Why485

No, a one pixel dot was drawn on every dynamic object in the world as long as the object was being rendered, which depending on the model's max render distance and your FOV could be as far as 40 miles away. That was the entire system. It was very simple.

All of your "now" pictures look like the "improved spotting dot" option set to OFF. It's not stated anywhere, but the setting doesn't take effect unless you restart DCS completely. If all the "now" tests were done in the same DCS session, without restarting DCS, your results will be off. Every patch I run my own set of spotting tests, just in case something was changed and not mentioned in the changelog, and I didn't notice any changes with last week's patch. Agreed on this though. 10km is optimistic for a WWII fighter. From a 1944 Soviet Army for artillerymen to estimate range based on spotting aircraft: http://airpages.ru/mn/scout_02.shtml

Dots fade out with distance (this is good) but if they are in front of clouds, they appear to "punch a hole" through them and show the color behind the clouds, making them visible even though they should be faded out. BugCloudDot.trk BugCloudDot.miz EDIT: I've added another, better example in the post below. To make it easy, I am also pasting the same gif, and attaching the new track to this post as well. BugCloudDot2.trk

FYI changing the "IMPROVED SPOTTING DOT" setting requires you restart DCS in order to see the effects.

These are the same thing. Anyway, I really, really wish we could get some insight into what ED is trying to accomplish here. I was pleasantly surprised to see that spotting was mentioned in last weeks newsletter but in the end all they did was point out the new option. I can only speculate what their goal is, and everybody here (including myself) is judging this all based on completely arbitrary measures and assumed goals. The only clue we've got so far is that they recognize this current iteration doesn't work well in VR.

FYI the setting doesn't take effect until you restart DCS.

Also FYI, after changing the option you need to restart DCS. It doesn't apply immediately.

After firing any of the air to air missiles, the reloaded missiles are not usable. This is recorded on version 2.9.0.47168 BugUnlimitedWeapons.mizBugUnlimitedWeapons.trk

There is a label option called "Dot Neutral" which confusingly uses the label system to draw dots. These labels are completely independent of the "visibility" dots, and function differently from them as well, so sometimes label dots are visible when the visibility dots aren't, and vice versa. For example, the dot neutral labels can be seen through the cockpit and clouds like any any other label setting. You can enable/disable label dots at will with the Left Shift F10 if they are being forced on by the server, or you have them on locally. 4YA Overlord forces all labels to off which means the only thing visible there will be the visibility dots. Wolf Pack Warbirds forces Dot Neutral labels to on, which is why you could turn those on/off.

There was a bug some versions ago where they rendered behind the clouds. That bug was fixed. Now, the implementation has completely changed and there is a new bug that needs to be fixed. This isn't hard to understand. Yes, it is an improvement over the dots that were implemented in 1.5.5. It obviously still has issues, but it works okay already and there are many, myself included, who are just happy to see that some progress is being made on this front for the first time in 7 years. And no, don't tell me that the 1.5.5 dots were fine just because they were there for a long time. I made a whole mod in exasperation to explain the problems with the old dots, and I was never happy with them even when they were first introduced. I'm sorry, but you have consistently misrepresented everybody's opinions, ignored what people have told you over and over again, and I'm not going to keep going in circles with you. We are both clearly wasting each other's time so you'll be happy to know that this is the last time I respond to you.

There is a bug right now where when dots are in front of clouds, and this includes the 2D cirrus clouds in your screenshot, dots are visible beyond ranges they should be. There are bugs. They should be fixed. I don't think anybody here is defending this saying that's the way it should be. This entire system is WIP! I don't think they're perfect right now. Yes, the things you are talking about are problems! The config option to turn them off should work since it's a WIP feature that's still buggy and VR users in particular would benefit from one. This is the first pass, and there is a lot to improve. I've already written at length my own thoughts about what I think should be improved much earlier in the thread. I don't know how many times it has to be repeated, but nobody is asking for giant dots 30 miles away. This is a step in the right direction, but it still needs tweaking and improvement. Frankly, in my opinion, I don't even think dots are the right approach here. There are many industry proven techniques (as in for real training simulations not just games like DCS) related to this very real problem, but I've been warned every time I talk about them because using outside examples is against forum rules. Even in the "worst case" where a pixel dot approach is kept, there are many ways in which it can be improved to get something that is not just more consistent across hardware, but also works at the ranges necessary, and behaves in a realistic way to match the "performance" of the eye in real life. The current implementation is not set in stone.

