Goggles

Absolutely. What's the point of posting here otherwise?

You confirm what I conclude about the weather model. In this case, it's seriously flawed, is over complicated, and doesn't reflect real life weather dynamics. Maybe because of limitations, one size fits all, but it should be uniform regardless of airport elevation, and I don't buy the visibility generally improving in cloud with altitude (fog is a cloud that reaches the ground); it may happen in some cases, but not generally. Surface visibility is how far you can see, and it should have nothing to do with thickness or field elevation. If you set a certain visibility value in the fog settings, regardless of the cloud thickness or airport elevation, that should result in how far you can see at that airport. Imagine if a weather observer was consistently under-reporting visibility in the aerodrome METAR, like reporting 200 meters when you can actually see 1000 meters, that person would fast lose their job. That's what happens at the airports with higher ASL elevation in DCS: what you set in the fog settings is not how far you can see.

You're talking about shallow fog, and the slant visibility that improves when climbing. In that case, you will have set the 'thickness' to 0, whereas if you set the thickness to 1000 meters (tops at 3000 feet), the visibility should stay fairly consistent during the climb until you break out, given that there's no point of reference: it's all pea soup anyway. But my point has nothing to do with that. If I want to depart from Batumi, which is at sea level, and I set the visibility in fog to 180 meters, then given that the runway lights are 60 meters apart, I should be able to count 3 lights down the runway. It's actually a bit greater in the game for Batumi, but that's besides the point. If I depart from Tbilisi, which is at about 1500 feet above sea level, or 500 meters, how come if I set the fog at the same 180 meters, I can see the runway lights almost to the end of the runway, multiple times further than Batumi? How do you explain that?

So is that all, fluffy clouds? Anything more substantial, like visibility that reflects what you actually put in the settings? Because right now, visibility seems to improve with airport elevation. For the same value fog visibility set for Batumi and Tblisi, you can see a lot further in Tbilisi. It doesn't work like that in real life. I understand that Eagle Dynamics had a real Russian Air Force pilot as advisor, but he passed away some time ago (RIP). Did they find someone to replace him?

The runway lights at controlled civil airports are always on. So what would be unrealistic about that? At uncontrolled civil airports with little traffic, they would be turned on by the pilot by keying the transmitter so many times on the Unicom frequency (ARCAL). As far as military airports, they may be turned off during wartime conditions, but for big airports that have a fair amount of traffic, unless they're so broke that they can't afford the electricity to run them they should always be on. So having to call ATC every time you want to land so the runway lights come on seems to add an unnecessary level of complexity that brings along other problems.

In daylight, runway lights are too dim to be seen ; intensity (brightness) should be turned up when fog is selected, including approach lights, but lights should not be seen beyond the visibility distance set in the fog settings. At real airports in daytime, the runway lights are usually turned on, but not at the brightest settings, unless visibility is low and instrument approaches are being conducted.

Well, that's great. But how do you edit a mission file? It's all gibberish as far as I can see. Is there a mission file editor? So why don't they allow setting the cloud base below 300m? Looks so easy to do. Yeah, it's called fog.

I did a little bit of testing and it seems that the flight director roll commands do not handle crosswinds very well. With a crosswind, when conducting a Localizer or ILS instrument approach, centering the FD roll bar results in a localizer needle consistently off centre. To make it center the localizer, it is necessary to adjust the localizer inbound course on the CDI. In real life, when doing an ILS approach, the Localizer inbound course set in the CDI is always the published value on the approach plate. For the ILS 31L in Tbilisi, the inbound course is 312 degrees (2010). With an incorrect inbound course in zero crosswind, the FD command logic would assume that it is compensating for a crosswind, but would still center the CDI localizer needle.

Before they deal with complex stuff like dynamic weather, weather systems, and pretty cloud pictures, they have to get the basics right, which is somewhat lacking: Ceiling and visibility: Apart from thunderstorms, how high the base of the clouds are and how far you can see are the main issues concerning conducting missions in all weather conditions, especially when taking off and landing. When the weather's bad, that means you may have a problem taking off or landing. If you're not proficient in instrument flying, you will either refuse to go and fight, or crash on take-off or landing, while the one who is proficient will win by default. The visibility figure you set in the weather settings should correspond to how far objects appear. Unfortunately, the lights, all lights including street lights and runway lights, do not correspond to that: at night, they can be seen much further than the set visibility. During daytime, at least in the open beta version, the runway lights are so faint that you only see them on the the runway. Low visibility is not just some fogging texture option on Open GL. It's the distance limit at which you can see objects, including lights. I hope they're working on that. Presently, you cannot set the minimum cloud height, or ceiling, lower than 300m, which is almost VFR. What about setting ceilings down to 50m or lower? The only way to get such a lower ceiling is to take off from an airport at sea level (Batumi or Sochi) and head to an airport that's higher above sea level, like Tbilisi; then you can break out at the destination elevation + cloud height there, and set that in the cloud height settings at departure. With dynamic weather, some airports could wind up in fog, and you have to return to do an instrument approach or go somewhere else. And as someone mentioned earlier, the wind setting is 180 degrees off what it should be. The wind report is always where it's coming from, and not where it's going to. That makes it easier to figure out the amount of crosswind you have. So if the runway is 09, or pointing East, and the wind is reported coming FROM 130 degrees, you have a 40 degree crosswind. My 2 cents.

