HornedGod

+1. ED should definitely integrate it into the base game. I find it strange they didn't do this from the outset.

I did some single player testing. The sprite sizes are definitely smaller than in 1.5.1, maybe back to the initial sizes. As a test, I edited the Fw-190 Dogfight instant action mission and added extra P-51s that travel perpendicular to the player's initial direction well out in front. If I use the Large setting then everything is fine, the sprites are always showing. Right from the start of the mission you can see the P-51 heading straight for you as well as the ones moving laterally. If I use the Medium or Small settings then the P-51 heading straight towards me has no sprite and only becomes visible once its 3D model is rendered. The other aircraft show as sprites (even though I have placed them further away than the initial pony heading straight at me). As those aircraft begin to turn towards me they start blinking in and out, vanishing for a few frames to a second. My hunch is that the aspect facing of the aircraft is being taken into account. Something is definitely not right though. I would still expect the minimum sprite size to be shown at the very least, but it's not happening with these settings. I've attached my quick and dirty test mission. Fw190 Vis Test.miz

So most likely the ACG server has it set to small. The fact that sprites would be visible then vanish for a few seconds (2-15) and then reappear is new and was not in the previous version.

Model visibility sprites are blinking on and off, which makes it rather hard to keep track of a target. Noticed playing on the ACG multiplayer server using 1.5.2. Model visibility was set to medium. Sprites were noticeably smaller than in 1.5.1 (I assume the pixel sizes have been adjusted again).

How often is this sort of upgrade of the game going to happen in the future? IMHO not a lot. This would have been nice to have now but is pretty much a pointless request at this point.

At one time flight sims were one of the biggest segments of the gaming market. I doubt those glory days will ever return. If we do get significantly more people into the genre then there will be the increased chance of hacking and trolling. As long as the community policies itself well I don't think we'll ever get to be a wretched hive of villainy and scum that you'll often find in popular FPS games. I don't think any of us are asking for things to be dumbed down any way either. Outside research, reading manuals, watching training or information videos, reading historical books are all part of this hobby that make it something more than just a pure game. But all those come after the thrill of flying has got its hooks into you. I want to see the cliff wall that is the current level of difficulty turned into a series of steps that allows newbies to slowly climb to the level that allows for the fullest enjoyment of this sim. Just because the few other sims on the market don't do anything doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It just means they're all equally bad and that is not something that should be accepted, especially by the devs of those games. They're shooting themselves in the foot. At least one dev out there is trying something new which I wholeheartedly approve of (IL2BOS's mouse control). There are three general areas that ED will be focusing on in their overall company strategy: 1/ Attracting new players 2/ Keeping current players happy 3/ Attracting back lapsed and former players The steady stream of new planes and the imminent release of NTTR is a direct play to #2, current players. The upgrade to 1.5 (and soon 2.0), from everything that has been released so far (DX11, merging of GUI and game executables, MP stability) are key to #3, getting lapsed players interested in trying the game out again to see if what turned them off before has been fixed. It also lays the new fountain for more planes, theatres, supporting new hardware, VR, etc. which is important for all categories of players. The one area that they haven't released any concrete information or shown as part of the 1.5 beta is how they plan to focus on #1, making the game stickier for new players (i.e making them play for longer with a view to getting them to spend money on a plane or campaign, etc.) I work in the MMO space and we're always focusing of the 5s: what kind of experience do we want the player to have after 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years, etc. We have to think of both the short, medium and long term of our game. Which is very similar to how ED should be thinking.

Ideas to help ease in newbies: 1/ When the game is run for the first time have a tutorial that walks the player through creating a pilot profile, explains what planes come with the base game and asks which one they'd like to try out first. This then loads that plane up and starts the tutorial for that plane. 2/ Base plane tutorials need more upfront instructions: setting up flight stick/controls (defaults for all the main sticks out there, etc), how to restart/repeat instructions, etc. 3/ Since the P-51 already has decent tutorials, and it has guns (an important part of a combat simulator), I'd add it as one of the default planes that is free with the game. Just add more initial instruction on game and control setup before the cold start tutorial. I think the P-51 is a better choice too in that DCS should be putting its best foot forward when making a first impression and that should be a plane with a fully interactive cockpit. Nothing against the Su-25, I just think the P-51 makes a better first impression and should be pushed more as the first plane seen. 3/ Put the Tutorial option at the top of the list on the main menu. 4/ Have more tutorials, especially ones that gives examples of BFM. Make tutorials a mandatory part of 3rd party planes (full release), along with an easy campaign. 5/ Have a tutorial or on screen prompts for first time users that try to join a multiplayer game. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen chat requests in a MP from someone who can't figure out how to select a plane once they've joined a server. I'd love to see more, such as TacView integrated directly into the game, bookmarks/save points in missions that players could go back to quickly without needed to go back to the main menu and restart a mission (especially useful in training missions), etc. but those are more for intermediate players. To start with ED should focus on the initial 60 minute experience of a newbie that tries DCS Free. I'm sure they have numbers from Steam on the number of people of who have installed the free game. I would not be surprised if the attrition rate is atrocious. Everything that could be done for more people to stick around helps us all, even if it takes away from planes and theatres in the short term.

