Why485

This mod is no longer relevant because the impostor system isn't used by DCS as of 1.5.5.

Bumping this thread because this is still a big sore point of the module for me.

Yeah it'd be nice if ED would include game changing updates to DCS in their patch notes, but they often dont. Their patch notes have always been incomplete

The only thing you're wrong about is number 2. From 1.5.0 to 1.5.4, they were not simple dots, they were in fact small sprites that were fairly accurate representations of the model from the appropriate aspect and lighting. However, that whole system is irrelevant now as it's been completely removed from the game and the model visibility setting in options no longer does anything. What appears to have replaced that system is instead an extremely simple 1 pixel dot that draws whenever an aircraft is in sight. As far as I can tell, there's nothing else going on, and I'm not sure if there's a max range for that dot either. In some of my testing cases (using labels to tell range) they've appeared very faintly at 10 miles (which is good), but sometimes they seem to appear further away.

No, there's a completely different system in place now. I'm still unclear if it does anything within visual range, but it does draw a 1 pixel dot once the plane gets sufficiently small. Turning on anti-aliasing seems to make the dot a little easier to see (spreading it out slightly into a few more pixels), as without AA it seems as if the dot is literally just 1 pixel. Depending on your resolution and screen size, a single pixel can be uselessly difficult to see, or somewhat easy to see. 4X AA No AA What is worrying though, is that sometimes with no AA you can have situations where a dot disappears. If you move the camera around it can sometimes look like it's flickering, and in some frames it can sometimes just disappear altogether. This isn't really an issue with 4X AA and above. Maybe that's intended and the flickering is supposed to simulate glare of some kind? I don't know. I will say though that it's easier to see targets at a distance when AA is on. As for WVR, it feels like it's easier to see planes WVR, but I'm having a hard time telling if that's truly the case or not. At this point I'm kind of leaning towards it not doing anything at all WVR, but again it's hard for me to definitely say anything. There's nothing I've been able to find to turn off or tweak so that I can compare or break down the system to figure out how it works. The only things I can definitively say is that this new system cannot be turned off, it draws dots once planes are sufficiently small, and it is not configurable in the settings menu. I could have sworn that WVR it worked better in the openbeta, to the point where I was wondering if they had actually implemented some kind of very subtle scaling (which is the best kind!), but on the stable release, it seems slightly worse. I have to again add the disclaimer that I have no hard proof either way to support those claims. If it sounds like I'm doing a lot of guessing, it's because I am. I'm having a hard time breaking this down due to the lack of anything to configure. It could be as dead simple as a dot, or maybe there's something more complex going on. I just don't know. ED doesn't ever say anything on the subject. This was a pretty dramatic change to the sim and it wasn't even mentioned in the patch notes. It would be great if ED would explain what is going on or at least tell us what their plans are.

Those settings are still there but they do nothing. The impostor system has been completely removed from the game and replaced with something else that's neither optional nor configurable.

The only thing it needs is to be able to place markers as the mission editor so you can point out important things the players need to know.

A lot has changed, to the point where I'm not sure the old system is even used at all anymore. What was also interesting was that the system is no longer optional or configurable. At least in the open beta, the model enlargement setting did nothing. I've been holding off on writing a big post on how they work as I want to play with them and test them more to make sure things aren't placebo. That and I wasn't sure if they would change between open beta and stable. I'll be doing more testing with the stable version. In general though, this is a big step in the right direction and I'm very happy that it's not even an option anymore.

The new map markers added in 1.5.5 are huge. This is the kind of feature that would make everybody's lives easier as it allows for much more accurate knowledge about a flight plan and target area that aren't conveyed well through a text box or tiny compressed static jpeg in a tiny mission briefing window. For public MP missions especally, these could be huge in facilitating teamwork with random pubbies as people will have intuitive ideas of where to go and what to do. However, there is a tremendous oversight with this new feature. You cannot place pre-place these in the mission editor. This seems like such a no brainer that I'm hoping that this feature is just not finished yet, but I really want to make it clear that this would be fantastically useful to mission designers and players everywhere.

Abusing the FOV slider to see with a far narrower FOV than you would have in real life is 100% required to get a bead on anything in the game. There's a reason the zoom axis is bound to my HOTAS. Setting a realistic FOV would help when compared to running a traditional 60-80 degree FOV, but in keeping with a realistic FOV you still wouldn't see as much as you should because of pixel densities and it being very difficult to separate planes from the background. To say nothing of the dramatic loss in SA as you will always be "zoomed in" compared to what you would normally fly with. The whole FOV thing is something I know a lot about from playing racing sims. In racing sims, it's a very inelegant solution to a problem that can only really be solved with bigger and higher resolution monitors. Or super high resolution VR headset. I've referenced that paper many times since you posted it, and even implemented my own version of it just for experimentation. While I think it's slightly too generous in how much it magnifies, that's trivially easy to tweak to get something that feels like a good balance.

