Why485

Full list of weapons affected. IMO this is a very positive change and I'm shocked ED didn't announce this in the patch notes or newsletter. This is something the community has been asking for, for many years, and would have been appreciated by a great many players. AN_M30A1 AN_M57 AN_M64 AN_M65 AN_M66 M_117 Mk_81 Mk_82 MK_82AIR MK_82SNAKEYE Mk_83 Mk_84 GBU_8_B GBU_10 GBU_12 HB_F4E_GBU15V1 GBU_15_V_1_B GBU_16 GBU_31 GBU_31_V2 GBU-38 GBU-54_V_1B

Same thing has been happening to me, exactly as reported.

With the Germany 80s map, if we are going to run 80s themed missions, these options are going to be more important than ever. While not perfect, disabling JHMCS and datalink can be used to emulate earlier versions of the jets for a more 80s flavor.

As of 2.9.11.4686 this is still an issue. This gif is showing dots bumping up against the maximum render distance of objects (~80km) but the dots are visible because they in front of clouds. This is identical to what previous gifs of the issue show, just re-affirming that this is still an issue and nothing has changed.

It would be very funny and on brand for the fog to make dots visible from 50 miles away.

This has never been communicated.

I played back the tracks for these and the differences are dramatic. The tracks with no ground units, all these aircraft dots are visible: The track with the ground units, almost all aircraft are completely gone: For reference, these are my graphics settings:

What if instead of dots they drew some kind of appropriately sized plane shaped sprite?

A bug in the game for over a year now is that dots in front of clouds are rendered no matter how far away they are. They can be 50 miles away and they will still render as very dark objects. ED has not acknowledged this as a bug or a feature.

As of 2.9.9.2280 this is still an issue.

Excellent post. I agree on all points. The inconsistent level of fidelity as to how aircraft are modeled (since every plane must reinvent every wheel), as well as the lack of any coherency in the planeset since the "departure" of Belsimtek, has had far reaching consequences on what missions can be created and designed, particularly in a MP context. E.g. it's really incredible that DCS is the first flight sim (AFAIK) to be able to create missions set during the Falklands War, but totally lacks the assets or flyable aircraft necessary to make it even remotely accurate. The only thing I have to add is that I do think for a majority of DCS players, dropping guided bombs on Toyotas from 20k feet is peak gameplay, and that's who I think ED is appealing to with recent map releases, especially the Iraq one. Unfortunately, the players who are about a wider variety of older aircraft with peer opponents seem to be a vocal minority.

You have to already know that a bad poll like this is going to produce inaccurate results, right? The worst thing I could do is actually vote in your poll, because it's not even going to give the answer you're looking for. It's poorly thought out on multiple levels.

For 2D, nothing changed, so for a 2D user I'm okay with it (very flawed, but they are passable), so none of the options really work for me either. It would have made more sense to add more options or to specify that this was VR focused, since I think those are the responses you're really after.

To review, these are the iterations of dots we've gone through. 1.5.5 - The original dots: They were 1px dots drawn on every object that was currently being rendered. Many complain about it being very difficult to spot targets at any range, especially those with higher resolution displays, but some notice that if you drop your resolution suddenly you can see targets out to 30-40 miles. 2.9.1. - Improved Spotting Dots V1: ED's implementation of the dot spotting mod. The main difference is that the size of the dot scales with resolution to try and maintain a baseline level of visibility across different monitors. The ED implementation has all the features of the mod, plus the addition of the fade distance of the dot being adjusted based on the size of the object. E.g. a B-52's dot is visible at 30 miles, while an F-5's ~5 miles. Unfortunately this also introduced the cloud rendering bug, which allows dots to be visible from much further than intended. 2D reaction to this patch was mostly positive. VR reaction to this was mixed. For headsets running low res, this looked very bad ("giant bricks"), but for high res headsets, this scaled well and looked fine. 2.9.7 - Improved Spotting Dots V2: VR rendering was changed so that if a VR headset is in use, dots were forced to be drawn at 1px at all times. For headsets running low resolutions, this looks pretty good and anecdotally seems to roughly match 2D spotting. VR reaction to this was mostly positive, because a 1px dot looks good on most common headsets. However, for people running high resolutions, 1px is too small to be noticeable. This seems the be where and why the divide is occurring, as following this patch, I noticed that the players very vocally having difficulty with visibility seem to be the ones with boutique and very high res headsets. 2.9.8 - Improved Spotting Dots V1 (Revision): As was stated by ED, they have reverted to V1, with the minor change of dots being affected by motion blur now. (Which IMO, is not good). 2D is unchanged, however VR reaction to this is mostly negative, because most players with VR, using the most common headsets, are back to seeing bricks again. Players with high res boutique headsets are once again fine, but the average VR user is upset. It's important to remember in this discussion that, especially when it comes to VR, everybody is seeing different things. Not only is the efficacy of a pixel wildly dependent on the resolution of a headset, but also on the display technology, lenses, and the layers of software ran on top of the headset for various performance or usability reasons. This is why, and I've held this opinion ever since they were introduced many years ago, that a pixel based solution will inherently be a problematic. In a 2D setting these problems are at least somewhat manageable since the main (but not only) difference is resolution, but VR is far more complex. If ED wants to keep this setting locked down, they will have to create unique profiles for every headset to match some baseline. Based on ED's commentary ("Currently we are working on the advanced functionality for spotting dots rendering which will depend on VR hardware type and its properties"), this seems to be the direction they are going.