In all the other aircraft, both the communications menus and the radio buttons are bindable to the mouse, but in the F-14 they are not. This is something I do on every aircraft, and can't be done on the F-14.

Please stop with this strawmanning. It's incredibly counter-productive to this entire conversation. 2.9 has issues, and it's important to point them out, but characterizing anybody who doesn't see the same thing you do as a cartoon character of your creation is not helping. Everybody involved wants what's most realistic. This is a complex problem that is only made more difficult by the wide variety of hardware involved. Not everybody is seeing the same things, and that's part of the problem here. It's important to show screenshots of the problems and what hardware you're viewing it on because the biggest issues right now are these discrepancies, especially when it comes to VR.

Issues like this are almost inherent to any kind of dot or pixel based system. It's why I'm not a fan of the approach, and never was, even when I made the dot mod. A dot won't give you a silhouette to determine something like aspect to help identify and track a fighter during a dogfight. To prevent the issue of close range planes becoming suddenly "invisible", the square dot would have to basically always be drawn, which means at short ranges it could obscure the plane in such a way that its silhouette and type aren't clear at ranges it should be.

Definitely. I do get the impression that if it weren't for VR not working well, the changes this patch would have been seen extremely positively. Here's hoping that ED chooses to improve upon this step in the right direction, and doesn't delete it entirely in 6 months. I said it before, but I think it's worth saying again. ED being transparent with what their goals with these changes are would go a long way in steering the conversation in a useful direction. Right now there's a lot of disagreement and straw mans circulating through this discussion on what the end result should look like.

If only there was some kind of way to represent airplanes within visual range, perhaps through some kind of smart system which would keep them visible at expected WVR ranges, but not at further distances. This would allow you to not only match the data with regards to spotting distances, but even identify a plane and estimate its aspect at reported and studied ranges in a popularly cited paper which emphasized the ranges at which aircraft could be identified, and not just spotted. Aircraft at ranges that I have seen for myself at air shows when planes are flying around and completing circuits up to 5 miles wide, staying inside their 5 mile NOTAM radius. It'd be even crazier if DCS had implemented some kind of system like this before, and then just quietly removed it despite it never being given any time in the oven to work out it's kinks. That definitely didn't happen though, it's just a hypothetical what if. For real though I think ED being transparent with what their goals even are would go a long way in steering the conversation in a useful direction.

This is the bug related to transparencies I have mentioned in earlier posts. You shouldn't be able to see it right now, and at those distances wouldn't if it wasn't in front of the clouds. This is part of what's making this discussion difficult and adding to the very inconsistent reporting.

To add more numbers to this, this is a graph from "Promise and Reality: Beyond Visual Range (BVR) Air to Air Combat" by (then)Lt Col Patrick Higby. "Visual range depends on various factors: visual acuity, visual enhancements (e.g. binoculars or long-range imaging devices), visual inhibitors (e.g. clouds or dirt on the canopy), light conditions, target aspect, and target size. Colonel James Burton selected five nautical miles—in daylight—as his BVR limit for evaluating air-to-air missiles. Alternatively, the Gulf War Air Power Survey (GWAPS) BVR criteria depended upon whether the target was visually identified. Table 1 is adapted from Stevenson and shows the average distance (in nautical miles) at which different aircraft are visible during daytime, based on airframe size. Factors such as engine smoke for the F-4 are not included. The dotted line shows Burton’s five nautical mile criteria." This matches the observations reported by other papers, and is the most succinct presentation between all the papers I've seen so I like using this graph. The actual WVR distance varies depending on the fighter, aspect, and many other conditions, but this is where the 5 mile rule of thumb comes from. It's a decent average. The size of the target is something ED is already taking into account, so I think they're already working towards this goal, though perhaps a bit too forgiving at the moment. I don't doubt WWII aircraft, being smaller, would be harder to see, especially if they were camouflaged and not polished aluminum like many late war props and Korean era jets. "BVR spotting" is a thing that can happen, with anecdotal claims from Chuck Yeager (who had 20/10 vision) of being able to spot enemy aircraft from over 20 miles away, but from my own experience and from what I've read these tend to be exceptional circumstances created by specific lighting conditions which can cause either a silhouette or glint. For the purposes of DCS, for the purposes of getting a good baseline first, I'd rather not deal with these circumstances and not boost aircraft visibility at these distances. As I've said many times before, I'm much more interested in ensuring that WVR means within visual range, and the discussions around strawmen built up to fight an imaginary desired "arcade spotting" 30 miles away are red herrings that should be dismissed from the conversation.