No to the first, and unknown to the second. If it helps, we won't know until it gets released. My unrealistic (but not unreasonable) hope is the revised lighting system will just happen to provide much more contrast between planes and their background when it comes to WVR dogfighting.

Throwing money at the problem and buying new monitors for all DCS players in 3-5 years is not a solution.

It's really three separate graphs combined together. For contrast it's how much added contrast. For scaling it's scale factor. For impostors it's size and alpha. I didn't put exact numbers because that's stuff that would be determined experimentally. What's important is the distances and the general shapes of the graphs.

There was another version of the proof of concept mod where I focused specifically on contrast for impostors. The problem with this is that it works great only when the game is using impostors. Once they get sufficiently close that the impostor no longer draws, you're back to something that's much harder to see even though it closer. I think an ideal system would use something like impostors at long range (> ~5km), and then some kind of subtle (subtle!) visual scaling system at ranges closer than it, combined with a boost in contrast for the object. The impostor system works very well when the target is far and its size can be measured in pixels. Not only is it efficient, but it's also very controllable, so you can tweak exactly when you want things to start being visible and by how much. This system doesn't work well at close range though because the closer it gets the more apparent that it's just a sprite becomes. This is why it goes back to rendering the original model. As I've stated numerous times in the past, the impostor system as currently implemented in vanilla DCS is woefully underused and a potentially very powerful tool. It's a shame that its current implementation is so simplistic, because that's where the biggest problem of ridiculously long range spotting (the problem that GGTharos refers to often) comes from. That specific aspect is trivially easy to solve. The hard part in DCS is what to do with targets when they get closer. Scaling based systems on the other hand, excel at close range where the problem you're dealing with becomes more about how far can you ID and track a target versus just knowing it's there. Scaling systems suffer at longer ranges though because it's difficult to tweak them to get something that works exactly as it needs to at long range. Meanwhile, I would also add some kind of contrast when in the smart scaling ranges that gets slightly more pronounced the further it gets, but in 2.5 the raw contrast situation might be fixed for all we know. I put together this little thing in paint to help visualize what I'm trying to say. Each system has strengths and weaknesses, and the best ones combine them.

When I say did it poorly, I was referring to people's issues with the current impostor system, and the ancient IL-2 solution of drawing 1-4 pixels when a model gets sufficiently small. Those systems are too basic, but with minor tweaks would work fairly well for solving the "long range" (i.e. ~10km, which is roughly the max distance for eyes on target) spotting. I think DCS's biggest shortcoming is in the 1km - 4km range where planes are unusually difficult to spot. This is where the contrast comes in to play, and is something that DCS struggles with for whatever reason. DCS is getting a pretty big overhaul of its rendering in 2.5, so maybe, just maybe something about that renderer will help with spotting and identifying planes at short range, but as with everything ED/DCS, we won't know until it's out. ED doesn't talk about things. Of course, one way to help mitigate these issues is to buy all DCS players 4k HDR monitors, but that's a ridiculous proposal, and it's only treating the symptom, not the problem. As for Falcon's Smart Scaling, I think it's a simple and effective solution to the problem. Personally I think Falcon's exact formula is a little generous and I would tone it down slightly given the resolutions of that paper's day. However, the concept is sound and demonstrably effective.

Which is why nobody is suggesting a simple dot. There are realistic ways to do this, but nobody wants to even try it because somebody once did it poorly in the past.

Square wheels don't work, so we shouldn't bother with wheels.

On the main topic, I have to agree that something needs to be done about the wheel brakes. I don't have an axis to bind them to, so they lock up at the slightest touch. It makes them almost completely unusable as even when lightly tapping the brakes while taxiing, they still lock up. BST needs to do something about this. Either make the brakes come on much slower when you press the button, maybe a separte bind for half-brakes, or add some kind of gameplay assist thing where it feathers the brakes as you would with pedals. This is one of my biggest issues with the F-5 right now and in everyday handling of the plane makes it much more of a hassle than it should be.

This echoes almost exactly what I feel, although skewing the date slightly older to remove the F-15A and F-16A comes in a very close second. I really like the idea of a crappy AIM-7 being the top dog radar missile, and the "super fighters" of the F-15A and F-16A being available only in very limited numbers compared to numerous MiG-21s, MiG-23s, and late model F-4s and F-5s. You get all the magic of old fashioned dogfighting with missiles that are just good enough to kill things, but not good enough that they're quite as dominant as the AIM-9Ms/R-73s and AIM-120s of today.