The only difference I've noticed this patch for 2D is that dots are now affected by motion blur, which means you should turn it off to avoid smearing them. For 2D they are otherwise unchanged and in a relatively good place. Almost all complaints seem to be coming from the VR crowd right now due to the more complex and not as comparable display technology involved.

This never went away. It's been a persistent problem since the dots were introduced.

As of 2.9.8.1107 this is still an issue.

The official line from Wags and 9L has always been that this would interfere with radar RCS calculations, which is not an explanation I buy but that's what they've said for years. The straight from the horse's mouth answer is that such a solution is "heresy" because spotting in DCS is already excellent and better than real life. If you have a problem with that, you should buy a 4k monitor that is at least 32 inches big, preferably 40. The problem is clearly because of your hardware, and you should just turn on labels and zoom in if you don't want to buy a very large and high resolution monitor.

Absolutely deranged take. The funniest part about this is the completely faulty and incorrect assumption that visibility is the same across all VR headsets. E.g. Meta Quest headsets match 2D visibility fairly well. Are you going to ban Meta headsets from your server too?

This is how it was for so many years before and it was one of the longest running complaints the sim had, especially because it was the only sim on the market which did literally nothing to make the visibility of aircraft more realistic. It was awful and I don't want to go back. Dots are flawed, and not remotely my ideal solution, but it's better than nothing.

There are no server settings that affect the spotting dot system. Some servers however, do run with the dot labels which are totally independent of the spotting dots. E.g. Warbirds uses the dot neutral labels (draws a little period using the label system instead of full colored names), while Heatblur's Cold War and many servers have labels completely disabled.

What @Dallatorre is talking about, and the "transition area" that a lot of people complain about with the dots is how at close range dots will inelegantly be removed, leaving an aircraft too small to easily be seen underneath it. It looks strange, and has the ironic effect of planes further away being easier to see than near planes. This has been an issue ever since the dots were introduced, and even after they were updated, this hasn't changed because the changes don't affect the minimum range at which dots appear. A simple solution, and I think this is what Dallatore is suggesting, is to either make the dots disappear closer in, or not at all. Let the aircraft underneath the dot organically appear out of the dot rather than the dot just disappearing. This would completely eliminate that rough transition distance aircraft are too close to get a dot, but too far for them to be rendered in a way that makes them visible in DCS. The tradeoff here is that the distances at which you could identify a target would be reduced, since the dot is visible closer up, but by how much depends on many factors, and zooming in would clear up the image because that would make the aircraft larger on screen than the fixed pixel size dot. This is a very crude drawing/graph, but it's the easiest way I can visualize this without booting up DCS and taking screenshots. The precise distance this happens will depend on your field of view and the physical size of the object itself. This is not a problem unique to VR. At a mild zoom in 2D, I'd say this happens at roughly 1 to 3 miles, but again this distance will vary dramatically depending on FOV (VR uses far wider FOV than 2D) and the the model in question. It can happen that various things coincide (resolution, FOV, model, etc.) where the dot disappears at just the right time that the transition isn't noticeable, but I would say that for the majority of players this doesn't happen, and it shouldn't be on the players to figure out some perfect combination of hardware, graphics settings, third party VR rendering tools, etc. to get this right.

FYI, this patch changed nothing for 2D. I'm not sure what that patch note is referring to, because DLAA/TAA/DLSS have not changed in the slightest. See my post in the other spotting thread.

Today's patch notes say: However, this does not seem to be the case. Dots smear and blur post-patch in DLAA and TAA just the same as they did before the patch. This gif is using TAA. This is a screenshot (enlarged 3x) using DLAA. DLAA is fancy TAA, so the results are the same. Both will smear and blur dots and other small details/objects. It's inherent to how they work and makes them somewhat uniquely unsuited for a combat flight sim without some kind of special handling in the rendering pipeline.

This is good, thanks for sharing.