Now that I’ve wiped the PC drive, reinstalled Windows 10, and upgraded to 64G RAM, I wanted to begin testing the new PC environment with VR. I’d also been reading about two add-ins for X-Plane 11: Traffic Global from Just Flight (payware), and the extended night lighting scenery download from the .ORG (donationware)
, and was eager to test them out. Finally, I’d read about some new configuration settings for Oculus Mirror (which I use to stream VR sessions from the Rift S) that apparently create a mirror more representative of what I see in the headset , and less likely to promote motion sickness for those watching, and wanted to test those settings out, too.So, last night after the kids were in bed, I decided it was testing time. I loaded up the VFlyte SR-20 at KTPA (my custom airport model), activated Traffic Global, and went for a spin. There is a video below
, including a random simulator crash at the very end. Not sure what caused it, but it was an X-Plane crash as the PC kept running. Regardless, early impressions are that my VR performance is better — higher frame rates generally, and smoother performance especially using Asynchronous Spacewarp. My impression of Traffic Global is that I’m very impressed. Great injection of real-world traffic , great models and animation, and no real frame-rate hit that I can see. My impression of the extended night lighting scenery is WOW! Beautiful, with lights all the way to the horizon, and again, little to no frame-rate impact that I can see — although I’ll do more testing to get a better sense of that. The image up top is a screen grab of what it produces, and again, here’s a video.Oh, one final thing: for this video I just used the default Oculus Rift S headset and mic rather than my aviation headset. I think it worked really well, even if it doesn’t sound like an aviation headset. It’s certainly more comfortable.