TL;DR: Very similar to the dot mod, which is disappointing because I'm not a fan of the dot mod's pixel-based approach, and ED's solution inherits most of the issues the mod had. That said, it's still a big improvement over how the dots used to work in 2.8, and the first step in the right direction I've seen ED make on this subject in 7 years, almost to the month. Yes, I've been counting. There is also a serious bug that makes the dots visible from the full render range, usually caused by clouds, that I think is the cause of many of the "I can see dots at 50 miles" comments I've seen. When dots are in front of anything transparent, including the 2D cirrus high altitude clouds, they are visible even if they should already be completely faded out. I am also very, very wary of this discussion being seen as "how to fix the dots" because IMO dots are not a good solution, especially in isolation. Ideally the feedback in this thread is used to build a better system rather than just tweaking the dots. While tweaked/better dots would still be far better than what we had before, I know DCS can do better than that. For reference, I play at 2560x1440 on a 27" monitor. My full thoughts, both good and bad, below: Like the mod, the dot size does change based on resolution. I.e. higher res, bigger dots. This is a good thing, because higher resolutions aren't "punished" with dots of a smaller apparent size. Like the mod, it does seem to hit a floor at 1080, which means theoretically running the game at resolutions like 1280x720 would give you bigger dots, but that resolution is so low I find that of dubious utility. Like the mod, the dots fade based on distance, which means you can't see dots 50 miles away. For a MiG-29 sized target, they appear to become fully visible ~5 miles, and fade out ~10 miles. 10 miles is, on average probably too far away to be realistic, and perhaps fading more close in would be more realistic. The distances at which a dot appears vary depending on the size of the object. This is a pretty interesting one, and not something the mod could do. A MiG-29's dot fades away at ~10 miles, but a B-52's dot fades at ~35 miles. Considering you can see airliners in the sky 30 miles away this isn't that crazy, but I do think the effect that size has on dot fade distances is exaggerated and should probably be reduced, especially since that kind of long distance spotting is often because of a specific lighting condition. I have airliners fly overhead at various altitudes all day, and sometimes cross reference distances/altitudes on Flight Aware, so this is not me making things up, but relaying my experiences. Like the mod, when the dot gets disabled because the model is too close (~1.2 miles for a fighter), an aircraft goes from very visible to suddenly invisible. This is one of the biggest problems with the current system. In my opinion, the priority of any kind of aircraft visibility system, is to ensure that the player's experience WVR matches documented data. A pixel dot based system's greatest shortcoming is in the WVR realm, and that's a big part of why I have issues with this approach. The ranges at which dots disappear (close in) and fade out (far away) seem to be based only on range, and seemingly have nothing to do with FOV. This probably a good thing. Changing LOD or visibility range settings has no effect on these ranges. (VR complicates this through what I think is DCS being too aggressive with culling objects at a distance with VR's super wide FOV.) As mentioned above, there is a pretty serious bug with the dots, and it's that when they are in front of clouds, they are visible to the full render distance (~50 miles, but depends on FOV). This in effect means that if you are flying low, and some plane is above you with clouds behind it, you can see them from quite a large distance. This I think is where a lot of the "I can see dots at 50 miles" comments are coming from. Both FSR and TAA are inadvisable to use because of their negative effect on the dots. TAA fades the dots the faster they move across the screen, while FSR has its own set of oddities. For best dot visibility, the solution is still running at native resolution, with MSAA to taste. Having sharpening now built into DCS is nice too and can help. I don't need to run Reshade anymore. Running FSR at low settings (e.g. 0.5) does not create gigantic dots. I was curious if this was going to be the case, but it doesn't seem to be. With FSR enabled, I'm not sure what math is being used to calculate the dot size, but it almost seems like it's using the final resolution, and not the downscaled resolution. Regardless of what's happening behind the scenes, this means that dots are very difficult to impossible see with FSR enabled. Unlike the mod, dots don't seem to be applied to missiles. This is a very good thing. Like the mod, dots are still applied to vehicles. Personally, I like this, but I think it's debatable on whether this is good or not.

