That’s the issue.
It’s as if the internal part of the plane is casting a negative shadow on the water. Which makes sense that you don’t want to render a shadow behind the obstruction, but the obstruction is not calculated properly.
The fact that xbox release was priority over VR controllers tells me a lot about microsoft’s priorities and motivation. To me, it looks like the priority was always to create a mediocre sim for the mass market, so that 15 year olds who still use Xbox can purchase flight sim in the microsoft store. In other words, flight simulator X 2.0. A flight simulator that kids play who are not interested in learning the systems or having realistic physics. If you are interested in learning the systems or having realistic physics, and have realistic control of the plane, you will not be playing it on an xbox. You will be using HOTAS or even more preferably, VR controllers.
With VR controllers, I can hold the yoke, adjust throttle, adjust autopilot settings, pull gear lever up, manage lights, radio coms, input squawk, reach over and press GPS buttons, adjust barometric pressure, the kind of manipulation that cannot be achieved by any other controls in the same efficiency. Using a mouse inside cockpit is ANCIENT. I am still trying to understand what asobo meant when they said they will do VR “right”. They postponed VR for a year to do it right. What was done right? All they did was what I predicted what they would do. They crammed VR into the sim as an afterthought by one dude who coded it overnight.
I’m looking forward to Xplane 12. If Xplane can achieve half the visuals of MSFS then the choice is obvious. Especially with forum moderators hiding any criticism of god emperor microsoft, it’s becoming clear what’s happening here. Microsoft is not a tiny company suffering from lack of resources and inability. They’re a 2 trillion dollar company. That’s bigger than most countries.
This is because ray tracing isn’t available yet, so reflections are done in screen space (this means they render the scene, then take that data – I think actually from the previous frame because you can see when switching views that the first frame doesn’t have some visual effects like reflection – and use the rendered color and depth buffers to use as a source to draw from when calculating reflections on the new frame).
Anything that would be reflected, but is obscured by something in the rendered view cannot be reflected because it’s not available in the rendered frame to pull from. (Except for clouds, which are separately reflected but at a much lower resolution.)
It’s been the same since the sim was released in August 2020.
There seems to be another issue now which is that there’s some “shimmering” as well, which started with SU5.
For those who have issues in VR, the thing that helped me was to make sure that you have the latest NVidia driver, as well as the latest beta driver for Oculus (if you’re on a Rift S). It’s the smoothest it’s ever been for me now, and exactly what I hoped for!
The reflections do look like garbage now, true. I guess they’ll only be truly fixed once they render them using raytracing in DX12. They’ve always been weird whenever something blocks part of a reflection.