JCTherik

I'm no pilot or a plane engineer, but doesn't the DLC destroy lift close to the body of the airplane? And when opening DLC, you'd usually push more power in order to get the lost lift back and not drop out of the sky. So, assuming level flight or constant descent, you'd still have 1G of lift. So, same amount of lift, except it's concentrated more towards the tips of the wings -> I'd expect the wings to flex more. But again, just speculating.

The trap sheet regularly shows 30+ seconds in the groove even when rolling out on centerline at 0.7 miles out, on speed in ~2kn winds. AFAIK It should start counting from wings level/crossing centerline, it seems to start the measuring too early or something. On a related note, the distance scale seems bit wonky too, it has no 1/2 mile tick. Being 0 -> 1/4 -> 3/4 -> 1 makes it non-linear, yet the glideslope/alignment bars seem to be straight lines. Visually it looks like if the scale has 4 ticks, it should be something like 0 -> 1/3 -> 2/3 -> 1. Sorry for potato quality, it's an unzoomed VR mirror screenshot.

Another minor nitpick - the wheel chocks appear and disappear even before the crew says "copy". It seems like the chocks don't really follow the usual logic of ground crew, I wonder if it even follows the availability or hearing of the ground crew - when landing on a road or non-friendly airport.

Yep, even just few shortcuts: Comms menu Up, Comms menu Down, Comms menu Select, maybe Comms menu Back. Add a highlight for the currently selected option and it's done. But there may be some dark deep hacks in the code if the comms F keys aren't even assignable, plus they override regular F key assignments, which is something that isn't even possible elsewhere in DCS. Another thing that's related in VR is the abysmal mouse behaviour, and how the white dot mouse appears with the comms menu, and how it's in different position than the regular cross mouse.

any update on this>

Exactly! It's an instrument, effectively an altitude indicator. Imagine your altitude indicator going out when close to the ground.

Same, bumping again. We have a misaligned ball that disappears when lined up right of runway, and those bugs are sitting here unresolved for a year, I mean, come on.

But the current solution is already player-adjustable, which is where the problem comes from. Wanna see better? Just buy a 50 inch 720p screen, put graphics on minimum, add a hefty reshade and disable antialiasing.

Ok, put the model engorgement on a slider, like the FOV.

I can see stuff if I pause the game and look where I think they should be, at 7k feet, still image, no trackir. If I start panning the screen - as trackir would, with less than maximum zoom, 5 miles is probably about an optimistic maximum, even at altitude. Over terrain, more like 1 mile.

That's the age old question. I personally think that rather than trying to recreate reality, we should strive to recreate professional training simulators - ie. instant respawn should definitely continue to be a thing, and players should be hopefully learning similar skills as in real simulators, and required skills that are only specific to the hardware limitations of simulators should be minimized. That's my opinion. If majority of people have differing opinion of what realistic means I guess I'll just have to live with this and probably stick to aerobatics, cause I don't see a thing, especially not when high up and looking down. Well, we could bring it closer to reality by making realistically difficult to see the planes, instead of trying to match the trigonometry of the apparent sizes of objects.

I'm very much interested in realism, it's just a difference of what we're considering realism to be. Your approach is that it should be realistic in terms of process. Turn your head around by tilting your head a little and let trackIR amplify that movement. Then focus into a distance by moving the zoom slider. None of this is realistic, but it is simulating a real world process. What I'm interested in is a realism of difficulty. In real world, I don't need to focus into a distance to catch a glimpse of an airplane that's 3 miles away. I don't need to fight trackir jitter, I don't need to tilt my entire head to follow the airplane, and the airplane isn't made out of a tiny pixel that's jumping from position to position 60 or 144 times per second. In real world, people are using their actual eyeballs to track an actual object, and as multiple people here report and as common sense would suggest, it is much easier to do this in real world than in DCS. Therefore, for me, DCS is not realistic in terms of experience. And I'd argue that DCS is going more for the realism of difficulty, not the realism of process. An example of this would be key bindings. In the real airplane, you cannot keybind a switch into a convenient position. Why is it allowed in DCS then? Why aren't we moving every single switch including the throttle, stick and pedals with our mouse only? That's because we want a realism of difficulty, not realism of process.

