I’ll post about X-Plane 10.40 next week – but just a quick note: apparently the Rift will ship Windows-only first:

Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.

That’s from a much longer blog post describing the Rift’s hardware requirements and the difficulty of moving that many pixels at that high of a framerate with ultra-low latency.  (The tl;dr version is that if you have a Windows laptop you probably won’t be able to run the Rift on it.)

I don’t know what the failure mode will be for not meeting requirements, e.g. will the Rift simply not run, or will it do the best it can with degraded performance.

To state the obvious, if there isn’t an Oculus Rift SDK and driver for OS X or Linux, then X-Plane can’t support those operating systems.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

15 comments on “Oculus Rift: Apparently Windows First”

  1. Yay – I’m looking forward to trying the Rift out with X-Plane 🙂

    Cheers

  2. Still get motion sickness just thinking about Oculus Rift, had the DEV1 kit so whilst interested I am more in the skepticism state of mind still, sure hope they fix that before release.

  3. I don’t see the interest so far. It is great for view buy nor being able to see the keyboard mice and controllers. Or printed charts seems to diminish the interest for simulation at this time.

    1. I think it would work best for military aircraft with HOTAS control concept, maybe also for aerobatics. It might even work for airliners, let’s not forget Flightfactor’s 777 and 757 both have ways of viewing charts in the virtual cockpit. So, I think there’s plenty reason to be positive.

      Of course there is the motion sickness thing to overcome, try flying a few aerobatic routines with your Rift headset on and you’ll probably be feeling a bit queasy…

    2. No place for it in a cockpit, although there are uses for it just not in a cockpit.

      Just sayin

  4. Looking forward to trying the Rift with X-Plane. I tried a different flight simulator yesterday and was blown away.

  5. the computer required to achieve the “recommended setting” is just outrageously high.

  7. I too am excited about the impending possibility of flying with the Rift. However the downside is that I will only be able use my Go-flight console by touch. I guess for me, the jury is out at this time. Interesting times, especially as a number of different vendors are approaching release date on VR headsets.

  9. I had great expectations about the Rift but it is dwindling due to the ever delayed release date, and the issues discussed by others here, to do with seeing the keyboard, mouse and charts.

    Irrespective of that, I have a question: Why are you concentrating so much on getting a VR solution out there which only works with the Rift? I understand that there is considerable excitement out there surrounding the HTC Vive, and there are other VR headsets announced (Steam, for example), and released, including low budget hacks like Google cardboard. Wouldn’t it be better to focus on a generic VR solution which can easily be adapted to several or all of the physical hardware options?

    Or is that what you are actually doing anyway?

    Or do I not know what I am talking about, and its much more complex than that?!

    1. Hi Paul,

      It’s too soon and the market is too fragmented to have a viable general solution. Hopefully we’ll get there someday. To the extent that the Rift is a high profile project with actual dev hardware, we’ve been trying to use their SDK. Once there is another company at that level we’ll have to consider how cross-headset tech can work. We’re a long way from OpenVR or some generic API.

  10. Ben
    So are you saying Rift support will be coming with 10.40? Or just stating that Windows support will come first for both X-plane and Oculus consumer.
    I believe X-Plane’s strategy has also been to wait for consumer version of Oculus…, so will DK2 users get this feature in 10.40?
    I’m waiting for this to happen before my PC upgrade…
    This will be a gamechanger, Austin Meyer was on Aviatorcast last month and briefly mentioned this feature was ready and works well.
    Thanks for the great work

    1. We are _not_ supporting the Rift in 1040. I am only stating that if Oculus ships Windows only, that we will be restricted to that subset when we ship support.

      I also have no idea what support will be like for dev-kits. We are entirely limited by what is possible in the Oculus SDK. The Oculus SDK changes approximately once a month, so for now the only thing we can guarantee is that we -won’t- do what Oculus has made impossible.

Comments are closed.