Okay april fools is over, let's get back on topic.

For those who preordered the Rift there is bad news and good news:
http://i.imgur.com/jneHEwh.png

So the bad news is - there will be delays,there already are - many people with estimated March 28 ship date still haven't recieved their Rifts. Hopefuly they will catch up later on, once they sort things out.

Good news is - all Rifts ordered before today will be shipped for free. They already removed €43 shipment cost from my Order History.

Quote from cupra M1K3 :

So let me get this straight, LFS is sticking with DX 9, still supporting Windows XP, and still waiting on physics. But, it does support, VR ...

I think this part sums it up nicely. As you can see, neither lack of DX11 or Win10 is blocking LFS from delivering one of best VR experiences...

Quote from cargame.nl :

It's funny that people think that DX9, 10 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 makes any difference. Surprise! It doesn't. Unless you make use of the extra library functions. Not even the DX9 library functions are used fully. So it's completely useless to switch to a bigger library. // Update; Ah, perfect tutorial material .. Tell me what differences you can spot! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-BeXKwu_7Y

This is pretty much off topic talk so I hope that you realize quickly that you make a silly statement.

I notice right away that the DX11 side has way better frame rate in the cockpit view. The DX11 side never really uses GPU #2, it uses slightly more video ram also. The DX11 side appears so much smoother than the DX9 side also. The whole images stays more focused on DX11, where the DX9 side at the very end of the video you can see a very noticable blur at the bottom of the screen when the grass is in view, but the DX11 side stays clear.

If you can't see the differences between DX9 and DX11 then you either need a better monitor, glasses/contacts/laser eye surgery, or you just don't have an attention to detail like others.

There is a clear difference in the 2 sides of the video that YOU linked so yeah. DX11 > DX9

Framerate one can not really tell from such videos..
The youtube video plays at 60 FPS but both times the game was running with multiple times that framerate. So it is more a matter of how the fps downscaling was handled. (First by recording software, then by video-editor, then by youtube player)

Graphic wise:
The DX9 video seems to have some other effects enabled?
No way that it looks THAT blurry:
http://i.imgur.com/AAfDUS7.jpg
Looks more like some field-of-depth effect thing, done on purpose.

And at the end, note how different the road looks:
http://i.imgur.com/Ja5XBqE.png
The DX9 picture even looks more detailed there.

Youtube also does not have so great quality anyway, I'd be very careful to judge small details like "grass is more blurred" from yt video.

Of course DX updates have so use, but in my opinion one can not tell so much from such videos, it is much placebo effect too....

It's true that when you see the comparatif video between iracing dx9/dx11, the gain in FPS is really interesting, maybe Scawen will be forced the switch when he start to seriously overhaul the graphics engine, because of the necessity to stay within an acceptable frame rate.

@Scawen, maybe the best moment to consider switching to dx11/12 is when you start to restructure the code for multithreading, because you will dig deep in the code anyway it could be possible to finish this two complexe projects in one shot.

LOL ... this is getting more hilarious than I expected.

1) both sides have framerates over 100FPS, so way more than the actual video can have, and judging framerate from video in such case is meaningless.

2) blurry grass ... it's called DoF (depth of field) effect, and it sort of emulates the focus of human eyes (I hate those together with bloom, lens flares, chromatic aberation and other BS effect game devs put into 3D engines nowadays). That difference shows both sides have different level of graphics quality (DX9 is set to higher quality, even if you obviously don't think so, but the devs do), so the FPS difference and GPU load is even more meaningless.

That said, all that video is good for is judge final picture quality. Now if I imagine driving the actual game, it's literally the same, at least for me, my brain is so occupied by actual driving, that I would never notice those subtle details.

edit: ups, I'm a bit late, I had the post almost written, then I watched some race, before I submitted it.. sorry.

Quote from lfsrm :

...
@Scawen, maybe the best moment to consider switching to dx11/12 is when you start to restructure the code for multithreading, because you will dig deep in the code anyway it could be possible to finish this two complexe projects in one shot.

