Why485

What is it? This mod aims to address two specific issues with the current implementation of contact dots in DCS: Dot size is always one pixel, which means smaller dots at higher resolutions, and that the lower your resolution, the easier it is to find contacts. Dots are rendered too far. As long as an objects model is not culled, it will get a dot drawn on it. DCS' draw distances can go out to >40 miles, making it possible to see the dots of an aircraft before even your radar can pick it up. This is accomplished by adding these new rules to how dots are rendered: The size of the dot gets bigger with screen resolution, using the reference resolution of 1920x1080. The dot becomes fully opaque at distance of ~6 miles. The dot is completely transparent at a distance of ~18 miles. When between those two extremes, the dot will fade at an exponential rate. Download The mod is available on the DCS user files here: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3330454/ How to install Unpack the "Bazar" folder in your DCS World root directory. This will overwrite the "dots.fx" file. By default, this is located in "C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World". As of the May 18 2.8.5.40170 openbeta patch, this NO LONGER PASSES IC. FAQ So what does this actually mean? 1. It means that dots are no longer visible from extreme ranges. You won't see planes 20-50 miles away. 2. Playing a high resolution (in this mod, defined as a screen height of >1080) you should have roughly the same "dot acuity" as somebody playing at 1920x1080. This corrects the common practice in DCS of people reducing their resolution to make the dots bigger. Are ground vehicles easier to see? Generally, no. At high resolutions, the dots become rectangles, since half the 2x2 dot is now under the ground. The dot also fades with distance the same as aircraft (the shader can't tell the difference), so you won't be able to spot vehicles from 30 miles like you could before. Why did you pick the ranges you did? Experimentally gathered data, from a paper that is infamous on this forum and won't be named, found that T-38s were spotted around 4-6 miles, depending on conditions. Knowing where the target already is can boost this detection distance by about 5 miles. Based on that information, I tweaked the opacity values and formula such that I was able to consistently find a dot around 4-6 miles, and could find and track distant dots (which are faded to ~50% transparency by this point) at around 10 miles, when I already knew where to look. Are dots completely invisible past 10 miles? Not completely invisible, but they are extremely faint. You'd have to already know they were there to find them, and they are very easy to lose. By about 15 miles they are basically impossible to see. Do I need to turn on labels to use this? No, the dot system in DCS is completely independent of labels. There is some confusion around the label system having a couple "dot" settings, but what those do is draw a label with a little . over the target. Labels are (at present) not obscured by clouds or the cockpit frame. The dots in DCS meanwhile are a completely separate function and do not interact with the label system at all. They are always on, cannot be turned off, and cannot be modified by players without messing with the shader itself as this mod does. To eliminate the chance of confusing labels with the dots, I recommend turning off labels completely when testing this mod. What makes 1080p special? In my experience, the dot size at 1080p resolutions is big enough to be useful, but not so big that it becomes distracting and strange looking. Therefore it was chosen as the reference resolution for which I wanted higher resolutions to have parity with. Does this mod do anything if I already play at 1080p? The only difference you'll notice is that contact dots fade away as they get further. Does this mod work on ultrawide? Yes. The only thing the mod takes into account for sizing the dots is the vertical resolution. Does this mod address the ability to see dots through clouds? No. I did make a brief attempt to see if I could fix that, but it's likely something that Eagle Dynamics will have to fix themselves the correct way. If I zoom into a dot that's far away, does that cause it to fade in? No, the dot opacity is based on a hard distance calculation. FOV has no effect on the opacity of dots. Does this mod address the exploit of raising the FOV to max in order to enlarge dots? It does not. The old impostor mod I made many years ago did this, but I wanted to keep this mod as simple as possible. I might add it in later if there is demand. As with the impostor mod, I'd likely just fade the dots over some field of view. What happens if I play at a resolution under 1080p? Dots will still increase in apparent size at resolutions lower than 1080. Initially I wanted to either try and make the dots "subpixel" by rendering them appropriately smaller at low resolutions, but this isn't feasible without engine changes. I also tried fading the dots proportionally when under the reference resolution, but this created problems with flickering models. The biggest advantage that low resolutions used to give was seeing dots from tens of miles away. Since the dots are now guaranteed to fade with distance, I figured it was best to just let the low resolutions keep their slightly larger dots. Why can I see missiles now? Unfortunately the only information I have to work with in the shader is the object's position. The shader is completely unaware of the model that is under it, so all the logic applies equally to all visible objects, regardless of their size. For objects larger than the average fighter, this works itself out and isn't an issue. However for smaller than average objects such as missiles, this can look a bit strange. Fixing this requires Eagle Dynamics to provide more information to the shader such as an object size. Does this mod pass IC? As of the May 18 2.8.5.40170 openbeta patch, this no longer passes IC. Update v1.1 See the below link for more information.

Seems to me the better and more universal solution to your problem would be improvements to spotting and visibility.

