Bosun

The plane will have control effects, yes, and it will have a decal (standard to every hit of the same magnitude) applied in the same area and orientation as the the general location of the hit every time. Once you're past the threshold of 'decal-applied' visible damage, the model is very simply 'wings on, or wings off'. Some models, like the Mig21 above, have a wingtip-off addition to the modeling, but the flames that come out of it make it look rather comical. That is because there is a single fire-sprite that gets generated for every situation, with a few noted exceptions. There's no variation on a small leak causing a fire, versus the entire engine flaming, so the wingtip (in the Mig21 above) has the same fire sprite for the wingtip being blown off, as it would for its engine catching fire. As for the oil leaks - yes, some planes have that damage effect, but it then creates a very puffy, very fluffy cloud effect that is remniscent of the early 2000s smoke effects. We know the engine can handle better, because effects like contrailing actually seem pretty great. Finally - fuselage damage does happen - in decal-form (a stamp-texture of bullet holes or worn hull applied). What doesn't happen is the plane being literally ripped in two, or at least a chunk taken out the back of it like a missile just exploded there or something. The main issue with the damage model is that you can have a missile hit dead center fuselage and the wings just fall off like the missile hit a 'jettison' button. I just think, for how beautiful this game is, our modeling of hits could use some work to be equally beautiful, is all. Where's the Su27 that has a rear right stab and back of the right wing with part of the right tail fin gone from a 'close' missile detonation? Or the the F16 that is simply vaporized into 4 or 5 pieces by a SAM strike, the back half of the fuselage and front half being ripped apart.

Multi

@NineLine can you poke @BIGNEWY for us? Just a lil' poke. you know. love tap, really.

Yes and yes. Carrier and airfield lights have never reflected off surfaces inside the cockpit for me.

The Heatblur Roadmap is terribly outdated, not sure anything in that planned section is still accurate. This isn't to say that there are no damage models at all, but that there ought to be more variation. When I shoot down aircraft in some other sims, 1. The tail sections are ripped out 2. Oil/Fuel/Water is leaked 3. Wings have different breaks or seams depending on where on the wing got hit, and how much 4. Cockpit glass is shattered 5. tailfins are shredded (visibily) When I shoot modern aircraft in DCS, regardless of module, I get only: 1. Aileron might come off, full wing still intact 2. One or both wings come off completely (all or nothing), no visible destruction to the body (bullet holes, but that's it) 3. Bullet hole or shrapnel damage holes visible on some of the fuselage Also, fire effects in other sims are really well placed and animated to come from inside the fuselages or engine nacelles, to look like flames escaping the craft. In DCS - the flames are static sprites that are a set length and if they happen in the engine, they look great. If they happen on a wing, it looks like a long, oblong cylinder of fire where the wing used to be, and not flames that are escaping from the cut-off edge of the wing itself. They've done a great job in the WWII section creating more dynamic damages. I'd like to see, when a Mig-21 gets hit center-fuselage with a missle, the cockpit glass be blown out in 1st person, or the fuselage be ripped in half, or various stages of the fuselage being intact besides just 'wings on' or 'wings off'. That's all. Take this for example, from the recent F-4 video, linked at the timestamp of a Mig-21 kill: That visual needs updating. That missle strike is woefully cartoonish against the fidelity of the rest of the world in the video. I think it is well worth ED's time to pursue updating the modules and effects and make sure that certain standards are mandated for 3rd-party developers in designing their damage models. Also, I think it is worth ED updating old modules to a new and modern standard. Where the module creators no longer maintain those, I think it should be ED that has rights to maintain it for them if the 3rd party vacates that role.

RayTracing: Would this solve the fact that I could be directly under the lights of the carrier's bridge, but my cockpit is still entirely black? I feel like carrier and other environmental lighting has no rendering inside the cockpit, which is a shame.

@BIGNEWY Did we ever tell you just how talented and awesome you are? Like, when the community needs an update, there you are - givin' an update on the people's game. A true hero. (how's the flattery goin', they said this would work?)