I don't see why even bother with DX and Windows any more. To stay future-enabled LFS will have to switch to OpenGL (or Mantle, if I understand correctly what is happening in OpenGL consortium). And that's even a bit bigger task, but with the world moving mobile, SteamOS and Mac, it's pretty much the only option. Or to hop on some 3rd party 3D engine like unity, but I wonder whether there's on the market any 3D engine capable to replace LFSs one (in terms of performance vs image quality). Would be sort of sad to introduce some occasional stuttering or long loading times just to have some stock universal cross-platform engine.

Quote from Ped7g :

LOL ... this is getting more hilarious than I expected.

1) both sides have framerates over 100FPS, so way more than the actual video can have, and judging framerate from video in such case is meaningless.

2) blurry grass ... it's called DoF (depth of field) effect, and it sort of emulates the focus of human eyes (I hate those together with bloom, lens flares, chromatic aberation and other BS effect game devs put into 3D engines nowadays). That difference shows both sides have different level of graphics quality (DX9 is set to higher quality, even if you obviously don't think so, but the devs do), so the FPS difference and GPU load is even more meaningless.

That said, all that video is good for is judge final picture quality. Now if I imagine driving the actual game, it's literally the same, at least for me, my brain is so occupied by actual driving, that I would never notice those subtle details.

edit: ups, I'm a bit late, I had the post almost written, then I watched some race, before I submitted it.. sorry.

When a dev starting to improve the graphics with features that can cut the fps's in half, or a more advanced physics that can eat the CPU usage like a hungry pig, you can't ignore the technology that can help you to gain every bit of fps's possible, especially with more physics refresh rate and calculations.

Edit : I don't mind if he switch to other solution like Vulkan or unity or whatever, what I meant is the necessity of the best fps's friendly solution to day when he start to mess with the deep code.

Quote from lfsrm :

When a dev starting to improve the graphics with features that can cut the fps's in half..

Yeah, but the iRacing video just proves there's no real gain to go from DX9 to DX11. Would be the picture of the same quality (+all effect applied), then you can compare the GPU loads. And I don't think they would differ much, because I don't believe the iRacing has truly native DX9 and DX11 engines (ie. two of them). I think it's some general 3D engine with DX9 or DX11 wrapper underneath, not exploiting full power of either API.

Which is the case with cross-platform engines too (like Unity).

At the moment LFSs 3D engine has huge limitation being single-thread, but huge advantage in being the old-style direct renderer with classic simple lighting pipeline, so performance wise it's now almost impossible to beat it for anything modern, as any good modern engine is using deferred rendering to enable much more complex lighting model and more post processing effects.

But Scawen can still at least decouple graphics from physics and do that part in multithread way, although it would need some careful engine-architecture planning and memory bandwidth calculations, so you don't end wasting so much CPU to sync the threads that the gain from running in parallel would be lower, than the hassle to develop it.

Not sure if anybody is aware of it but this may be something for Scawen to try and get into? Seems like a good way to reach VR enthusiasts and make use of a completely now form of interacting with game assets while talking about all kinds of decisions that went into building them.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/411820/ The Foo Show main steam page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3jZyOXqzU complete show for us non VR peasants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyZeVJZBTSM and a quick review by some youtuber.

You can't look at just one video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Krl2-MHFb4

Quote from troy :

Not sure if anybody is aware of it but this may be something for Scawen to try and get into? Seems like a good way to reach VR enthusiasts and make use of a completely now form of interacting with game assets while talking about all kinds of decisions that went into building them.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/411820/ The Foo Show main steam page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3jZyOXqzU complete show for us non VR peasants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyZeVJZBTSM and a quick review by some youtuber.

Would be awesome to see Scawen and Eric on The Foo Show

Quote from cupra M1K3 :

You can't look at just one video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Krl2-MHFb4

Oh wow you are right, thanks man. DX11 changed my life - my games newer ran and looked this good before. How do I unninstall DX9? It makes my games slow and blurry.