This is how dots work in the current system. At low resolutions, you can ironically see targets before your radar sees them. At high resolutions, those dots may as well not be there because they're so small. It's a flawed system that benefits people in an unequal way and is most effective in boosting visibility at the ranges that shouldn't have it. There are many, many solutions to spotting in general. It is a very well understood problem with very well understood solutions. Almost every simulator, even professional industry ones, addresses this in some way. Where I used to work, one of the questions we would sometimes get about our image generator was if it had some form of smart scaling. I hope some day Eagle Dynamics is willing to open conversation about this again, because it has been, and remains one of my biggest problems with DCS.

I first noticed this when playing online where after an air to air sortie, I rearmed with Mk84s and noticed the pylons were mounted incorrectly. I tried to recreate this offline, but usually it worked correctly. After some quick testing, I found a way to reproduce most of the problem. My steps were as follows: In the mission editor, place down an airstart F-14A with 4 underbelly Sparrows Put a target at front to lock and shoot at Fire off all the Sparrows at the target Land and do a Ground Crew -> Rearm to replace the Sparrows with Mk84s After doing this, the two rear Mk84s are mounted incorrectly Attached is both a track of the mission, and the mission itself. I've also uploaded a video of myself doing the above steps. F14Mk84Bug.miz F14Mk84Bug.trk

For the record, customers are expected to put this IG on whatever they want after they've bought into it. We have to support everything from domes to laptop screens to VR. As far as I know it's all using one formula/algorithm. There's been algorithms posted and tested by community members in previous incarnations of this thread which take into account resolution and field of view to address the problems with smart scaling. It's much more robust than the system a certain single engine aircraft focused sim uses. Again, I'm not even saying that smart scaling is the be all end all, but the problems you describe are not insurmountable and sims have been tackling and solving it for decades. It's only gotten better when you compare how more contemporary sims do it to how much older sims used to.

At work we are working on an IG (image generator, basically a graphics engine) meant for military simulations to be used to train anything from guys on the ground to pilots in flight simulations. One of the specific requests, from industry customers, was to have a system analogous to smart scaling because they feel that it's artificially difficult to spot and identify (key word) aircraft in simulations without it. Just saying. This is a solved problem if you ask me, and smart scaling isn't even the only solution. It's one of many, and they can be even be combined to create a more robust system.

To reproduce: Have 1440p monitor Set DCS to run windowed (uncheck fullscreen) Set resolution to 1920x1080 Fly any plane with clickable cockpit Observe mouse does not align with cockpit clickable hotspots Some other things I noticed: If you set DCS to run fullscreen 1080p with a 1440p monitor, then the buttons will align correctly until you try to Alt-Enter to change between windowed and fullscreen. Going from fullscreen to windowed then back caused the issue to re-emerge. Using Alt-Tab a couple times when the fullscreen option is checked and the mouse gets misaligned seems to fix it. When the bug is present, this is how the mouse is misaligned. The red +is where my mouse is (the mouse doesn't appear in screenshots), while the yellow X is where DCS is registering the mouse as being. The tooltip shown is for the middle MPCD button because that's where DCS is registering my mouse as being, even though I can see my mouse (and the tooltip appears at) the red +.

Doing it this way just seems like the more "official" and supported way to do these kinds of things. I'm always going back and forth between different builds of DCS, so I find it easier having a common directory where I dump control setups and then loading them when compared to manually moving files around.

Starting with the 1.5.8 openbeta, when I try to export my controls, no new file is created. For example: Go to Settings > Controls > Select an aircraft Click on any of the cells under a column that represents a controller (e.g. Keyboard, Saitek Pro Flight X-55 Rhino Stick, etc) Click Save Profile As Save a file with any name After doing this, I never see a new file created. Right now I'm trying to export my Harrier controls from 1.5.8 to the just released 2.2, but I cannot export the controls. It doesn't seem to matter which module I try to do this with. It is not unique to the Harrier. It also doesn't seem to matter where I try to save the file, nor does the name of the file itself. (For the record, I usually put it under Saved Games\DCS\Saved Controls.) I've tried putting it in different folders in Saved Games, and even on different hard drives. Running as administrator made no difference either.

I posted this earlier in the thread, so I'll post it again because it's relevant. Keep in mind that this is for the current 1.5/2.0. I don't know what the 2.1 Normandy alpha is doing because I don't have access to it.

I'm looking forward to the release of this on the openalpha branch so I can test it. If they've done anything (it seems like they have), I really want to know what.

Very interesting. I don't have access to the Normandy alpha, but I'm very curious to run my usual battery of tests and investigate what's changed as soon as I can.

Can I ask that when this change is applied, it is mentioned in the patch notes? There have been multiple dramatic changes to visibility (such as the removal of impostors) that were never mentioned in any official channels.

For the record, with the current system, resolution is an unintuitive tradeoff. With a lower resolution you will have an advantage in spotting objects at distance because the physical distance at which they get reduced to a dot is smaller, and the dot is bigger on the screen. With a higher resolution, you will have an advantage WVR as with more pixels you'll be able to better discern the low contrast plane from its background, and the plane will in general just have more pixels drawn for it.