To add in to this thought, the job of modelers and texture artists, lighting and rigging artists, is to create an environment that is a fascimile of the average of what you felt you have perceived. Tough job, for sure. Again, I agree with the OP sentiment - there is certainly some work to be done. Just the revisions you've made on the Marianas above are quite pretty. As for comparing MSFS to DCS - the point is not to say DCS should use MSFS engines. Not at all. The point was to say that it is possible to blend that level of detail with DCS' need for dynamic content a little better. In particular with render-mesh sizes, because outside of buildings being destroyed, the mesh size on the terrain doesn't get destroyed or distorted currently in game. (If they're working on that, that would amazing, but I haven't heard they are, anyone know?) Also texture resolutions, for scanned texture areas. I think DCS could up these a little. The technology is there to render detail and manage GPU/CPU/RAM load in displaying it when needed. The map tech is a little behind the curve. And I do agree, the stock settings, even with a calibrated monitor (mine are calibrated each year for design work), are over-saturated for the amalgamation of perception, average, that I personally feel I am perceiving (including, as above, all the minute variances of lighting and shading and time of day.) But - eyesight is different, and where my perception says colors are duller in real life, someone else's eyes may think DCS is duller than they experience. Because at the end of the day, if I perceived the spectrum of 'red' as the color you experience as 'green' - neither of us would ever know. Let that sink in.

Agreed. The lack of a damage model (that is, lack of variation in damage taken) is starting to date the engine. Some modules have it better than others, but the missile explosions and aircraft fires are certainly in need of more detail and variation. A missile hitting an F-14 from any aspect shouldn't result in the same damage every time. We should be seeing the actual frame of the aircraft warped and split, not just the wings fall off. With glancing hits from AAA fire, there are never oil or coolant leaks, or fuel leaks that I've seen. The reason these haven't been priority of course, is that we often shoot things from miles away and never actually see the detail. However, with the advent of more camera controls like the go-pro camera from this last fall, I find my footage is lacking quite a bit, and the immersion is a little gone, when splashing someone up close. I'd also like more visual damage feedback with rough landings. Buddy of mine broke his landing gear on a carrier deck landing. Looking at his model, you'd never know, but he could tell when taxing that the wheel was out. That's something that should be a priority, as changes of aircraft status like that are vital to ascertain how badly damaged you actually are.

Overall though, I agree with the original post: We need more detailed landscape engines here. Games like MSFS have really pushed the bar, and having 2010 map-technology now is showing its age. MSFS has much higher detail and is still performant, so this isn't an impossible goal. The real question is whether or not DCS would require an entirely new engine to support such a shift in detail. The new Kola map is an example where, given OrbX' other projects in MSFS, their quality is quite high and I can only imagine that the trees and buildings we see in their Kola map being as refined as any other on Caucauses is only due to limitations of the engine itself.

