Frequently Asked Questions

I can’t see my hands in DCS

If you are using controller emulation and followed the instructions, you should only see laser pointers.

If you are using touch screen/tablet emulation, you should only see mouse cursor movement.

If you do not see these, follow the setup instructions.

Why are hands not meant to be visible in DCS?

For touch screen/tablet emulation, DCS does not draw hands for mice/touch screens/tablets.

For controller emulation, the instructions say to disable the hands because HTCC intentionally ignores hand orientation.

Why does HTCC ignore hand orientation?

HTCC draws a line from your headset to your hand, and uses that for pointer orientation; this greatly increases pointing stability and accuracy.

Only Eagle Dynamics are able to make hand tracking in DCS immersive, reliable, and useful; third-party software like HTCC must make a trade-off, and HTCC chooses reliability and utility over immersion.

Why does is the pointer in a line from my head?

See the previous question.

How do I improve gesture recognition?

  • Make sure your area is well-lit
  • Make sure your hand tracker can see the gesture

Gesture recognition is provided by your hand trackers’ driver; there is nearly no scope for improvement within HTCC.

Why does the cursor move when I move my head in DCS?

This is a limitation of DCS’s mouse handling.

My anti-virus says it found something, what do I do?

Report to your anti-virus vendor as a false positive.

I do not spend my free time (and in some cases, money) trying to fix bugs in other people’s software, which this practically always is.

I’m a security researcher and found a problem, what do I do?

If the potential issue is in this list, please do not report it until you have confirmed that the problem is a genuine issue in HTCC, not a false-positive:

  • an antivirus says it found something
  • VirusTotal says one or more antivirus programs found something
  • the autoupdater can download and run code from the internet (yes, it’s an autoupdater)
  • the autoupdater contains some suspicious words (this is the dictionary for Google’s Brotli compression, found in appendix A of RFC 7932)
  • an LLM or any other tool says it found an issue
  • any other heuristic

If the cause is not in the list above, or you have confirmed that it is not a false-positive:

  • If you believe that opening a public GitHub issue puts users at risk, please email me
  • Otherwise, please open a GitHub issue

I’m a game developer, how do I add/improve HTCC support?

HTCC is a band-aid; everything it does can be done better, more easily, and more reliably in the game/engine - without HTCC. Adding/improving HTCC support in your game should not be a goal; instead, add/improve support for XR_EXT_hand_tracking in your game.

If you would like assistance implementing hand tracking in your game/engine without HTCC, I can be reached via email to inquire about my availability for contract work.

I’m a gamer; can you support an additional game?

I do not currently intend to add support for any additional games to HTCC.

The game developers can do everything that HTCC does better, more easily, and more reliably in the game itself, without HTCC. I do not want to give game developers a reason not to implement hand tracking directly in the game; long-term, this may be a net loss to users and the broader ecosystem.

You can:

  • ask the developers of the game to improve the hand tracking experience without HTCC
  • ask relevant hardware manufacturers to make hand tracking part of their relationship with their software partners