Yes. Ideally, the game would take resolution and field of view into account to reach a "close enough" solution. Again, I believe there are other sims well within the close enough realm, so there's no reason why DCS wouldn't be able to do this.

While I don't think the impostor system was the greatest solution, it was a workable solution if ED wanted to put in just a little bit more effort into making it work. All the system needed was a few more parameters to make it a little smarter about how it scaled which would have solved most of the issues people had with it. Having the impostors scale down with distance would have solved the oversized planes, and having the impostors scale with both field of view and resolution would have prevented the situation where a lower resolution gives players an advantage. Both of these things are easily doable, as I was able to do them in a mod to the shader files without access to any of the game code. ED could execute those ideas better than I was able to because they can edit game code, they just never seemed remotely interested. That said, a better system would I believe adjust the contrast of the target to make it stand out more, perhaps add some element of glinting to the aircraft frame, and apply some slight (slight!) scaling to keep the identify ranges in line with real life data. I also disagree that it should be optional. Ideally, it would be at its most realistic setting and that's it. If the system works well, nobody will even know it's doing anything. A good example of that is a certain WWII sim that now simulates multiple theaters.

There has never been an official response to the issue from the developers. There has never been acknowledgement that there is even an issue. There may be changes to this situation when 2.5 comes out as it features new lighting which may or may not improve WVR spotting, but anything beyond that is speculation. There is nothing confirmed.

I'm posting this with the disclaimer that I have not tested the latest version of DCS. I've only tried the first release of 1.5.6 (as changes to visibility usually happen in big 1.5.X updates) and didn't notice anything different from 1.5.5. The below is from 1.5.5 when the model enlargement system was removed and replaced with the 1 pixel in the distance. This is where the "lower your resolution" advice is coming from. These screenshots are with 4X AA I believe. I can't attest for super sampling because I've never tried it, but I do find that adding 4X and above AA makes it easier to see the dots because they blur out into 2-3 pixels rather than a single flickering pixel.

Nothing seems to have changed.

We will see. If 1.5.6 is supposed to come out tomorrow, then there may be more changes to visibility. They've tweaked it in some way on every major 1.5.X release, so I'll definitely be running my usual battery of tests.

Where do you see a gap? Because the model gets magnified over a distance, by the very nature of that it smoothly disappears into the distance. It doesn't ever pop out of existence.

I thought this was pretty interesting, so I decided to implemented it into a little demo scene. In the demo there's a few squadrons of planes flying around, and you can move the camera around to see what the scaling looks like. Labels and scaling can both be toggled. Field of view can be changed with the middle mouse. If you want to mess with this yourself, here's a download link to the demo. Extract the contained folder anywhere and then run the executable inside. Overall, I like it a lot. I especially like that it adjusts based on field of view so that when you zoom in on far things it doesn't look weird. I haven't thoroughly tested the resolution compensation, but I think that's a great idea as well. Personally, I think the magnification is a little too strong (I feel the same way about a certain F-16 flight sim), but that's trivial to tweak. What's important is that the foundation is solid, and it most certainly is.

Why would you say that?

Keep in mind that with the 1 pixel dot system currently in place, the lower your resolution, and the larger your screen, the easier dots are to see. This is why you see very different opinions on if you can see too far or not. Incidentally, this benefits VR headsets the most, which to be honest need all the help they can get. This was the case before with impostors, but the difference was much more pronounced than it is now. This is one of the reasons so many servers disabled it. While the current system, which may be seeing another change when we get to 2.5, isn't as robust as I'd like it to be, after having some time to sit on it I think this is the best spotting has ever been in DCS. Which, isn't saying much, but still. Because it's forced on and non configurable it solves the biggest issue I had with the old system which was that most people just disable it outright. It's subtle enough that it appeases those who think zero visibility is a good thing, but still functional enough that it's an improvement over what we had. I dont think it's perfect by any means. A dot doesn't really help you with WVR spotting, which is I believe the biggest problem with spotting in DCS. I also don't like that lower resolutions have an advantage, but I also kind of feel that playing at high resolutions has enough inherent advantages that it's not as big an issue as it could be. The resolution problem was much greater with the old system. In a sense, you're trading off distant spotting for WVR spotting acuity when you raise your resolution.

The entire impostor and model enlargement system was removed in 1.5.5. The settings in the options menu, and the settings you see on server options don't do anything anymore. It's instead been replaced by 1 pixel dots. As iLOVEwindmills already said, if that was intentional, or if maybe this is a partial form of some future system, we just don't know. ED didn't tell anybody that they changed anything this patch. The most optimistic thing I can say about the situation is that 2.5 will likely bring another big change to visibility as we're getting a whole new lighting system that in screenshots already seems to have more contrast than the current game. There's also some weird glinting in the latest NTTR trailer (which was rendered in the new 2.5 engine) that may hint at canopy/airframe glinting for 2.5. Or it could just be a bug.