Welcome to DCS, where the planes are invisible and it's hailed as realism. As you can tell by the swift moderation into the nearest garbage bin megathread, this is a very, very longstanding issue of DCS. The recent (as of 1.5.0, from December of last year) model enlargement helps, but it's a significantly flawed implementation that ends with most servers disabling the setting completely, making its existence pointless. Aircraft visibility has been, and remains, one of my greatest issues with DCS for years. There are many examples of threads over the years about this. Here's a good one from three years ago and before 1.5: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=101143 I don't know what much else there is to add to this, as everything that can be said on the subject has been said a million times over. The biggest problem is that there has been absolutely zero messaging on this subject from ED. ED is in general very tight lipped about everything, so we have no idea what their plans are to address this, if any plans exist, or if they even consider this to be a problem. I know one of the reasons you left a certain other game was because of the unresponsive and uncommunicative developers, but you'll find no such reprieve here. If anything, ED are even more tight lipped than a certain snail themed developer. Something I'd recommend reading, or at least skimming through, is this paper on aircraft visibility and identification done for military flight simulators, and one method of compensating for the difficulty of spotting/identifying targets in a sim versus in real life. This is the paper that a certain F-16 themed flight simulator's excellent smart scaling is based off of, a system where the realistic setting is "on" rather than "off". https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0ahUKEwis8d_Cv_jLAhVCJR4KHa58CSUQFgg9MAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dtic.mil%2Fcgi-bin%2FGetTRDoc%3FAD%3DADA414893&usg=AFQjCNHKm798R5vMZNOJFfz5dxX2GJwwHA&sig2=YAF950PMFgtBbKimsif_Bw&bvm=bv.118443451,d.dmo&cad=rjt 2.5 is supposedly going to see some big changes to the lighting engine. Will this give more contrast to targets? Will the engine updates in 2.5 help keep planes from apparently disappearing? Will ED include some system in 2.5 to work as a better model visibility setting? Nobody knows, and we likely won't know until it's released.

I'm very curious as well. Was this bug affecting anything related to ground clutter? Did fixing being able to flip the plane upside down for more radar coverage change how radar detection normally works for better/worse?

This has been one of the suggestions to make the setting work better since the setting was added. Even in this very thread, 7 months ago.

I've "had patience" for years on end. My patience has run out. While I appreciate that they did something in the form of impostors, the fact that they treat it as a gameplay realism option in the same vein as labels or unlimited weapons means that they believe it is an assist and inherently unrealistic. If ED decides to go with the approach of "is realistic)))" then they should just come out and say it already. There has been precisely no messaging on this issue ever since the release of impostors, and at that point all we got was Wags giving a description of what it does. Is ED working on improving the situation? I don't know. I don't even know if ED thinks there is an issue, and therein lies my biggest problem with this whole thing. Their actions seem to indicate that everything is working as intended and is exactly as it should be, but until they say something I don't know if there's anything for me to even have patience for.

What? There are plenty of ways to make aircraft stand out more, and none of them have to do with VR or whatever you're calling "double precision lighting." I think a better question to be asked here is if ED is aware of this issue, or if they think there is an issue at all. The messaging has been extremely unclear, and with their past actions I'm inclined to think they don't think there's an issue at all.

TrackIR seems to got all kinds of screwy this patch. Some planes are affected, while others seem to be just fine. The M2000 and MiG-21 work just fine for me exactly how they've always worked. All the FC3 planes, Ka-50, and A-10C have unusual interaction between TIR and the normal numpad view buttons, as well as unusual rotation limits and axes. The view limits for TIR have been dramatically shortened. What used to allow me to comfortably look over my shoulder now only gives me ~90 degrees. The numpad keys and mouse view are functional and rotate the view even though I have TIR enabled. This should not happen with TIR enabled. All cockpit movement was previously controlled exclusively by TIR. The only way you used to be able to move the cockpit with TIR enabled was if TIR had no signal. Looking 90 degrees to my side, the world is tilted by about 15 degrees. The axis of rotation seems wrong. Taking off my TIR hat so that TIR no longer has signal and pressing Numpad 5 to recenter the camera and having the camera act as if TIR is off, no longer functions correctly. Instead, doing so will center the camera on whatever the view was last before TIR lost signal. Strangely, centering the camera with Numpad 5 seems to work "correctly" (it shouldn't do anything at all, but it works how you think it might if it did) when TIR is active, which plays into the fact that the numpad/mouse view seem to be operational when using TIR even though they shouldn't be. External view now reads TIR input. External view is not supposed to be influenced by TIR movement. There seems to be some strange overlap between VR input and TIR input because this is something that happens when you wear a VR headset. I want to make clear that not all aircraft are affected. Of the modules I own, only the FC3, Ka-50, and A-10C have these issues. Both the Mirage and MiG-21 have their normal view limits, no numpad movement, and no external camera TIR movement as they always have. It seems only ED developed modules are affected. My TIR profiles have not changed (this is what it feels like on affected planes, but something in DCS has changed). My TIR profile is set correctly, and the fact that I can switch to Mirage/MiG-21 have it work correctly, and then get in a FC3 plane and not have it work correctly anymore proves that it is an issue with DCS. Setting VR options on/off seems to have no effect on this. Here are also the screenshots that Skate requested to prove that my controls are setup correctly. This is not a control issue, there is something off with how DCS is applying TIR movement.