My DK2 + ED impressions

I posted a week or so back about upgrading my rig and getting the DK2 for Elite, which I have done but honestly have only just found time to write my thoughts out as promised. I've been busy working and then when not working I've been in the DK2 lol.

I spent a good 2-3 evenings tweaking and playing around with all the settings and have settled on what I am using now and am very, very happy. I did all the setting changes in the NVidia thread on this forum which were invaluable, so thanks to everyone that contributed to all those instructions. I have my Nvidia Control Panel tweaked, GUI colours changed, running sweetfx and currently am using 1920 x 1080, I tried DSR at higher res but although in space it was amazing and got rid of pretty much all the jaggys, the station judder was too much and I dropped back to 1080p. Apart from the seemly lack of decent real AA and edges of most objects looking jaggy, the game is outstandingly awesome looking. The screen door effect can be ignored and I don't notice it any more.

Highlights for me have been little things that are nothing in the 2D version. The sensor panel; blips actually being above and below the main plane/disk. The UI panels are in front of you, tangible and awesomely 3D, the sense of depth on everything in the cockpit, being able to look out over the edge of the ship, etc. I am highly physically animated now in dogfights, my head moving all over the place, sitting forward, back, craning my neck, etc! The size of control towers in the stations, other ships, cockpits, station exteriors, etc everything feels huge and has real depth, that's the biggest thing that can't be explained until you experience it! It all feels so natural and even after a week or so I still catch myself looking down to press a button on my throttle and giggle as I realise I am totally immersed and my hand isn't there.

Wanna say thanks for everyone that convinced me to get a DK2. My only regret is I didn't get one sooner :D
 
I'm really pleased for you. It's a real game changer. I found that after a week, I realised I couldn't go back to monitor. And this is just the start. Who knows where this will end up.
 
congrats! Welcome to the cool kid's club. I recently talked my brother into getting a DK2, it should be there tuesday. there is no turning back from the rift
 
Have fun! I have played ED without rift ..... for less than 5 minutes - couldn't stand it. :)

My only gripe is that i can't make nice screenshots of my discoveries.
 
My only (minor) gripe with using the Rift with ED is those 'aching hands' animations.

I wish FD would turn them off when using the Rift, because it breaks my immersion when my virtual hands move when my real ones don't.
 
My only (minor) gripe with using the Rift with ED is those 'aching hands' animations.

I wish FD would turn them off when using the Rift, because it breaks my immersion when my virtual hands move when my real ones don't.

Really do you notice your hands that much? I am usually to busy looking around to notice the hand twitching
 
(I hope this is not too off topic and I don't want to hijack the OPs thread, but this felt like the best place to drop this review. This is not a review of ED, but a review of the Rift. Why this is relevant to me is that the only reason I am interested in the Rift is to play ED)

A local computer place let me try the Rift today. It was a limited demo, standing, with no sound, on a machine that wasn’t fully optimized. I believe it had an RX 270 card? I kept my glasses on and really had to mess around with getting them sitting on my face right, while being at the correct angle to see properly. The headset seemed surprisingly light, and then they turned it on and I was on the desk demo. As many of you have described I could not stop looking around. I mean the graphics were pre-WII quality, but that didn’t matter as the looking around and the “being there” feeling was great. I was especially taken by the couch I was “sitting” on, I could not get enough of turning left and right to look at it. Something about it presence and depth really had my attention and I kept moving my head around to get a new view of the couch. And I could turn my head and look inward, but the look inward was jumpy as I was around a foot from the sensor. Then I tried the Apollo demo as I started floating down the gantry of an Apollo rocket. I could not get enough of looking up and down the Apollo rocket as the depth was so clear and vivid. It LOOKED big, it had true depth and size and mass…and it gave me an entirely new perspective on these historical rockets…this part went too fast. Then I was in it for a launch and this is where I got a bit disappointed. The control panel was flat and without any depth, even though there was depth between me and the control panel. The astronauts on either side of me were clearly static cartoons, and it would have been better if I was launching solo. But looking left and moving forward to look out the window after we got into space was amazing! And then a pencil came floating by, really floating and I watched it for a while and then reached out to grab it, AHA, you got me Rift! Pretty cool reaching for something that wasn’t there with my physical hand. One of the store techs was talking about quality and then I remembered, the never ending, sometimes near violent ‘Screen Door Effect’ threads. So I started looking for the SDE…and couldn’t see it…struggled with changing my perspective from ‘in game’ to just looking at a flat screen and there it was. Is that it? Is that what some people go on and on about? Sure, I could see it if I looked, but it didn’t jump out at me until I made myself go find it. I did however see it much more clearly when a demo was loading and I was reading graphics.

Then I tried some kind of Star Wars Tie Fighter thingy and it just felt cheap. I really just wanted to look around space, but then I was flying some tiefighter and realized I had to use the mouse and then mentally was done. I suppose I am a sim snob because if you put me in a spaceship or plane and I have to use a mouse – Check Please! If it’s not a joystick, I’m not playing. But the demo felt cheap (sorry if you like it). Also at this point I felt a tinge of nausea and I have learned it doesn’t go away so I disengaged from the Rift.

My thoughts are mixed. The demo was for all practical purposes a poor one. My expectations are high and this was not an optimized machine, with no speakers, standing a foot from the sensor, with some limited efforts in the software I tried. The head tracking of seeing where I looked was flawless, but I expected it to be. But even with my high expectation it was still just awesome to look around and really feel like I was someplace else. In zero-g when I reached for the pencil with my real hand I had my VR moment! Even though I knew I was in VR, I still innocently grabbed for a floating pencil, how great is that! But I need to try the Rift, using a great optimized game (such as ED!) with a proper set of speakers, the right video card, and optimized settings, etc. There was nothing about this experience that talked me out of the Rift, and I was quite pleased to see that the SDE was minimal to me. But there was also nothing that pushed me over the edge to run out and buy one, seeing as how I also have to buy an entire PC to go with it.

But when I put together my 2D experiences in ED with the awesome sense of depth and size I experienced gliding down the Apollo rocket in the Rift - I am pretty sure I have a good idea how amazing it will be in ED. Darn, where is my charge card...so close ....:)
 
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