Here’s fairly recent pics of my mass chaos system:
Aviation teacher and Flight Instructor
Here’s fairly recent pics of my mass chaos system:
@Micro_440th as a former Aviation Technical Writer (mostly turbine engine manuals) and a RL civilian pilot, I appreciate the realism that BMS has gone with having the -1 and -34. The problem is that a lot of people, especially those transitioning from DCS are used to things like the excellent Chuck’s Guides series, they see these manuals and go there and not understand how these were written is truly as reference material, not how tos, like RL.
Making the disclaimer better that the BMS Training manual and secondarily the Comms+Nav is truly where everyone should start to learn to fly and employ systems would help. It’s less graphical than Chuck’s Guides, but honestly has better info on how to actually use the systems. Truly the -34 and -1 are reference material these days to understand the things going on behind the scenes or why what you did with the Training manual/Comms+Nav manual worked the way it did.
With native VR support coming, I thought it was time to start this thread.
First, let me start with what PointCtrl is. It is a very clever finger tracking unit. Think of TrackIR thats camera mounts on the VR headset and you wear two active dots with buttons on your index fingers. These small active dots’ buttons quite intuitively allow you to click on things in the virtual cockpit. As a long time home cockpit builder, I can tell you this melds VR and virtual cockpits into an amazing symphony. You look around the cockpit and you put your finger on the switch where it looks to be in the headset and hit the clicky buttons to move the switches. Plus it works with any aircraft’s cockpit. I had planned to rebuild a more thorough home cockpit, but PointCtrl stopped me. I determined with it in VR all I needed was a basic button box for the switches/levers I needed to reach often without looking at them (like gear, Master Arm, etc.). It feels so natural to use the switches, knobs, and buttons in every VR cockpit you sit in (in DCS VR).
On the hardware integration side, the very clever thing about PointCtrl is that is works on mouse emulation. No software integration is required, unlike other hand tracking solutions. This 3d world into 2d mouse movement works shockingly well.
I’ve played with the current lots of issues BMS in VR work around of the Vorpx VR wrapper/virtual desktop. There are some big issues there with PointCtrl’s movement being very amplified almost like it is at a much higher tracking resolution/DPI than what is shown on screen, but I really hope that the native BMS VR support may fix these issues.
Another interesting feature Aux button panels that attach to the side of your VR headset and add 6 functions. Originally these were the QWERTY but now with a firmware update with the V2 hardware, these can be DX buttons and do show up in the Alternative Launcher.
Edit to add:
A couple of videos of how it works. The support boards aren’t needed but does give you a physical stop so you don’t feel like you are just hanging out your hand in space if you like and a way to steady your hand if you want:
@qawa please don’t stop! I think it’s a bit of a hurry up and wait. For me, I’m waiting for the full implementation of F-15 before I take a dive into it. I love that it’s a model that DCS doesn’t really do (it’s a FC3 plane so it doesn’t really count). I personally Iwould love to have a F-5E in BMS too. We all I think have aircraft we would like to see and of course there is the OFM group, but again I haven’t taken a deep dive into them yet partly because I know it’s F-16 avionics still. So the whole other full fidelity airplanes in BMS will reach a critical mass and we appreciate you being part of the foundation!!! I think it will be the next major leap in BMS, much like we have seen many new/returning users with VR, I think the other aircraft will have a similar wave of bringing more people to BMS.
This has been inspiring! I have a lot of old stuff still, looks like most of the eFalcon releases, FF, OpenFalcon, RPs, original HFFM release download, etc.
I’m sure @Aragorn can still give you all the advice, but if you need the pdf circa 2003, I got it!
Here are some of my screenshots from 1999 and 2000:
@Stevie It doesn’t matter to me. Again, I’ve accepted my best zone for combat simming fidelity is 20 years ago, when the Eagle was in its twilight of its prime. Give me full fidelity mechanical scan, primitive to no datalinks, etc. to full fidelity and it’s true challenges instead of guessing at the modern Gee-Whiz easy.
