Why485

I have no evidence of this either, but I also have a much harder time when my FPS is low. I think this has more to do with it being more difficult to physiologically identify motion when the game runs at low FPS versus high FPS though. Low FPS means there's less information for your eyes/brain to process as potential movement or contrast.

This is still an issue as of 2.9.6.57650. I've taken a new gif of the issue, and attached a new track to demonstrate. These dots are MiG-29s many miles (>30 miles) away and should be invisible. When against the horizon, with no clouds behind them, they are indeed invisible. However when put in front of the clouds, they are silhouetted with what seems to be the sky color behind them. BugCloudDot2.trk For completeness' sake, these are the settings I recorded the video with.

I've seen this on every server I've joined. Servers that normally would show numbers there.

This is still an issue in 2.9.6.57650.

FYI, any of the upscaling settings which rely on TAA (this includes DLAA) will by the nature of their algorithms and implementations, blur tiny distant details in motion. I.e. for best spotting you should only use MSAA, or no AA at all. Any other setting will use TAA and essentially smear small objects moving across the screen, which in DCS is going to be basically everything you care about.

Aircraft lighting is incredibly inconsistent across all different aircraft. It seems like every single module has its own custom implementation on how light should work. A handful are visible from a distance (e.g. Hornet) while others just can't be seen unless well within visual range.

The launcher is completely unusable and crashes 2-4 seconds after opening every single time. I had to disable it to launch DCS.

Anecdotally, it does seem like the VR specific issues the dots had were addressed, and appear to roughly match how they work in 2D. I was flying with a friend who plays in VR (Quest 3) last night and we were comparing what we could say and his visibility seemed to be similar to mine (2D, 1440p), whereas before he was able to spot what he called "flying blocks" from twice the range that I could see anything.

I'll add one more to this. A sufficiently well executed visibility and spotting system is completely transparent to the player. One of my favorite conversations on this subject was somebody who was vehemently opposed to any kind of visibility system in any game because it's "unrealistic", claiming that IL-2 46 never used anything and they could see just fine back then, so why should we do anything now? The irony is that IL-2 used a combination of dots and scaled LOD models to aid in distant visibility, and it worked so well that said player never noticed it was doing anything at all. Achieving realistic results that match empirical data (of which much has been supplied throughout this thread) in a transparent way is the ideal. There are many approaches to this problem but frankly I don't think ED is interested in what we, or anybody else, thinks. Their methodology has always been to invent a new wheel because existing wheels are never good enough. This is a well studied problem, with many known and proven solutions, which have been discussed at length for many years. At this point, I don't think what anything anybody says on this topic (especially in English) matters. They already have their superior solution planned, and are only waiting on some free time, our passion, and our support, to implement said solution.

This is still an issue as of 2.9.4.5349.

Put me in the screenshot.

It was added after ED didn't get impostor system right on their first try, so they silently threw the whole thing out and replaced it with a dot system where a one pixel dot was visible whenever the object was drawn regardless of the distance. This meant that these dots were visible out to 30-40 miles (the approximate max draw distance for objects), and got bigger the lower your resolution was set. This system was around for several years. It was then replaced with the current system, which puts a cap on the distance these dots are rendered, while also seeking to address the resolution issue. For the majority of people this seems good enough, but there are edge cases, mostly in VR, where the scaling doesn't quite work. There's also a bug that makes the dot visible beyond ranges it should be. While I don't think the dots are perfect by any means, and in fact I think a purely dot based approach is not the best idea, this is still probably the best DCS has been with regards to spotting. Even ignoring the bugs, they are a bit too strong, and if we are always going to be stuck with a dot based system, then I think some bug fixes and tweaks would go a long way towards making it so good you don't even notice it's doing anything.

I was disappointed too, as ED own the engine and so are able to do something much better than what I did. They didn't copy the mod 1:1, more like re-implemented it natively and at a lower level in the engine, with a couple improvements. I've detailed out my impressions and differences I've noticed in this post. The new spotting is an improvement over what was in the game before, but I'd like to see them go much further and make something better. The official line is that the current system will be looked at, but there has been no communication beyond that, nor any clue as to what their intent is or what they even see as the issue to be fixed.

It does matter, because certain situations can make the dot more or less visible even if the logic for what "triggers" the dot is the same across all of them. I ended up creating a similar lighting situation to your screenshot and the dot is more visible compared to my main spotting test scenario. I expected the combination of lens flare and atmospherics to make the dot more washed out than it was. It's just another data point to add to how the dots work. For the record, I used a Su-27 (in your example it was either Su-27 or MiG-29) and the dot is fully opaque at ~10 miles and then fades beyond that. I'm not saying anything changed. I test this after every patch because ED has a history of changing spotting without any patch notes. I just think it's an interesting test case.

What distance? What plane? The terrain affects this too. The sun is too low for 10:00 at the default June date, so that's not exactly right either.

Can you post this test mission? That's a very specific lighting and altitude/aspect setup that I'd like to add to my battery of spotting tests.

This is a good post, thank you. This is one of the things that I feel like I haven't been getting across. "Spotting" is a complex subject with a lot of nuance but in these discussions it all too often gets turned into cartoon strawmen and people completely talking past each other.

This isn't so much aimed at you, more so whatever audience for this discussion might be left, however it's a great point to respond to as it's a common sentiment I've seen. In a good spotting system, you will still lose sight against a noisy background and ground clutter. Keeping track of the target in a fight would still be a skill that takes practice. A good spotting system aims to provide realistic results, and I've given examples of what those realistic results should look like many times in the past. E.g. for WWII planes, these are good reference numbers. Even with the current (new) and flawed system, you still regularly see people talk about how they lose sight or have difficulty spotting and what people like me are advocating for will in all likelihood make spotting more difficult than it is now. My favorite discussion on the topic is somebody saying to me (paraphrasing), "Back in ye olden days of a certain WWII flight simulator from the turn of the millennium, we didn't need any kind of dots. Why do we need them now?" And like, that was pure *chef's kiss* because not only did this beloved WWII flight sim have dots, but it also used a basic form of scaling through creative LOD rendering. For the record, the distances planes became visible in ideal conditions matched the above cited numbers. That's what I'm after. When these sorts of systems are done right, you won't notice it's doing anything at all.

No, nothing has changed as far as I can tell. It sounds like you forgot to restart the game after changing the setting. It doesn't take effect until after a restart.

As of 2.9.2.49629 the issue of dots being visible when they are in front of clouds at extreme distances is still present. This bug is responsible for some of the "false positives" in people seeing dots at further distances than intended. I've already reported this, but the thread has had no reaction from ED.

This is still an issue as of 2.9.2.49629.

No, it's not for me. It's to make this as easy as possible for ED because the more guesswork they have to do to debug this the less likely it is to get fixed. I have a vested interest in seeing these bugs get fixed, and having the exact settings removes any ambiguity and ensures nothing is missed.

Posting a screenshot of your settings page would be better, but that's pretty compelling evidence of the issues. That's a great video.

Are there any plans to have this addressed or looked at?

As far as I can tell, putting the new setting to off renders dots with exactly the same logic as it did in 2.8.