Tvol

As I explained in my post, HDR effects in games do nothing to increase the dynamic range or contrast of any frames. You're already maxed-out on that without it. What it does is dynamically adjust the contrast and luminance of the entire frame to attempt to fit as much of the important bits (or rather, the parts that the engine thinks are the important bits) in the dynamic range of the monitor. If you get a bright explosion, the entire scene will get reduced in luminance so details of the explosion aren't lost. Again, when it comes to getting the most out of your display, games already do that. You don't need HDR. HDR is just digital fakery that only works reasonably well half the time. Most of the time it'll screw you out of details you want to see, mainly because it doesn't work like your eyes do (your eyes will adjust to see maximum detail of whatever you're focusing on without damage from bright light sources; HDR effects have no idea what you're focusing on, they just guess).

Or your eyesight. Someone with tritanopia might have trouble distinguishing between the HUD's default green and blues, though that's pretty rare (1% of the male population). Someone with dueteranomaly (most common, 6% of males) has less sensitivity to the green spectrum than normal. Tritanomaly would also do it (blue sensitivity shifted toward green), but that's exceedingly rare (0.01% of the population). Turn off HDR, see if that works. It's extremely unlikely that this is the case in real-world applications, principally because the contrast ratio of even the best monitors for the task (and I guarantee you aren't playing with one, because those monitors are usually limited to refresh rates of 30Hz or less) absolutely pale in comparison to what the eye can perceive. It's easy to understand roughly using photography terminology. In photography, the principal measure used for differences in luminosity are stops. One stop = twice as much light. Most IPS displays are limited to a contrast ratio of about 8 stops. The human eye can perceive 16-20 stops (I may be overestimating that; memory's a bit sketchy), easily. (Incidentally HDR photographs, at least the data used to make them, has even more data than that, landing at around 32 stops of contrast on average. So...yeah...we are way, way better at taking images of things than we are at reproducing them. Odd.) In real life, I suspect pilots just ramp-up the brightness of the HUD so they can see it over the surrounding environment. Those things use fairly powerful light sources; the latest generations even use lasers. They were almost certainly all purpose-built to overpower daylight reflections from clouds. Even the HUDs in cars are able to be seen by the driver easily in daylight. So the main issue here is the limitations of the displays we're using. HDR in games isn't true high dynamic range by any stretch of the imagination. What the game engine is doing is dynamically adjusting the total luminance of the entire scene up or down to fit most of it within the display's ability to, erm, display. Incidentally, this can make HDR a really, really undesirable feature in competitive gaming where loss of shadow detail can be extremely detrimental. It's also why many games still give-up on HDR wholesale and stick to gamma adjustments made by the player in settings (which also has the handy effect of compensating for the player's own ability to distinguish between luminance, which can vary; and no, gamma is not the same as brightness). Can the issue be fixed if it's indeed caused by HDR? Maybe. Probably not the way you might be hoping for. One quick fix that comes to mind is to darken the environment so that the HUD is always the brightest thing on it's part of the frame, even when extremely bright objects are filling most of the frame (that's more-or-less HDR in a nutshell: whatever takes up the most of the screen gets priority, with some tweaks to make it less garish and the effect more subtle). The problem there would be that whenever you pointed your nose at a patch of cloud in daylight, the environment would noticeably change, an effect which can be extremely jarring. It might even look kinda, off, because it is. It's not how our eyes work. Without having any real tangible information about your settings though, let alone the display you're using, all I can offer is the above guess work based on the assumption that you're using HDR and that's the root cause. I'd lean toward the use of HDR since the problem is clear from the screen shot. (That or your eyes aren't normal and that's why you can't see the green on blue, but that'd be pretty improbable.) And that I'm playing with an iMac 27" IPS display without HDR and have had no issues (and I have normal colour vision).

