I tried the plane few times, since I like to fly low and slow to enjoy the scenery, but this plane just won't play nice for me.
A year and so after failing to enjoy the plane, I received my Pimax 5K+ headset, and this plane was one of bush planes I wanted to fly in VR.
I remember the first time I fire it up and inspected it. It has a gorgeous and clean textures, everything was easy to read, well it is a thin aircraft so everything is near you. I remember fumbling with the switches and levers, and then to my surprise the stick would not budge. I was not able to "grab" it using my "vr controller". That is a show stopper. Since I fly using controllers only, there was no way I'll use the joystick I have to manipulate the stick and use my other hand to manage the different switches, knobs and levers.
Even more, The knobs and levers were not VR friendly, they worked, but the action I had to do was not intuitive to the expected direction you manage things in VR. For example, a mixture should be moved in and out, but I had to move my hand up/down to get the desired effect. worse was the throttle, the movement was up/down and sometimes left to right just to get the desired action.
Here is an image of the cockpit, and I highlighted most of the knobs/levers I use.
I can admit, that in this case, the cockpit manipulators were not intuitive to say the list, and I was surprised that the main manipulator - the stick was not manageable natively in VR.
You can see lots of green over the different levers and knobs. When you are in VR and you reach to a lever, it receives this greenish glow that is out of place and sometime even not able to enclose the whole object, like the throttle.
I admit that we do not use the switches that much, but I wanted you to better understand the "realism breaker" when you deal with such cockpits.
VR READY / VR Compatible - Bla Bla
I bought many planes that said: "we are VR ready" (ASDG never claimed to be one of those) and although their planes do work in VR (which is true to 99% of planes) their manipulators might not be VR ready and therefore their planes should not be counted as such.
We, the simmers, should demand better quality in VR.
Designers should test their planes using only controllers, they should not depend on a joystick + controller combo. It takes 5min to see what works and what does not work on most planes. Fixing takes time, but that is part of the deal if you publish your plane as "VR Ready".
So what happen in the case of ASDG
I was baffled at first since I could not find good documentations nor videos that explains how to convert non VR plane to VR and here is a gold mine.
I admit that Due to work and other life activities, learning how to convert planes to VR was down the list, but eventually during the lock-down, I decided to watch some of VRLabs YouTube videos and apply what I learned on ASDG Super Cub.
What I wanted to learn was:
- How to add objects to a cockpit that were not supported at the start (like Yoke/Stick).
- How to convert manipulators to more natural behavior. For example knobs should rotate and not manipulate by moving your hand right to left and vise verse.
This might not sound much, but in most cases this is what you need to start your project. You will pick more experience and understanding as you go.
I was able to modify the following [manipulators] in 2 ASDG planes (I do not intend to convert the other planes I was interested on the 180hp and amphibian only):
- Added stick: manipulator to the planes (took ~10min for each plane, who would have thought).
I only added the stick to front seat, maybe later I'll do the same to the back seat. - Throttle: Moves naturally with your hand. Before you had to move the controller up and down, now[edit] the movement is push/pull.
Took me hours to figure how to set it correctly, and I'm not sure it will be easier next time . - Mix/Prop: moves on their "z" axes. In and out as should have been.
- Park Break: movement was modified to naturally push/pull feel.
- ADF1 card knob: rotates correctly and not by dragging your controller left/right.
- Heading Knob: did not function in VR, not works as expected.
- Pitch Trim handle:
Before: You moved your hand right/left to the handle, and it will circle itself few times (like a crazy carousel). It was very hard to slowly and naturally rotate the pitch handle.
After: The "pitch handle" now rotates around its axes in sync to your hand movement. Much more natural in VR but I admit the location of the handle is not that comfortable (depends on your type of chair).
The pitch trim rotation took me hours to figure out, and I had to conduct many trials and errors before I succeeded. - Gear Lever: In the amphibian plane, the gear lever works naturally when you move your hand up/down motion to raise/lower gears.
- Better "clickable region representation" (the green thing) in most knobs/switches and levers.
I embraced VRlabs suggestion that the "clickable region highlight" should not interfere with the textures, it should be implied like silhouette over the textures. Now I don't want to sound dramatic but it does make a big deference where it counts, especially in VR.
Here are two examples:
You can compare the green clickable area of the pitch trim and the magnetos switches, it looks much better in my opinion, and in VR it is almost not noticeable.
What I learned during this process
The good thing about VRLabs videos that they were not scripted (for good and bad). You could pick his way of thinking and how he tackles issues during the conversion process.
To sum it up in few points:
- Watch VRlabs videos.
- Use same tools (as much as possible), so you will have same workflow as VRlabs.
- [Edited]In many cases, The cockpit object file might not hold the real object and the textures you see in the plane, it holds representations of the objects you want to manipulate. Therefore, you have all the right to move/rotate any object in the cockpit file so it will match the object in the plane.
The "cockpit" file basically define the clickable areas (the green silhouette).
In some cases, the cockpit holds the Object + Texture, therefore it will be a little harder to make the clickable area nicer a little more complex.
You can test this by hiding an object in the cockpit and see if it [is not visible in it] in X-Plane. If it did, then it is probably resides only in the cockpit object file and not in the "objects" folder. - When dealing with rotations objects (angles), there is no reason not to define the minimum as 0 and the rest as a positive max angle.
Rotation can have 0 to 360 degrees, but do not limit yourself. It can be greater than 360 and lower than 0. X-Plane calculates relatively to these values, and that impacts the rotation speed for some manipulators.
For example, for the "pitch trim" I defined a rotation of "0 to 5220" (or something similar), because I needed few rotations, and I had to make the rotation object synchronize nicely with the rotation representation. That took lots of trials and errors until I figured this out.
(The angles could also be "-2610" and "+2610", the result [would have been] the same in most cases, so using "0" feel more intuitive). - To make a silhouette "clickable area", you should scale the manipulator and flip its normals (see videos), continue scaling up or down depending on the result you receive.
When will it be available ?
As far as I know it should be part of a BETA run, so I have no control over it.
If someone wants to test these modifications, then I believe it is safe to only send the "cockpit" files, that way there are no contradictions with the developers.
I really want to say huge thank you to VRlabs, without his video[s] I could not done this, and now after 2 years, I can enjoy this fantastic plane (although I believe it still have its issues).
To Laminar Research: VRlabs done what your team should have produced long time ago. You could do it directly or indirectly, but videos like that are the best way to explain and teach developers how to make their planes VR friendly.
I hope that more content will be available in the coming months, but I still have some videos to go over and learn some more.
Until next time.
Blue Skys
Saar