On the sense of scale being off This is a measured and known phenomenon with low-detail assets in a digital 3d gamespace. Our eyes perceive scale by continually resolving details that are smaller the closer we get to something. When details stop resolving at a close distance, your eyes stop being able to judge or properly contextualize the scale. The extreme example of this would be Jane's F-15 game from the late 80s - with the simple grid-lines for land, and the pyramids that were triangle-line shapes. In that gamespace, you'd never be able to tell how far away you were...when you were close to them. Same for the ground in early games like Aces over Europe, or Aces of the Pacific. The ground wasn't resolved enough, so while it was somewhat ok to determine your altitude up high, because they had small dots along the land that you could scroll past....up close those dots were spaced far apart and telling your altitude was impossible without the instruments. Finer, more modern versions of that confusion come in when flying over peaks in the new Kola map, or flying low over towns in Caucuses. It's much more subtle now, but your sense of scale feels off because your eyes don't have the finer detail being resolved, even when going fast, that would better lend you to discern how fast you're actually travelling. The result is that you appear to be going slower than you really are, making the world objects seem larger than they actually are. The real eye-trick of this is to fly along and feel how big the trees in Caucasus' map seem to be at low altitude, and then to go land beside one and compare its' scale to a real tree. The same for the buildings. You'll notice the 'scale' is actually fairly on par - but why do they seem bigger, or that you're moving slower, at altitude? Because of that aforementioned lack of detail, tricking your brain into thinking something is larger than it really is, because the finer details that would exist and inform your perception that would be scrolling by in between those larger assets, aren't there. Those larger assets lack references to place them contextually in size. I've often thought, flying through Caucuses, that houses, buildings and other things are 'off scale.' Sometimes, they actually are. Some of the buildings legimately are too big or small. But a lot of the mis-perception is that lack of smaller detail giving those assets context within the landscape. Fixes for that? Finer resolution on terrain tile mapping, and higher-res ground textures at lower altitudes, and more 'gak' as it were - more small objects that can place and contextualize the scale of your larger assets. (And that's just the rendering details - there's an entire other layer to this, which is in-game camera aspect and 'lens' size. For example, Star Citizen's camera is notorious for being too 'fisheye', so that even when zoomed in, it is hard to judge distances and scale properly. That isn't an asset issue - its a camera issue in how they frame with the lens and the equivalent mm size they're simulating.) Hope that all makes sense.

I'm a graphic designer. If you're taking a digital photo for reference, it will be in RGB until you print it. Printing an RGB image through a physical printer on paper is where you get distortion, because color printing requires CMYK bands. You'll convert that file prior to printing, to run CMYK values. That's the only time you'll convert to CMYK, and it'll be a separate copy of the file. As long as everything stays digital - no conversions between CMYK or RGB are needed, as none are ever done. As for Color Theory being complex - it can be given the right discussion or context. We had entire courses on Color Theory that lasted full semesters. You can make it as complex as you want. How complex it needs to be given any specific context, however, is fairly limited.

There are not an insignificant amount of folks hyped for whatever is secretly planned for cloud towers and new weather. Hypehypehype. @BIGNEWY any small, tiny, wafer-thin snips or bits you could ever-so-daintily drop? I'm assuming these are planned for Q4, if I'm guessing timing right?

I think one thing that SRS does well is their radio overlay being off screen, so it doesn't take up screen space while still allowing you to quickly reference and monitor who's talking, what channel you're on, and how many people are in it. Despite the realism of tuning a freq and needing to call out to the darkness if anyone is there - I think in the online sphere, people better network and respond when they know someone else is there on channel. Also - many servers still hard-require SRS to log in to. Once in-game VC gets a little more honed/fleshed/toned/meshed in, would it be possible to have in-game communications run through a radio sub-routine in the game itself, that forces any other 'program' calling the radio API to transmit through? Ie - would it be possible to force SRS into using in-game radio transmissions if it wants to call the API? That way, using SRS would simply be a 'style of overlay' choice, more than a 'which voice-comm to use' choice?

I echo that. Honestly, I'm not really that tied to dots being any particular size. I just want spotting to be similar across resolutions. In the old system, you had a definite and clear advantage at lower resolutions, and a definite and clear advantage with larger monitors. In this modern age of graphics, those two factors can absolutely be compensated for to create uniform experiences, and there's no reason not too. You could no sooner argue that pennies or daylight savings time should be kept in perpetuity, than you could argue that the spotting didn't need adjustment. I, for one, am glad they're moving in the direction they're going, because of all the things that are so obvious and within our ability to fix (pennies/daylight savings time), it is a refreshing spot of hope and light in the world to see at least this one being worked on.