If I recall correctly, it should be: C:\Users%USERNAME%AppData\Local\DCS

I never said space was "at a premium". Nor did I even suggest that the issue here was lack of space. FYI there are 50GB of free space on my Win7 partition. The issue is that DCS will write a really big-ass "temporary" file (but really, they're rather permanent), and NTFS is still just as stupid when it comes to writing files as it was when it was first invented, sticking that one large file into many non-contiguous sectors because it dumbly starts at the beginning of the drive and tries to write to every free one along the way. The result is the temp files get really fragmented as soon as they're written (sometimes in excess of thousands of fragments).

I dunno if anyone else has noticed, but when playing in multiplayer, DCS creates some truly massive "temporary" files. These files don't get cleaned-up when quitting (or if they do, very rarely), and being so massive, they tend to get horribly fragmented. Now, I use OS X for just about everything other than gaming, which neatly avoids file fragmentation almost entirely by simply not dumbly writing any file in the first free space it finds (HFS+ is just ridiculously superior to NTFS in so many ways, and this is one). So, I'm not used to seeing fragmentation so bad, so quickly. I use Smart Defrag to fix the problem after DCS creates these "temporary" files, but I was wondering if there is anything I can do that'd be preventative? (And don't say "buy an SSD"; I don't have money for that.)

Good job assuming and reading way too much into what I actually said. http://www.facepalm.de/images/facepalm.jpg I mean, seriously, you're trying to pass-off what you said as if it were somehow moderate. No, you said, very clearly: "I hope they add so many trees our PCs explode" That certainly implies ultra-high levels of fidelity. What are you asking for? Are you asking for updates to the graphics engine such that it performs better and will still be scalable and accessible to most if not all people still playing, or are you asking for (as your words definitely imply) the game to be updated to a point where "people's PCs explode"; a point at which, it certainly sounds like you're saying that the equivalent of a pair of Titan Blacks wouldn't even cope. If that's what you're asking for, then you're being stupid. The game, at peak hours, has maybe a few dozen people online over all the servers. Any improvements, as I said, need to be scalable. Losing even a handful of dedicated players because of a jump in minimum requirements would be quite noticeable. No amount of being snarky and self-important, or telling people "get a better computer" is going to change that. Guess what, not everyone is rolling in money. If a developer doesn't design for that, as you clearly are suggesting now that they shouldn't, then they will fail.

There's no better sure-fire way to kill your community than to update the game's requirements so that only the people with the best hardware can run it. If that's what they're doing, they're doing it wrong. And collision isn't a graphics thing. O.o Collision calculations are more-or-less always done on the CPU.

The A-10C is $50 USD, the F-15C is $10 USD. I'd say your expectations are flawed.

That supports what I said. O.o

The two are not mutually exclusive, and it's somewhat funny that you're suggesting that is so. DCS absolutely has elements that borrow from games, like abstractions in the flight models, to abstractions of systems used in planes like the F-15C in-game, and other things like the Game Avionics Mode. Just like any other game, it has its own agreed-upon rules, and even has a competitive aspect in multiplayer. Hell, if DCS is just a simulator and no one, including me, plays it for the purpose of entertainment, I'll eat my hat. The Oxford English Dictionary certainly has my back on this one. Video game. Game (see #2). But that's certainly one heck of a tangent. Do tell, was your post meant to suppose that the highest-quality graphics possible are necessary for a simulator game like DCS? If so, would it be acceptable to devote time instead to the graphical detail of minutiae like trees instead of development of the more gamey parts like multiplayer, the flight model, or instrument behaviour?

O.o General rule of game design: People want games, not graphics.

F-15C checklists and references here: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/722011/

No, you aren't. The HUD starts counting from 0.

You can input the ILS frequency directly on the higher fidelity aircraft, but not on the F-15C.

Determine which airport you want to land at, contact ATC. Once you're cleared for a runway, cycle through ILSN targets until the course on the HSI matches the runway, and then use the F10 map and ruler to make sure that the distance to it reported by the HUD is close to what it is on the map.