Why485

It's "caused" by disabling shadows. It's a problem in basically every plane, but it's more pronounced in some than others due to the layouts of the canopy and cockpit. For example, here it is in the MiG-19: When shadows are enabled, the Mi-8 canopy is always in shadow whenever the sun could be shining on it in such a way that it becomes opaque, preventing you from seeing the opaque glare. With shadows disabled, and you have the sun behind you in the Mi-8, then you get the full glare reflection of the sun with nothing to block it. There are many issues with canopy glare and reflections that make it difficult to impossible to see out the window. The Harrier is also quite bad about this. I can barely see out the window to land the plane: Here is another one, this time on the HUD, and with shadows enabled too: I used to work around these issues with the clear canopy mod but that's no longer possible for the great majority of servers.

Was this before or after it was announced that MAC was going to be a standalone game?

Do you have any sources for this?

I don't think it makes any sense for MAC to connect to DCS given that it's meant to be a standalone game. The whole point of such a spinoff game should be to get away from the limitations and baggage of DCS, and to make low level changes which almost assuredly would bring incompatibilities with DCS. There's no guarantee that MAC and DCS would even operate by the same rules or level of realism. E.g. missile flight models could be dramatically different. MAC shouldn't just be "DCS, but FC4". Honestly if that's all MAC ends up becoming, then I think it'd be a disappointing waste of potential. It should go further into building out mechanics and context for players to fly missions around in, especially in multiplayer, with new UI and features to facilitate it given the clean break away from DCS. That's what I personally want out of something like MAC. We still have no idea what it is and ED's own explanation for what it is has changed radically every time they've mentioned it so who knows.

That was very forthcoming, thank you very much for the straight answer!

Is there any insight you can give into this?

At the rate DCS modules come out, it is a real concern that I might not be around anymore or able by the time the modules I want to fly can be released. These things take 4-8 years each and really it seems like the only way to have modules come out more frequently is to just keep adding more third party developers who each make one plane and then support it for a couple years because it'll never be released finished.

I just wanted to know what was going on with Modern Air Combat (MAC).

What's the status of Modern Air Combat?

We've been hearing "we're working on the LOD system" for years, so there's no way to know if whatever they're doing will be released within the next couple years or at all. It seems unlikely to me that LOD work has anything to do with spotting in the first place, and is more likely to be related to performance considering DCS has rather notorious inconsistencies (e.g. Tu-95 using LOMAC era lines for its lowest detail model) and extreme triangle counts (e.g. ~400k for the lowest detail Mirage) in LOD models. For all we know it could just mean that they're going to start enforcing more uniform standards across first party and third party models. Without more specifics (which were not given) there is no reason to believe that whatever this LOD work entails will even affect spotting, and IMO it's more than likely to be completely unrelated. There's no way way know. What does make me nervous is that they're still talking about the dots.fx at all. Unless they dramatically rewrote the dots to some new system, this feels like an underwhelming half-measure and hopefully temporary until a better solution. Might these dots.fx changes be an improvement? Maybe! I'd certainly welcome any improvement given the circumstances. However, considering ED have far more flexibility in how they can tackle this problem than dots, I would be a bit disappointed if that's what they settled on.

Here are my favorite examples of why I thought this mod was essential.

Those videos have a lot of sound added in post to be cooler.

This is not what a good spotting system would be like. I think those who are so virulently opposed to one, who I must also point out are very much in the minority at ~5% according to a recent poll, don't understand that. They speak as if people are asking for big colored labels, and that's just not the case. For example, with a good spotting system, the accident visualized in this video could absolutely still happen.

You are wrong. Not just in the video game world (every other consumer combat flight sim does this), but even in my experience in the simulation industry. I have mentioned this before, but we have had customers specifically ask for features like this because they are aware of the problems and negative training it can cause.

To quote the oft-cited paper directly: It's not lost on me that the paper is dated. However, the concepts and data presented in it are still sound. For some reason, people have it in their head that the provided solutions can only be applied literally with no changes at all. They can be changed! Other community members have improved on the formulae set down in the original paper, and these formulae can always be tweaked to taste and for the average modern display. Frankly I find it baffling that this is a controversial viewpoint. DCS and its staff maintain the unique position in the genre and industry of essentially ignoring this issue for many, many years, with the only respite being the briefly lived impostor era. They were an imperfect (though entirely fixable) solution that was tried but then quickly removed for reasons that to this day have never been made clear. Their removal was never even mentioned in the patch notes. As small as it is, I am thankful that for the first time since then, ED seems to be acknowledging that there might be a problem. I am nervous about whatever they might consider a solution, especially given the extremely opinionated comments of a prominent and lead developer of the sim. Either way, I am looking forward to seeing (or not) the results of whatever work is in progress.

Zooming out causes the lower detail LODs to appear when physically closer to the camera. Conversely, zooming in can cause the dot to disappear because the model is big enough on the screen that the LOD system tells the dot not to render. Zooming out can also reduce the visual clutter, and make the dots appear to be bigger on the screen, since they are always a constant size.

Here is a screenshot of the issue. I'm running at 1920x1080, with MSAA disabled. I have a mission with many airplanes flying around. In my test mission I have a group of 4 planes 10 miles to the right of the MiG-29 that the F2 view defaults to. When looking at the group to the MiG-29's right, the dots will flicker and and disappear depending on where they happen to fall on the screen as the camera rotates around.

The dots DCS currently uses were implemented in 2016 as a replacement for the briefly lived Model Visibility impostor system. They have been unchanged since then. Before the impostors (which were around only between Sept 2015 and July 2016), DCS had no form of dots, scaling, or anything to more accurately model aircraft visibility on home computer hardware.

FYI, one of the main features of the mod was to put hard limits on dot rendering distance. The vanilla game's dots render any time the 3D model is rendered, which could be upwards of 50 miles depending on the situation. The mod made it so that 10 miles was (roughly) the hard limit at which you could see something if you knew where to look, because the dot was fairly transparent. Around 4-5 mile mark, which data suggests is roughly WVR for modern fighter jet sized targets, the dot becomes fully opaque. In the vanilla game, somebody running a lower resolution can spot dots 50 miles away and use it to cue their radar. With the mod, even in the best of cases (know where to look, silhouetted against a bright and uniform sky), you won't really see a target further than 10 miles.

This is not true of the dots, only the labels. Dots are 3D rendered geometry the same way the aircraft themselves are, and are occluded the same as any other 3D geometry in the game world. Labels are not dots. They are UI text drawn on the screen, but because the labels have several "dot" settings, it's caused some confusion. The dots and labels are completely independent systems.

As of the May 18 2.8.5.40170 openbeta patch, this no longer passes IC.

I disagree.

I have been talking about this issue on these forums for at least 8 years. According to ED, there is no issue. Chizh himself also says, that DCS is better than reality with regards to spotting.

This mod is invaluable. Thanks a lot!

It's a performance killer in 2D too. It's why I released the current version which works correctly without MSAA.