Why485

It's not as big as you think. This is 24 pixels, but only 6 pixels wide. It's important to remember that 24 pixels is the size at which the imposter starts to get drawn. All that means is that instead of drawing a model, you're getting an equivalent sized imposter sprite. The imposter sprite then scales down the same as the model would as the target gets further away or changes aspect. However, once it reaches the minsize (3 pixels for normal, 5 for enlarged) it stops scaling down and stays a constant size. This is 3 pixels This is what 5 pixels might look like This is actual size, and how big it will appear ingame. However it won't be as easy to see as this because the sprites are not (0, 0, 0) black. They are some lighter and transparent color interpolated from the sprite and downscaled. The other important fact about this being actual size is that depending on your resolution, those 5 pixels could be either very tiny, as it would be at 4k, or they could be huge, as they would be at something very low 1280x720. This is a more accurate representation, at actual size, of what a scaled down enlarged imposter might look like. Edit: And, just for the sake of completeness. Here is that above dot I created put in a screenshot so you can see it in context. I put one in the air, and one on the ground. Here's the cheat sheet. Here's that same screenshot, but taken at 1280x720 and displayed on a 1920x1080 "monitor" to show the difference in apparent size that happens when you change resolution.

I think the system as is, is fairly flawed because it's riding 100% on pixel sizes. It needs to be more complex than that in order for it to both make more logical sense and have a more consistent presentation across different hardware configurations.

Well, now that the cats out of the bag, I can post this picture. As much as I love being able to adjust the imposter system to what I feel is realistic, these settings must be locked down or else you can do such ridiculous things as this. Look at the distances. I already talked to one of the ED testers about this at length last week, a day after 1.5 dropped, and presumably he's already filed an internal bug report for it. It's a pretty serious issue with terrible repercussions if ED does not lock down that lua file. I'd hate to have all servers force the visibility option off because it can be exploited like this.

They're rendered out sprites of the plane in question. If you zoom into the sprite, this is what it looks like. This is why you can still make out the silhouette and aspect of a plane when it's using the imposter sprite. Note that you won't see this if you zoomed into the plane ingame. If you did, you would make the plane take up more pixels and it would switch back to the model.

With the way resolution affects the spotting system, it's actually the other way around. If running equivalent settings aside from resolution, a smaller resolution will see much larger dots. For parity, the higher resolutions would require larger dots as 1 pixel at 2560x1440 is much smaller than 1 pixel at something like 1366x768. Enlarged (2560x1440) Enlarged (1366x768)

The smoke looks awesome, and as far as I can tell doesn't even seem to have a big performance impact. I was disappointed with how short lived the smoke is, so it'd be great to have bigger and longer smoke trails. If it really does become a performance concern maybe it could be made optional?

The system works based on 2 values, a minsize and maxsize. When a plane takes up fewer pixels than maxsize, it starts drawing the imposter sprite over it. This imposter sprite will scale down with distance as the plane gets smaller until it hits the minsize. When the plane its drawing takes up less than minsize pixels, the imposter no longer scales down, and instead stays at a constant size. This is why you can see the imposter sprite from further away than the model by itself. The imposter sprites also don't flicker in the same way a model taking up 1-3 pixels would. They're sort of like blurry dots that change opacity instead of flickering.

I don't know if a specific radar causes this. I suspect it's the AMRAAMs but I have no evidence it's them specifically due to the unpredictability of online. When I get locked, the lock tone stays indefinitely on even after whatever was locking me is no longer locking. The lights will all go out, or start blinking, but the lock tone plays forever. If I turn off the RWR the tone goes away, but it comes back as soon as I turn it back on. Ditto with lowering the volume and then raising it. This might happen in SP as well, but I haven't done anything in SP yet where I've been locked. Edit: Woops, this should go under the Audio section.

This gets even worse when you turn on the cockpit lights, making it nearly impossible to see the ring.

I agree.

Off is the old rendering, plain and simple. Normal and enlarged both do the same thing, but with slightly different settings. When an object reaches a certain size on your screen, the game will draw an imposter sprite over the object. This sprite scales with distance until it reaches a minimum size where it stops getting smaller. That the sprite doesn't go below the minimum size is why you can see planes further away than before. The only difference between normal and enlarged is that enlarged has a slightly larger minimum size. Here's a comparison with Normal and Enlarged at 2560x1440 with 2X AA. There are F-15s at 2.5km, 5km, 10km, 15km, and 20km. I didn't take any screenshots with it off, but just pretend the planes aren't there if you want to know what it looks like on normal. It's important to note that what the settings look like will depend on your resolution. The lower your resolution, the larger the dots will appear compared to a larger resolution. The most "realistic" setting will depend on your resolution. I recommend just setting up a simple scenario like below and testing each setting to see which looks best to you. Enlarged Normal

In the new cockpit, the ring of lights that tell the radar strength are dim enough that it's very difficult to tell at a glance how many lights are lit up.

Off is the old rendering, plain and simple. Normal and enlarged both do the same thing, but with slightly different settings. When an object reaches a certain size on your screen, the game will draw an imposter sprite over the object. This sprite scales with distance until it reaches a minimum size where it stops getting smaller. That the sprite doesn't go below the minimum size is why you can see planes further away than before. The only difference between normal and enlarged is that enlarged has a slightly larger minimum size.