Wondering what settings you were using: 2.5.6 open beta or stable version? fog visibility value? fog density? fog thickness? cloud base? cloud thickness? cloud density? day or night? which airport? (seems like Tbilisi 31L is the only one with decent approach lights) I want to replicate. Thanks.

Flight Director Roll command bar Speaking of flight directors: In the CC model, the flight director roll bar is not behaving correctly while tracking the localizer. The command bar does not track the localizer, at least not completely, and seems to be oversensitive to roll changes, rather than localizer deviations. The pitch bar seems to be ok though. Setting the vis down to 1200 feet, I have to go raw data if I want to successfully complete the approach to land, as the roll bar would keep me consistently off the centreline. The C-101CC seems to be the only module where you can fairly realistically replicate IFR flying to the civil airports in DCS. The L-29 Albatross flight director works well, but can only use Russian ILS.

The lighting issues you talking about: is that the cockpit instrument panel lighting, out side lights like runway lights and others like street lamps?

Hi, I recently got the C-101, and loaded it in both stable and open beta DCS. The C101CC seems to be a slightly older version in the open beta than the one one loaded into the stable version. Anybody know how I can load the latest version of the C101CC in the open beta? In the one in the open beta, the instrument panel lighting doesn't seem as good as in the stable version. But the most annoying thing is that the gunsight in the open beta is tooly bright at night. Any way of turning it down? I looked everywhere for a switch or circuit breaker, but seems you can't dim it. In the stable DCS 2.5.6, the gunsight lighting is ok.

Do you acknowledge that the change was not implemented in the latest stable version? It works for me only in the open beta.

Visibilty 200 meters, clearly a Cat III operation, at an airport that was essentially non-precision. That's how far the Yak crew could see the lights. Should never have attempted the approach; any civilian doing that would have been canned.

The lights are key in having sufficient visibility in order to continue an approach and land. That's why most runways used for low visibility approaches have high intensity approach lights and high intensity runway centre line and edge lights. Without those, especially at night, you would not be allowed to continue the approach and land if the visibility was too low for visual flight rules. That's why, in low conditions such as fog, visibility is measured using lights, since it's the lights that guide you into making a successful approach and landing, and not ground features that may appear. To that end, instruments that measure runway visibility essentially determine how far the runway lights can be seen, and report that value as the Runway Visual Range visibility. Before the advent of transmissometers, with the latest versions using lasers and forward scatter meters, Runway Visual Range (RVR) was eyeballed using runway lights: "Originally RVR was measured by a person, either by viewing the runway lights from the top of a vehicle parked on the runway threshold, or by viewing special angled runway lights from a tower at one side of the runway. The number of lights visible could then be converted to a distance to give the RVR. This is known as the human observer method and can still be used as a fall-back." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway_visual_range) When it's pitch black and foggy (less than 1800 meters), it wouldn't make any sense to report other than how far the lights can be seen, as you can't normally see anything else to guide you, especially in foggy conditions. In the real world, runway light intensity can be varied, and turning the lights up to maximum only marginally improves the visibility. However, the instrument that measures visibility, the transmissometer, is calibrated to take into account runway light intensity. But it still reports how far the lights can be seen. If you ever get a night rating, you will learn to approach and land with the airplane's landing lights off, as it is the perspective of the runway lights that should guide you, rather than other ground features that may or may not appear. Any pilot who is to conduct an instrument approach wants to know if there is sufficient visibility at minimums (200 feet AGL on a Cat I) in order to continue the approach and land, meaning: at decision height, are there enough runway lights ahead that will allow sufficient reference to safely manually land the airplane. So, as far as DCS is concerned, when the 'Fog' feature is ticked, there is no basis for setting a visibility that doesn't correspond to how far the lights, including runway and approach lights can be seen.