With the upcoming release of DCS 2.0 there's a good chance that ED might actually spent some marketing dollars to announce the update and try to attract new players. But if all those new players hit the brick wall that is there right now it will have been money wasted. New players are not going to go to Youtube to watch tutorial videos or spent forever setting up their controls. I hope that ED does spent time and effort on making the ramp up for new players better; it really is the Achilles heel of the game right now and one that can be fixed. New players means more money for the game, more players in MP, more chance of new aircraft and theatres. It's a win all around. But when new players try the game they have to be eased in. They have to see the potential and understand it's complexity without being turned off by the difficulty. I'm not a fan of doing this via the arcade mode, but rather through more aids that automate things as much as possible in the full simulation mode. These aids can then be disabled over time. The game should explicitly highlight that theses aids are on to new players and what they do to help (and where the settings can be changed if desired).

You've just shown that you don't understand vicx's post and how the LOD models were being used for visibility purposes. The LOD models are larger then their higher poly counterparts. In this case, size does matter.

SharpeXB, you've made your point numerous times in this thread already. IMHO you're repeating yourself so much that you're coming across as a troll. If anyone from ED is reading this thread for input on this feature they've read you loud and clear. No need to beat a dead horse. You've made your point, how about now letting others offer suggestions on how to fix and improve the feature without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What is there now is a great start and pretty much all I need for my WWII aeriel combat needs with my setup. For groundpounders, those with VR, etc. there is still room for improvement. Until such time as to when you have first hand experience of the feature (seeing it in motion is also different then seeing static screeenshots of it), how about you take a break.

It's a percentage. You expect people to play at 640x480 to abuse this? At 1080p or above it won't make a perceptable difference if done correclty. They set the max allowed. If I prefer to have it set at 0.5% but the only server I like to fly on has it set at a max of 0.3% I can live with that. I'm sure server admins would prefer the ability to set these options to reflect the kind of experience and players they want on their server. WW2 servers might want higher values than modern jets. On A10 or helicopter servers the grount target settings will be important. If server admins are unhappy with their populations they can adjust the settings to see if it draws more/different players. More options is almost never a bad thing (unless it leads to trivial differences or hard to see effects). I forgot to also add: 6/ Potentially add a model visibility ONLY/zoom ONLY/Both option (again with server side control) I still find myself using zoom occassioally even now I have model visibility on. I use zoom when the target I'm tracking is close enough to be a regular 3D model but I want to either see the marking on the aircraft (to tell if's its a player or AI on some WW2 servers) or if the aircraft is hugging the ground and I want to be able to track it better against ground clutter. This normally only involves zooming in slightly, so potentially only allow a much more limited zoom in MV only setting.

+1 It's highly likely that the cockpit rendering has a custom pipeline so I'd hope that this is feasible.

Adding options is generally easy in a game (I speak from experience). What ED needs to do is provide plenty of options for the Model Visibility stuff. What I'd like to see overall is: 1/ Instead of the current off/small/medium/large options it should be turned into a more precise value. I know on the backend that each of these values is tied to a number of pixels that the imposter sprite renders at. Instead of a fixed pixel size, the imposter size should be a percentage of vertical resolution (or horizontal if user is crazy enough to play in a portrait mode). This would level the playing field with regard to 1080p, 4k, etc. 10 pixels (current large option) on a 1080p montior has a vertical percentage of 0.9259%. So let's say a slider was allowed to set any value between 0.0 and 1% (with increments of 0.05% to allow for 20 ticks on a slider). 2/ Allow for different settings for ground and air targets (sea targets as a third?) 3/ Allow for VR settings (i.e. both ground and air in addition to regular monitor ground and air). 4/ Put back in the alphaExp transparency usage (or make it optional too) 5/ Allow all of the above to be gated on the server. Server sets the max allowable settings for monitor ground and air, VR ground and air, etc. When you join a server, you use the server max allowed if your local setting is larger. IMHO this setting is great. All ED has to do is take it to completion by adding in more user control and server gating. Anything I missed?

I played again later and the issue was not present. So repro is not 100%. I'll try and provide more information if it happens again.

In another thread SithSpawn stated that the new large setting is aimed at VR usage. With the slightly lower res of VR displays it may indeed need to be that large. The Small setting is akin to the previous Enlarged option. I found that to be perfectly usable in helping highlight far away contacts without making it immersion breaking. So, the only real bug here is that you need to restart to see your change take effect.