I’m not going to be a modern fighter pilot IRL so the new systems don’t have the draw that they used to, give me the full up complexity when I was in my pilot prime, my vintage, which just so happens where we also have the best declassification and debatable the last of the challenging avionics and pilot’s management of all the aircraft systems. BMS shouldn’t do 4.5/5th Gen IMO, it will lose is hallmark fidelity. But that’s me!
@Micro_440th I was thinking about that right after I hit send from a document production level (which I did professionally for a short time). It has to be easier for a small volunteer team to work in that style format. Also if it’s all hyperlnked there are a lot of things you can do like modern RL docs. But one other big thing I’d hate to lose is the current document size chunk Ctrl+F search that I honestly use a lot outside of VR. Webpages could make that that harder, even with Google, etc. So output to PDF I think is still great for the end users.
@MaxWaldorf sir, this thread is for 4.37 screenshots. How dare you?!?
I don’t know about "stand up guy,"but yes, I’ve been a US CFI-I for over 20 years now.
I’m not sure if I can get all the military Instructor Pilot (IP) terminology and panache but could try, especially if others are helping. I would probably need a better quality mic, but willing to buy a good entry level one. Most of experience is actually Private level students which is basic “primary” instruction, second most experience is Instrument instruction, and my favorite interest in BMS is air to air: BFM, ACM, BVR (and have done just a little “instruction” in VFS with that), also formation and AAR.
I think it would be nice. We’ve trying to keep the BMS in VR thread to be the main VR clearing house, but ones like the Vorpx crashes, are in other sections like tech support. It would be nice not to have to bounce around.
I would start more individual threads too for other stuff like PointCtrl attempts, look under hardware mods, etc. I would also volunteer to find threads that could be moved there for the mods.
@Zipper If you are familiar, think like DX11 vs. Vulkan vs OpenGL. The software your GPU uses to interface its processing power to building the 3d image on screen.
I remember Glide and the Voodoo cards being noticeably better for Falcon 4.0 but that may be my brand bias coming out 20 years later
@Atlas honestly, how far off is it in DCS? Any improvements with the ahem effort we’ve been helping with?
I’ve never had a good experience with feeling like my untracked hand was exactly where I it feels like it would be in VR. The proprioception just breaks down for me, I can’t just be in VR and move my hand and feel like it’s where VR draws that switch/button exactly because it’s a very fine point in virtual 3d space that in other games also doesn’t always line up (at one point Onward’s weapons were like that for me, probably lots of other examples as I think about it). So it’s never surprised me that physical cockpit builders have issues like you described and I experienced with my “lite” cockpit. It’s why I’m such a fan of PointCTRL and my VR headset facial interface chop jobs. But if DCS or some other sim has you not being off, I need to up my expectations…
@Deeling definitely cool!!! Keep working on it and let Miles or possibly even @fredemmott with HTCC know. I would say that PointCTRL can move the BMS cursor, it’s just way too sensitive. I would actually say there’s a better shot of getting Fred to implement it in HTCC.
Or is there anyway you could modify your code to allow the user to select a joystick to do a relative joystick position equals mouse screen position?
As I mentioned before, @fredemmott’s PointCTRL firmware does joystick axis too for PointCTRL movement. The problem is Joystick to mouse movement apps like Joy2Key do the mouse emulation movement of joystick axis position=greater cursor speed where it would work better with PointCTRL that joystick axis value=screen cursor position (although maybe a ratio other than 1:1).
@scubapics that’s the problem, the tablet input is way skewed with BMS, you can get mouse movement but it’s way to sensitive to be useful. HTCC creator @fredemmott has discussed here and we have talked about it some on his Discord. He can explain it a little better, works for DCS because of the rare way it uses mouse input and makes devices like this have problems in other sims like BMs and MSFS:
@fredemmott said in PointCtrl in BMS:
FWIW, if using RawInput, this should show up as WM_INPUT with a RAWMOUSE with MOUSE_MOVE_ABSOLUTE set. If using classic WM_MOUSEMOVE, data should already be good - but those (x, y) need to be treated as an absolute rotation to project, not as an offset
It doesn’t look like there’s true absolute mouse support in DirectInput - while the axis can be set to absolute mode, this just makes DirectInput emulate it by keeping a count.