Ok, tell me how do I zoom in and keep track of the enemy in merge? The more you zoom in, the more jiggly the trackir is, and past a certain point, it's not possible to keep track of moving target while you're yourself maneuvering. I guess we're just plain not getting anywhere in this discussion, WVR will still continue to be unplayable for most people who will either leave or do the ridiculous thing and buy a 1080p monitor, add reshade and drop their graphics, so that antialiasing isn't bluring out the pixels. Or, I use, as you suggest, labels. Wait, what are those labels you're talking about? Have you ever seen labels in real life? I thought you want realism. Aren't they kind of like sprites? Yes they are, except they are implemented badly, they have text and color and they are visible even when the airplane is under me. How about a greyscale dot as a label that disappears if I don't have a line of sight?

Ok, I did some test and to my surprise, it's actually visible much more than I expected. This is absolute perfect conditions, blue skies above sea, 7k altitude, 34 inch 1440p OLED monitor. So, to my surprise, yes, they do actually render up to 27 miles, didn't test more. I have 12 airplanes, distances are about: 1 1.7 3.1 5.8 8.5 11.2 14 16.6 19.37 22 24.8 27.5 Everything done with a paused game, still image, no trackIR, using mouse to change view, knowing exactly where they are. Max zoom, eyeballs 10cm off the screen: I could find all lof them. The last 3 are extremely, extremely hard to spot, I have to give my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the brightness differences, and like faint stars, I can not look at them directly. Max zoom, regular viewing distance from monitor: I can see 14 miles when directly looking, and some sprinkles past it that I can only see in periferal vision, but not when looking at them directly. With a lesser but still very high zoom, roughly hud sized I can clearly see 3 miles with a faint dot on 5.8 miles. With zoom in such a way that I see bottom of MFDs and top of the HUD in F16: 1.7 miles, very faint dot on 3.1 Full zoom-out: Dot on 1 mile, faint dot on 1.7 mile. I had to crop the images due to the size limit. The first is full zoom, the third one is zoomed to the HUD size, the second one is zoomed so that I see both the MFDs and the HUD. So, in a realistic scenario, I could zoom in as far as seeing both MDFs and a hud. Anything past that, the TrackIR becomes too sensitive and jittery, and I won't see anything. Which means, my effective spotting distance would be about 3 miles, in perfect visual conditions, I could perhaps just about get some glimpses of a dot. 3 miles is just about the distance of 2 airplanes in a 2-circle. If there's a cloud, terrain, or the TrackIR moves in an unexpected way, I lose sight.

What distance does it become a single pixel? Can you see a single pixel on 4k?

Don't hold your breath, this has been broken for years, and with the current sentiment of pure denial, it doesn't seem to be moving anywhere.

So, either it magically fixed itself without anybody doing anything about it, or the users who just weren't being listened to for years possible either dropped their resolution, or moved on from WVR combat or moved on from DCS period. People aren't going to sit around and complain forever only to be ignored and accused of having skill issues. You see targets 10 miles away? Ok, either you're an exception, or this issue possibly doesn't affect 4k as much as it was predicted, or something else is at play. No, it's not a skill issue, the thing does not render!!! The problem we're having in this discussion is that you just straight up don't believe me. I'll take some screenshots in the evening and see what's the limit in 1440p.

And if you can't see the targets at all, that sorta defeats the purpose of playing this game. Do you understand that I just can not do dogfighting with the current rendering? The game is unplayable, the Combat in Digital Combat Simulator just isn't implemented for my display, it fails to deliver, it refuses to work, it does not simulate the thing it's supposed to simulate. The current rendering system does not allow for modern day dogfight on 1440p monitor with antialiasing. I'm saying that the airplanes as they render now, they render too small on 1440p, and your counter is that they used to be way too big, therefore the current size is fine. Then don't render it as huge at egregious range, render it as appropriately sized sprites at appropriate distance! It's really not rocket science! So, you agree that rendering the airplane too small is possible, that's what's happening today. Rendering the plane too large is also possible, that's what used to be the case when DCS had sprites. But despite airplanes having the ability to be too large and too small, your belief is that having them in between is impossible? Why would that be?

Sadly, this got lost, but this would be great.

Worse for who? For me, the current state of things is neither realistic, nor playable. Hard to see how this could get any worse. Well, maybe it could if I got a 4k display. With properly sized sprites for different resolutions, zooms and distances the issue of "too big" of an airplane should not be a thing. There's an alternative option: let's just temporarily put a 9km hard limit on render distance for anybody, including 1080p players, so that it's fair for two weeks. Everybody will hate it, nobody will be able to dogfight, the stream of complaints will possibly crash the dcs forum, but you'll see the issue getting resolved pretty damn quick.