I play 4k on a 32" screen, native with a 4090, running DLAA and everything on Ultra or Max. No upscaling. My analysis? I played on 1080 for over decade. The spotting I have now at 4k is slightly worse than what I had at 1080p, because there were less surrounding details in the lower resolution for even a larger dot to blend in with. That, to me, is realistic. So from my end - I love the spotting changes. I can see contacts far enough out where I feel like others can (in online play, people can call contacts and I can, for the first time in 4k, in ANY game, actually see them physically rendered when other people are seeing them), and it is slightly still more difficult than 1080p for me, which hits the sweet spot of the fact that this isn't a real simulation, so details like light flashing off of metal, subtle movements, and other things that are impossible to render in a game envrionment (currently) can be overcome by the game mechanics. Part of our suspension of disbelief still revolves around 'game mechanics' making up for lack of real world fidelity. Even though we have come immeasurably far in rendering technology, we're still a very long way from allowing a game to simulate the subtle nuances of movement and light and shadow at a distance, that our eyes would be able to ascertain, in a game. Ergo, we sometimes have to deal with 'gamed' mechanics to compensate for that lack of fidelity. I think you've done a marvellous job with this attempt to upgrade classic LOD spotting for the first time in 20 years. You're the first sim to do so, and you've done it rather well. I look forward to the improvements and refinements - but from my end - thanks. I can finally play online and see again in native 4k.

@NineLine Is there some option or .lua I can edit to fix this tiling?

Running 4k res, In: F-5E, and F-14 so far: nullI posted this a while back - but it's still not been fixed and it can be mission-breaking for me. It gets better with 1080p, but I still believe these scratches are too 'hard' and opaque, for how your eye would focus around them, and certainly at 4k resolution, they're simply much too tiled and dense. Is there a .lua line I can edit to get these more reasonable -or can ED simply allow the cockpit glass mod to pass IC again, for the sake of being able to see in low-angle light?

TuesdayReleaseTuesdayReleaseTuesdayRelease #worthashot Can you imagine Worf as a co-pilot? "There is an incoming Sam Launch. Turn towards it and we shall face our enermy." hahaha "He is on our 6'oclcock. This is a disgrace." "I shall eject, and fight him face to face. Draw your weapon and prepare for canopy release."

"D****it Jim! I'm just a co-pilot, not a navigator!" "Data, see what you can find on our adversary." / "Yes, captain." "Jester, lock him up!" / "Today is a good day to die!!!"

It's official: Jester 2.0 will be whoever the heck you want him too - because, "We're going to make Jester 2.0 fully scriptable to the community during Early Access." Write him how you want him.

When I first started flying simulators, it was the early 90s. I remember flying around what would require severe imagination intervention to call 'pyramids', and the first time I saw a 'cloud' in a game that I could fly around, was a WW1 sim by Microprose in which the clouds were solid block objects - and it felt so immersive back when games started implementing cloud 'layers', just prior to several titles pioneering the 'rotating face object' clouds. And now, 30 years into flying simulators, the work that has been done to create immersive and captivating escapism truly leaves me amazed every time I play. I honestly can say that I get as much enjoyment out of simply flying around the maps, as I do in active engagements with enemy units. Sometimes more enjoyment if I lose the engagement. All that to say - just, thanks. Thanks for all the work you all do. This is a luxury industry, to be sure, but for someone that needs to be able to look at a beautiful sunset in the darker winter months of northern latitudes in order to remain sane - you've done it. You've really done it. To be able to so clearly explore the sky as the young boy in me still gets thrilled to do, you keep the youthful energy of exploration, the marvel of technology and the stunning highlights of our natural world in wonderful definition. Thanks. (edit - whoever created your sunset is worth every raise you're about to give them.)

Flappie - Sorry, I've been trying to get it to happen again, but it hasn't. I played a lot of sorties that evening and didn't think to take note of which track it was. For what it is worth, though, it hasn't recurred, but I've got it on my mind to note the track and export it if it does. When it comes down to it - it really wasn't affecting anything. I was more amused, than anything else.

Any word on if there's a plan to allow the Voice Chat/Radio Overlay to be exported for display on another screen? Or an API that would allow someone to build a custom interface to display on a 2nd monitor?

Exiting Multiplayer mission to debrief. At first I was worried - but -