Heh, the sky is wrong in the DX11 version, doesn't match up with DX9 or the shine on the road surface.

Didn't take long, Oculus Store exclusives can run on SteamVR now: https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive

Probably the closest thread.

There's a bit of a melt down on reddit atm regarding Occ Rift, Palmer Luckey, shipping dates, cost, etc

All fun and games..........

"Good grief, does nobody hire PR reps or get media coaching anymore? You pay the nice PR person, they stop your communications with customers from turning into a dumpster fire."
and
"I think he's kind of hilarious. He seems totally unprofessional, but sometimes it's kind of refreshing to see someone talking shit to some of the entitled consumers out there. I think it's a horrible decision of someone in his position, but it makes for good drama. It's like when GabeN comes down from the heavens to talk some shit to people. People are so emotionally invested in these products and have such high levels of entitlement, so it makes a good shitstorm when a CEO comes down and says "Shut up fanboy.""
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/4ghxwr/kernals_hit_popping_temperature_as_the_inventor/
https://np.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4gfpjk/palmer_luckey_on_twitter_i_prefer_production_that/d2h9uud?context=3

http://uploadvr.com/facebook-oculus-privacy/
The above is probably a major part of it.

"It turns out that when you install the software to run Facebook’s Oculus Rift it creates a process with full system permissions called “OVRServer_x64.exe.” This process is always on, and regularly sends updates back to Facebook’s servers.

The process’ main purpose is to help detect when the Rift is turned on and on your face so that it can launch Oculus Home, but the further reaching implications of it are potentially much more salacious.

Digging into the Oculus Rift’s Privacy Policy that users agree to when checking “Agree” on the Terms and Conditions there are a couple of interesting bits that may prove to be concerning (if not completely expected).

A section of the privacy policy outlines “information automatically collected about you when you use our services” including when, where, and how you interact with content on the platform even going as far as tracking your movements in virtual space."

"Virtual reality offers an unparalleled level of access to data for advertisers. Before metrics were measured in how long someone watched a video or how many times a link was clicked, but with VR you can get far more granular. An ad executive at Coke, for instance, could tell just how long you stared at the Coke bottle cleverly placed inside your favorite game as an in-game ad and use that data to better place it in the game for you next time."

Yes, it is truly awful that the OVRServer_x64.exe is always running and connected to facebook servers, even while the Rift is not connected, and there is no way to exit from the software or stop it running when your computer starts.

Palmer Luckey has definitely made mistakes. Although I think he is a nice person at heart, it's not good that he has mocked people for trying to get their DK2 working which can be problematic due to bugs in the Oculus software.

I personally jumped ship and went with the HTC Vive.

The Oculus shipment delays and their overall attitude as of late has been very disappointing to see. The last straw was hearing brick and mortar stores get a ton of Rifts to sell with bundled PC packages, while those who pre-ordered at launch have to wait for months upon months. My own Rift order is set to ship at the very end of august/early september after their component delay, while there's people just walking in to a store to get their Rifts and then selling the bundled PC.

I ordered a Vive at the start of this month, now its payment has already been processed and they're preparing it for shipping within the next week. Been a million times faster and more pleasant experience than dealing with Oculus, I can tell you that much.

I bought both and sold my rift after 2 days! The vive is so much more than the rift can ever be, no contest.

The whole VR thing is very 'First Gen' atm. It's all new and who knows what will be the 'thing' in a year from now ........

I'm waiting for 'gen 3/4' for a great replacement for Track IR for Rise of Flight/IL2 (latest) flight sim's, and a decent VR for racing games.

The current bitch-fest is just so funny, I must be getting old and past it ......

Quote from jasonmatthews :

I bought both and sold my rift after 2 days! The vive is so much more than the rift can ever be, no contest.

Apart from "room scale" and the touch controllers (latter which are coming for Rift), I'd like to hear why it's no contest? Surprised you got your Rift already too, I pre-ordered pretty quick when it went live and mine won't be shipping for a few weeks yet most likely.