Here's a comparison with Normal and Enlarged at 2560x1440 with 2X AA. There are F-15s at 2.5km, 5km, 10km, 15km, and 20km. I didn't take any screenshots with it off, but just pretend the planes aren't there if you want to know what it looks like on normal. It's important to note that what the settings look like will depend on your resolution. The smaller your resolution, the larger the dots will appear compared to a larger resolution. Enlarged Normal

The model visibility is the one thing I was looking forward to most with 1.5. Overall, I think it works very well, but it has one major flaw. It's highly susceptible to changes in resolution. I did some testing last night because I was curious to break down how the scaling worked and how it represents fighters at different distances. I set up a scenario with F-15s out at 2.5km, 5km, 10km, 15km, and 20km. At first I was really happy with the results at my native resolution. The fighters were out there and easily visible, especially when silhouetted against the sky. I did not experiment enough to find the cutoff distance at which dots will no longer draw because I was soon distracted by another issue. I remembered Wags talking about this as if it was based on pixel sizes. The problem with this approach is that lower resolutions (or higher field of views) will cause the planes to take up less pixels, but have the effect of making them even bigger. So, I decided to test that. I was also curious what the difference between Normal and Enlarged was. Here's some comparison screenshots. All screenshots were taken with 2X AA. It's best if you open these in new tabs and flip back/forth between the tabs. That's where you can see the differences the best. Enlarged (2560x1440) Enlarged (1366x768) Normal (2560x1440) Normal (1366x768) There's a substantial difference in the size of the dots depending on your resolution. 2560x1440 dots have much more granularity and variety in their size with a very realistic feeling look on enlarged. 1366x768 dots on the other hand are much more uniform in size, but their opacity seems to be the defining characteristic in telling distance. This also means that the most "realistic" setting will depend on your resolution. This, I believe, easily explains the discrepancy in feedback. Those who run at lower resolutions will see a much bigger difference, and much bigger icons, than people who run at high resolutions. It has me considering running at lower than my native resolution to help with spotting. This is disconcerting though, and I honestly struggled with whether or not to post this because I worry now that servers will force this option off and remove 10 years of progress. Even if it flawed, I still would rather have it flawed than not at all.

Those are rendered out with render times likely on the order of hours for those videos. You're not going to see particle effects like that from anybody in a real time game for a long time. I guess you could use it as reference material for making an effect but to say "implement this", then point to a rendered out CGI video is a pretty ridiculous thing to say.

It's shown in some of the older screenshots and in some of the cutscene like marketing videos that have been put out. I haven't seen anything that looks like depth of field in gameplay videos.

Until only a few weeks ago, I was using a 24" 1920x1200 display. I've since upgraded to a 27" 2560x1440 one.

Agree with OP, a simple optional filtering/smoothing that could be added to any axis is a very useful tool for a great many reasons.

I haven’t played DCS for quite a while now. After updating my game I decided to jump right in on the 104th with my favorite plane and see what I can do. To my surprise, I managed to bag 2 kills during my play session. Not the most amazing flying, but still a ton of fun. uNvJAuJ986I

Believe me, I abuse the zoom axis to no end, but I really shouldn't have to the way I do. It shouldn't be so difficult to spot planes in the air, or tanks on the ground. It's not uncommon for players to lose visual of something that is literally maybe a km in front of them and that's ridiculous. We have reports from both civilian pilots and actual combat pilots, many of them, that say it is much more difficult to see objects in simulators than in real life. DCS should simulate what the pilot can see, as that's what's most true to life. If that means you have to make small compromises in rendering, then so be it. Why is DCS literally the only combat flight sim on the market both present and in the past that has no solution or no accounting for this problem? Think about that. Literally every other combat flight sim addresses this. All of them. Hell, even more casual games like War Thunder or combat flight sims on consoles (Energy Airforce/Over G Fighters) address this. If this was such a total nonissue as seemingly only the ED testers suggest, why would so many developers come up with solutions to it? DCS is simulation of flying combat missions in combat aircraft. Visibility is very large part of that, and it is in my opinion the area that DCS lacks the most. Above all other of its problems, it's the biggest one that prevents the game to be played the way it should be able to. It wasn't such a big deal in the LOMAC/FC days because all the planes involved had advanced radars to help work around for most of these issues, but now that DCS is featuring WWII, Korean era, and other aircraft with limited or no radars, being able to maintain visual on targets in a realistic way is more important than ever. What should the solution be? There's plenty of ways to tackle it and they've all been covered in detail in this thread. I have implemented distant scaling and dot systems for my own personal projects, as it's a subject that I am very passionate about. Frankly, I don't care which way ED decides to go because doing anything will be a huge improvement over what we have now. The last I heard, ED has finally changed their stance from "working as intended" to "we might maybe possibly consider thinking about wondering if we should do anything... but only after EDGE." At least it's progress, but this thread should show you that a great many people, the overwhelming majority if the poll is to be believed, think this is a real issue.

They are relevant to the discussion as they provide examples for what people are looking for.

Thats why you refresh this thread and the LNS forum at the same time.

Aircraft visibility is a massive, massive concern of mine and has been from the very beginning. DCS is the only combat flight sim on the market that does neither dots nor scaling to compensate for the fact that we're looking through a monitor to view our game world. I can tell you from experience that you can see aircraft very easily from further away in real life than you can in the game, especially so if they catch the sun's light and glint. Meanwhile, I can't tell you how many time's I've been following a plane that can't be more than a kilometer away, right in front of my nose, and have them completely disappear from sight because the pixels didn't line up right. Don't get me wrong, spotting aircraft shouldn't exactly be easy, but in no way should it be as difficult as it is now. This wasn't as big of a deal before because with the FC3 jets you just find things with your radar, but now that DCS is pushing WWII, Korean, and early Cold War era planes spotting visually is becoming more and more important. The artificial difficulty in spotting will seriously hamper the experience in flying these planes in ways that are ultimately unrealistic.

The latest MiG-15 video where he shoots off the tail of an F-86 is the best we've got so far. irSxoHeEDP4