If y’all have a wacom/huion/similar tablet, that works essentially the same way as a PointCTRL as far as the game is concerned - if absolute mode is working correctly, there should be a rectangular region that maps to your FOV, which isn’t the case in BMS.
As a side note, the mouse shouldn’t necessarily map to one eye buffer; while DCS shows one eye in the mirror window, the ‘input FOV’ for the mouse/tablet over that window is the combined FOV - so 2* max(abs(leftfov), abs(rightfov)). This lets you use the mouse over your full FOV for both eyes, not just the one currently in the mirror window. This means that the windows cursor doesn’t match up with the in-game cursor if you move it from the outside the window to in the window, but gives a better in-game experience (regardless of if mouse or tablet)
@scubapics it will take VR controller support to make HTCC work for PointCTRL at least, not just OpenXR. I saw the Slugmouse earlier this week and looks very interesting but didn’t look to see if it would support different style input for the mouse that is necessary for PointCTRL natively. I know it uses HTCC out of the box but without VR Controller support or hand tracking (which I think is what Slugmouse uses) in BMS, I doubt it will work.
@Moose No VR controllers, nor PointCtrl (my favorite), UltraLeep, etc. VR is still in its infancy in BMS, while solid in how it works with standard VR viewing and getting better, controller support isn’t being added yet.
@MaxWaldorf @Echo I get it, but I don’t turn the movies off because they still are tied to campaign events. Think about over the years how many people have reported a unplayable campaign that is actually ended and they didn’t know because the video didn’t pop up…
@drtbkj @Tomcattwo nailed the answer!
I would add that there has been some talk going to all .zip.acmi format to use TacView exclusively and BMS leaving the antiquated ACMI viewer and its .vhs format since 4.37 (not even U1) hence why they added the config line edit we have to use to turn back on the .vhs. LSOBot in its current state will only work as long as the .vhs is an option. Either LSOBot would have to be updated to the new BMS .zip.acmi or whatever is being removed by BMS’s file added back in so that LSOBot recognizes passes. Updating LSOBot could potentially allow .zip.acmi support so no TacView conversion necessary.
The .vhs format is a Falcon 4.0 only file extension and only a handful of converters like TacView and flt2vhs exist as well. TacView is definitely the modern standard as @Tyrant was trying to embrace anyway when he made LSOBot. The .vhs format can also be quite large and can take a lot of time to compile on 3d world exit. If you ever had a really long hang after exiting a campaign mission that you recorded pre 4.37, that’s why. Also Falcon 4.0 and most versions of BMS have a file size limit to .vhs as well. There are many reasons as I and I think BMS sees it to leave it behind.
Honestly, I like the post 4.37 ways of doing things that I will only enable .vhs for grading passes since I like to record full missions and have recording turned on by default.
@Tumbler31 @Tomcattwo is asking for the original .vhs format to continue to be an option so we can use LSOBot. I’m not sure if there is really any other advantages the days other than that. Sorry T2 if I’m missing something.
Personally, I’d prefer to have whatever the issue is with LSOBot not reading BMS’s current version of .txt.acmi fixed so I can stay with the new format .txt.acmi that even @Tyrant was trying to transition to almost 5 years ago to keep the new streamlined TacView support. But that’s me
I don’t know it this is a real time telemetry recording issue which I believe was U3 or just the txt.acmi defaut AVTR format transition which I think was 4.37U1. I think I’ve been trying LSOBot before the U3 without success.
@Tomcattwo true, as I said I used flt2vhs for a long time. It’s a layer I didn’t miss but not that inconvenient then also there is the increased exit 3d world time when I record the full mission as I often due for campaign or online. Also worried about long term support since I believe .vhs support may not be continued. And it’s strange that BMS is now supposed to be using the native format to LSOBot. I’ll give your settings with the lower recording frames a try too.