The trace, as you call it, must be larger than 3D model of the plane or else it would essentially do nothing at any range because it would be same size as the aircraft. I.e. if the plane is impossible to see at 5 miles without the trace, it'll be impossible to see at 5 miles with the trace. The problem you're talking about is how the trace simply disappears completely and abruptly at close range, which I agree is a problem. I have some thoughts on how I would fix this if it were me (I tried to fix this in the mod but it wasn't possible without source), but I think it's more important to just say that the aircraft abruptly going going from highly visible to almost invisible feels bad. I don't want to get too in the weeds either on "how to fix dots" because that's too limiting for what we should be trying to achieve. I'd rather frame the discussion as "fixing aircraft visibility" instead, since that doesn't preclude smarter and more robust systems than drawing 4 pixel squares. I think ED understands this based on how Wags specifically phrased the known issue: Units are visible in VR at unrealistically far ranges and are less visible at closer ranges.

If this were true, then spotting dots would do literally nothing. Keep in mind that the dots don't replace the 3D models. The lowest detail LOD is always being rendered out to the max object rendering distance (~50 miles, but this range is adjusted in real time up and down based on FOV). The problem they are trying to solve in the first place is that aircraft are difficult to impossible to see at distances which according to various research papers and studies should be visible to the pilots. As I've said many, many times in the past decade on this subject. The main problem that should be being solved here is making WVR visibility match the data. I'm less interested in "distant spotting" (which is what a dot adjacent approaches are best suited for) than I am in making WVR actually mean visual range. This is especially important to WWII, Korea, and early Cold War era fighter jets which can't rely on radar to do spotting for them. There is also a difference between spotting and identifying, that I think is glossed over in all these conversations. "Spotting" is simply the earliest you know something is out there. It can, in the best of cases, mean something like being able to see the glints from other fighter sized aircraft tens of miles away under certain lighting conditions. E.g. Chuck Yeager talking about seeing fighters in Korea from 30 miles away. This is the situation where dot-like solutions can be best, since you're mainly interested in specks of shadow or light at large distances. "Identifying" is when you are within visual range (~5 miles, but depends on the aircraft and conditions) and close enough to tell what the target is, and more importantly, what its aspect is. This is where solutions like smart scaling work best, and despite what so many people seem to insist, this can be done subtly and well.

What it looks like to me is that for whatever reason the aircraft models are getting culled too closely to the camera. When in 2D I haven't seen this issue of the aircraft disappearing when I zoom out, but something about VR is causing the distance at which planes are drawn to be much shorter than they would be in 2D.

There is a bug (at least I think it's a bug) where, when distant aircraft are against anything transparent, they are extremely visible, no matter the range. Note that "anything transparent" includes even the 2D high altitude cirrus clouds. I don't have a gif of this in action, but for example in the below screenshot, when I positioned the camera such the plane had no clouds of any kind behind it, it was invisible, as I would expect from this great distance. However, when I move the camera such that it was against the clouds, it became highly visible.

This is a pretty big deal for mission makers and a welcome direction for ED to move in.

It's both good and realistic for people to not be able to see out their planes. People who run on low settings not having clean canopies is immersive because it's like not paying the maintenance crews for your planes enough, so they don't have the budget to clean the windows. It doesn't make sense to make this optional.