Agreed. Color coded names and icons would aid being able to quickly parse the events. Not blue though. The current blue results in not being able to see the blue text most of the time due to its poor contrast with blue skies. Also, the grammar in the new event messages needs a pass. Eveyone is 'on' an aircraft instead of in them. And the kill messages rarely list the weapon type used at all, so they just trail off with nothing at the end of the sentence.

Turns out the new option only applies when you quit and restart the game. I logged it as a bug. New Large setting is almost too much!

So, it seems the new settings do work. It's just that they only apply after you do a full exit and restart of the whole game. Whew, thank goodness. I've only tried the Large setting so far, and I think it might even be slightly overdone. You can clearly see the orientation of planes from a bazillion miles. Pretty sure that the fact it only takes after a full game restart is a bug. Can we get that one logged and fixed?

Got this crash again with 1.5.1. Game was cycling map on ACG server. 05622.492 INFO EDCORE: # -------------- 20151109-034316 -------------- 05622.492 INFO EDCORE: � 05622.492 INFO EDCORE: # C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION at 170B36FA 00:00000000 05622.497 INFO EDCORE: 00000000 00000000 0000:00000000 05622.502 INFO EDCORE: 170B36FA 00A3EF30 0000:00000000 ??4DynamicAtmosphere@Weather@@QEAAAEAV01@AEBV01@@Z()+116A 05622.502 INFO EDCORE: 170C7D10 00A3F020 0000:00000000 ?UpdateCloudsUsingDynamicAtmosphere@moMeteoDispatcherImpl@@IEAAXAEBVPosition3@@M@Z()+2C0 05622.503 INFO EDCORE: 170C6F8D 00A3F050 0000:00000000 ?OnNextFrame@moMeteoDispatcherImpl@@UEAAXAEBVPosition3@@PEAVFog@edcg@@@Z()+DD 05622.504 INFO EDCORE: 16CCC3E8 00A3F510 0000:00000000 ?Render@SceneManager_Implement@@UEAAXXZ()+388 05622.504 INFO EDCORE: 9317DB5E 00A3F580 0000:00000000 05622.504 INFO EDCORE: 93181592 00A3F5B0 0000:00000000 05622.505 INFO EDCORE: 93197904 00A3F5E0 0000:00000000 05622.505 INFO EDCORE: 93197854 00A3F610 0000:00000000 05622.505 INFO EDCORE: 93241E2C 00A3FCC0 0000:00000000 05622.506 INFO EDCORE: 93243CB5 00A3FD00 0000:00000000 05622.508 INFO EDCORE: 35EA2D92 00A3FD30 0000:00000000 BaseThreadInitThunk()+22 05622.508 INFO EDCORE: 372B9F64 00A3FD80 0000:00000000 RtlUserThreadStart()+34 DynamicAtmosphere2.zip

The new option isn't the same as the previous one from what I can tell. Instead of blurry far away dots you now just have a single black dot. It doesn't look to be switching to a UI bitmap of the far away object, instead it's still a full 3d model that maybe just has its LOD model scaled up. If so, I thought that was was specifcally not chosen because it didn't give what was desired. Which is certainly what I'm seeing because I can't see anything anymore, where the previous Model Visibility option was great. Bring back the previous way!

Now that the chat window shows events again, it's apparent how much event spam there can be when you're on a MP server with a significant number of people (20+). I would like one of the following two options: 1/ Two tabs: one for event messages (take offs, landings, kills, etc) and the other for player entered chat 2/ Tickboxes at bottom of chat window to filter on/off the various types of event messages. With the large number of event messages player chat can rapidly disappear off the most recent items (sure you can scroll to see them but if you never knew one was there to see in the first place because it moved off so fast...).

Repro steps: 1/ Select Multiplayer on start screen 2/ Let server list get populated and then click on the star to mark a server as a favorite 3/ Click on the star for that same server again The star stays selected. There is no way to unselect a starred server.

What do people think of the new Model Enlargement option versus the old Model Visibility one? My take: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=152127 tl;dr: bring back the Model Visibility option.

So with 1.5.1.46722.87 it looks like the Model Visibility option has been removed and a new Model Enlargement one added to the Gameplay section. To my eyes, the new setting, even at Large, is nowhere near as good as the previous Model Visibility. The old (sic) way had the distant 3D model replaced with a scaled and alphaed billboard, and you could always spot the transition between the billboard back to the 3D model. It wasn't ideal but the greater clarity at range was very much appreciated, especially in a warbird. The new setting looks to keep the 3D model active all the time but scale the LOD version (?). A far away aircraft is a solid dot instead of the blurry bunch of pixels with the previous method. Why the change?

Also new is the broken cockpit glass effect when you get shot up.