"At night, you can still see lights beyond the set fog visibility" That means, if you want to shoot a CAT II (RVR 1200 feet = 360meters), you have to set the fog visibility to 185 meters, if you want a realistic night visual environment. The runway lights are about 50 metres apart, and with the fog visibility set to 185 meters, I can count 7 lights: 7 x 50 = 350 meters. You also have to set the cloud height to 300 meters, thickness 2000 meters and density to 8. Fog thickness 1000 meters. Otherwise, the vis goes up.

OK, figured it out. I loaded the latest beta version and the visibility mod works. At night, you cannot see the lights all the way to the end of the runway with reduced visibility, except below. Bug fix has not been carried over to the regular 2.9.16.18 version. Only in the open beta version. In the open beta version: At night, you can still see lights beyond the set fog visibility: Visibility set to 200m, lights appear to 350m Visibility set to 300m, lights appear to 550m Visibility set to 1200m, lights appear to 2400m: At Batumi, runway length is 2400m, so you can see to the end. Should only be able to see lights up to 1200m, half way down the runway. Tweaking required, to reduce visibility of lights in fog at night by at least 40%. At night, when fog is selected, if the cloud density is set to 9 or 10, there is no fog anymore, and the sky appears bright light blue, and horizon appears against shadow of blocked objects.

Did all that again, plus installed a new NVIDIA Geoforce GTX 1660 card with the latest drivers. No change except better frame rate. Lights still visible in fog, and strange blue sky and horizon visible when cloud density set greater than 8 (with fog). Makes no difference whether VR or not. Guess I won't be buying any new modules for a while. Sunk 300 bucks on a video card that didn't make any difference.

Maybe it's because you're not supposed to see them? That's why so many helicopters fly into wires: pilots can't see them. That's also why many helicopters have cable cutters, on the roof and on the bottom of the fuselage. That's also why, when you fly helicopters low level, youo always fly over high tension pylons, and not between them.

Just discovered that the night blue sky [non] fog happens when the cloud density is set to 9 or 10 (horizon seen, light blue sky) (fog option is checked, 40 meters visibility, thickness 1000, cloud height 300 meters, thickness 1000m) If cloud density is set to 8 or below, fog conditions are rendered correctly, except the lights remain visible beyond the set visibility.

HI, Is this issue still being looked at, or is the matter closed? Can it be confirmed that the issue is related to the video card and/or drivers? Considering getting another video card, but don't want to waste my money if it is not the problem. BTW, reloaded the latest drivers for the AMD RX570, and consistently get the issues reported by diskwalker: at night, selecting Fog at any visibility makes all lights visible, makes the horizon visible and the sky turns light blue; non-light objects do not appear visible beyond the set visibility number. In daytime, sky is normal, fog is apparent, except runway lights visible beyond the visibility limit. Thanks!

Had loaded new graphics drivers. Still see the lights. Got the clear blue fog, like diskwalker Deleted metashader and fco. No difference. Reloaded older graphics drivers, no difference, see lights except clear blue fog occasionally. Maybe a graphics card incompatibility. I have the AMD Radeon RX570 Radeon Settings Version - 2019.1023.1545.28374 Driver Packaging Version - 19.30.31.05-191023a1-347941E-RadeonSoftwareAdrenalin2019 Provider - Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. 2D Driver Version - 8.1.1.1634 Direct3D® Version - 9.14.10.01410 OpenGL® Version - 26.20.11000.13572 AMD Audio Driver Version - 10.0.1.12 Vulkan™ Driver Version - 2.0.106 Vulkan™ API Version - 1.1.119 Radeon Software Version - 19.10.2 Radeon Software Edition - Adrenalin 2019 Graphics Chipset - Radeon RX 570 Series Memory Size - 8192 MB Memory Type - GDDR5 Core Clock - 1268 MHz Windows Version - Windows 10 (64 bit) System Memory - 16 GB CPU Type - AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core Processor Using Oculus Rift S.

I am not using any mods that I know of. Version 2.5.6 appears otherwise stable, including rendered graphics (do not see odd colours or textures). Please confirm that you did not see the lights in my track. Is there a setting that I am unaware of that would make the lights disappear beyond the set visibility limits?

Had a second look: 30 meters visibility set, night. Non-light objects are rendered correctly: cannot see them beyond the set visibility. However, looks like they forgot the lights, not just runway and taxi lights, but all the lights, including street lamp posts. They can be seen miles away with 30 meters visibility set. In the attached track, you cannot see the runway markings beyond 30m, which is correct, but the runway and all other lights can be seen all around. Lights should not be seen beyond 30 meters. night30mfog.trk