If they lower their resolution, they get less pixels, don't they. I'm not sure what you're suggesting, do you think this should not get fixed? First of all, it's not just the pixel size that's the problem, it's that AA washes it out, plus there are some other bugs that make the pixel intermittently disappear in certain ranges and zoom levels. Only then we'll see how much effect the pixel density actually has. As it is now, it's just unusable for me. All you have to do to win dogfight against me is to merge at mach 1 - after quarter turn, you just won't exist on my screen even if I was staring straight at you. I can do some tests later today, but if it's anything like that video - 55km visual range in 1080p vs 9km visual range in 1440p, then I really fail to see how somebody could defend this state of things.

On 1080p, sure. On 1440p, 3px is still pretty damn hard to see. On 4k, 3px is still smaller than 1px on 1080. This has to be adjusted for resolution, we should not be counting pixels here, it has to be relative to the resolution. Here's a video somebody made, it's from 4 years ago, so it may be bit different today, but it shows the issue well: TL-DW: viggen is clearly visible from 50+km on 1080p, but the same viggen was intermittently spotted at 9km on 1440p.

I think we should return to sprites. Yes, sprites used to be too big, but the fix to sprites that are too big is to make them smaller, not to scrap the whole thing. If we want to render tiny distant targets, we have to render them after any anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, etc. Which means, sprites are the perfect solution for that, it's what sprites are - bmp images pasted over anything else on a screen. They used to be too big and they rendered at too far of a distance -> fix the size and maximum render distance, don't throw the baby with the bathtub. Or better, once it reaches the max distance, only render flashes of light dependent of the aspect of the target and angle of the sun and an observer. Seeing an occasional flash of reflection of the sun from a canopy glass at 50nm is pretty realistic. There's plenty of room for improvement, and whether it's done by dynamically generated sprites or 3d rendering that's separate and pasted over the AA scene or whatever other technique, I don't really care, but the way it is now is just totally game-breaking for any sort of visual combat. At 5-ish miles, there should be a transition between the sprite and a 3d rendered model, but that transition also has to be handled well. As it is now, the transition from 1 pixel to full render just makes the airplane disappear in VR and higher res screens in certain distances and zoom levels. I know that lot of people can see airplanes at 20-ish miles when they zoom in on 1080p. I could not the airplane at 5 miles at 1440p, same for ground targets, which is why I only fly aerobatics, I just don't own an old enough monitor to play any sort of combat, and frankly, it would feel really bloody dumb if I had to buy lower res monitor just to see other airplanes in DCS. If I do a dogfight and both of us enter the merge a bit fast, when we're the furthest away from each other, the target disappears for me - both in VR and in 1440p ultrawide. I know the target's there, I know that the target will eventually appear if I correctly predict where it's going to be, but for a while there, I can't keep visual because the visual just plain doesn't render, or at best renders as 1 pixel on a monitor that's not really meant to have individual pixels distinguishable. Paradoxically, with all the 1 pixel rendering weirdness, the airplane is often visible when my nose is touching the monitor only when I zoom out in game. When zooming in, the black pixel disappears at certain distances, which makes even less sense. It's a bit better in VR for me, but only if I scale down the pixel density and remove all AA. The whole point of modern "retina" and 4k displays is that the pixels are so small that you don't see individual pixels, which makes the DCS decision to render a single pixel rather nonsensical. Yes, sprites make the airplanes bigger than in reality, which is unrealistic, but labels are way less realistic than that, and there's currently no way to spot without labels on 1440p+ and AA on. So, yes please, we do need this fixed - losing a visual on an airplane 5 miles away against blue sky is absolutely a game breaking bug, it literally takes the C out of DCS.

As in the title, the ball goes dark even though I'm almost on centerline. Tested planes: F18, F14 Tested carriers: Stennis, Forrestal, Abe How to reproduce: - Talk to a carrier - Approach direct - 1 to half a mile behind it, steer right to get off to the right of centerline Expected behavior: - Ball stays on Actual behavior: - Ball goes dark I don't know what the correct procedures are for a waveoff on too far right, but as it is now, it's almost impossible to touchdown right of the centerline, that seems a bit overzealous.

I mean the entire channel was off. I will try to make a track when my buddy comes on, since the issue does not present itself when single and jumping to the front. It may be intermittent as well, although we spent few hours trying to get to a config where the CPG could reliably control the helo, with all kinds of microswitch behaviour setting and it was basically always trimming the CPGs inputs regardless of yaw AP status.