twistking

We need a high fidelity A-10A!

You are right! Did not notice it, despite calling Berlin my home. I do wonder though: Would we expect Berlin to be in a Fulda gap map? Would be a rather big map, if it would also cover a bit of area south of the Fulda hotspots... I'm biased of course, but an 80s themed map roughly covering Berlin, Kassel (?), Frankfurt, Nürnberg would be a dream. *edit* Didn't see @Silver_Dragon's size comparison. Would still be a heavy map and probably the densest with a lot of very big cities. Nice!

good find. however i have no idea what this could show. the only big international airport near fulda would be frankfurt (other civilian airports in the area are much smaller) and i cannot match that image to any historical layout of frankfurt airport.

Will the launcher also come with the steam version?

I also noticed that often the greens are so much off, that they were technically not green anymore, but cyan, if you want to make that distinction. But it still boils down to greens being too "cold" (too much blue), too saturated and probably to bright also. When you discover those "lime" greens in satellite imagery, those areas seem to be overexposed. This would explain the brightness and wrong white balance.

That was just me being a polemic scoundrel. Fair enough. At first i was surprised, that you would call Caucasus (too) vivid in its palette, but then i remembered that it has different seasons (which is a great feature) and that i always avoided spring, because colours could be a bit "out there". However, Caucasus is still a good example of artist's intend and subjectivity and taste. I mean you could easily make the argument that Caucasus doesn't look photo-realistic or naturalistic, but it clearly looks the way it does on purpose. It looks a bit artificial, but is well crafted (obviously lacking detail compared to newer maps) and produces pleasing images. Again, easily recognized as being video-game-graphics, but still nice to look at. Normandy is indeed way more "problematic" in that regard, but personally i don't find it too offensive, because there's just a lot of detail, so i don't focus too much on those "jarring" colours. I think Kola is especially problematic in scenes where there's less detail and those blotches of lime really catch the viewers attention.

The issue is so obvious, there's no need to compare anything to real world photography. The severity of the issue may be perceived differently of course. ED has extremely talented artists and DCS does shading and colours extremely well generally. Aircrafts can look naturalistic / photorealistic and also the terrains look great in most cases. It's unlikely that those artists would not immediately notice when colours are off to such an extend. DCS would not look as good, if everyone working there was colourblind! I assume that the lime green already exists within the albedo textures of the map assets. If so, then i don't know why it should not be corrected right there. In my CC examples i deliberately used the crudest photoshop colour tool available to make sure it could be replicated with basically every colour tweaker imaginable. I don't know how the DCS map tools work, but it must be possible to batch process the texture data. A modern PC should be able to do that in a matter of minutes... Also i'm not sure why you bring up Caucasus. ED's vanilla Caucasus looks fine! It's not photorealistic, but it has a pleasant palette at least. There's nothing pleasant about the lime greens however: That's why i'm so sure, that those are not intended: They are neither naturalistic nor aesthetically pleasing.

If the person who created those peculiar colours did so with intent, this person wasn't an artist. Therefore it cannot be artist's intent, merely creators's intent. Joking aside, i just highly doubt it: It does not make sense artistically whatever style the creator was going for. I cannot proof it though. Obviously the result was deemed "good enough", but that does not mean that it was intended, only that it was tolerated. Again: DCS uses PBR. With PBR albedo colours should generally (!) match their real world counterpart. Colours are way more objectifiable than amateurs would assume and with PBR this should extend into the realms of computer generated imagery. I'm not interested in discussing this further, as i'm relatively certain that it's mostly an asset (map) issue. Also there's no harm in having different CC presets to correct for it in post. I was only pointing out, that CC is not the ideal solution. It is a solution nonetheless.

You're suggesting the issue was a problem of taste or personal preference. It's not. The greens in some DCS maps are erroneous and should be treated as a bug, not as a point of discussion. Of course there are personal preferences when it comes to colour. We already established that the slightly over-saturated look of DCS is artist's intent. Fair enough. The lime greens however are not artist's intent! Using custom LUTs to correct these colour problem is a crutch for obvious reasons. I'm not against offering more LUTs to choose from the graphics menu. @Stanlesuper's work looks quite good and would be of benefit for many, but it's not an ideal solution. DCS is using PBR (rendering). It should generally be able to achieve realistic colours in "most" situations. Sometimes it erroneously doesn't, which might be a issue with the renderer or the assets, or both. This must be fixed. Colour post processing (and custom LUTs) are the last step in the pipeline. They can be used to cater to different user preferences, retain a natural or more stylized look. Using them to correct bad assets is not ideal!

Congrats for getting official ED blessings. Will you keep responsibility for maintaining those assets, or did you effectively donate them to ED with ED taking over the responsibility to maintain them? Or in other words: Will the assets be part of the DCS core proper, or will they become a module with you becoming a "third party"?

Hi, your examples look really good. For me personally you've maybe even over-corrected a tiny little bit, but your results are objectively better than the original images (i'd probably dial it back ~20%). Well done! I don't have the Kola map yet (and after having watched watching some previews on youtube, i decided to wait until it's much further developed), so i don't have any need for a custom LUT. I'm still very much interested in how you archived your LUT. Did you do this in LUA directly within DCS, or did you use an injector program to get your LUT in the pipeline?

This is only really good news, if ED keeps an eye on production value, performance, maintainability and coherence in the DCS ecosystem. Many mods are quite simply not "good enough" to be put into DCS officially (yes, some official DCS assets are also broken and/or outdated, but those are legacy assets mostly.). Massun's assets look very good though. I just hope, that we'll eventually get parity in visual quality and function between all assets in the official DCS ecosystem...

Will @Massun92 continue to support and maintain his assets or will ED take over the responsibility for maintaining the assets? Should we report potential bugs or issues with the pack to ED or will there be a separate forum for the pack with Patricio acting as some kind of "third-party"?

Noted. I'll still wait though. I don't like EA and this one seems to to be particularly early. I try to avoid buying for a product's potential. I found another example that illustrates this discussion by the way. This time it's a negative example (so it does NOT show the issue. It's positively good i guess). Its from today's newsletter. I think it looks very natural. Not a hint of "poison" lime green. But not only the hue is natural, also there is quite a lot of variety in the shades of the greens. A lot of earth tones as well. The grass areas don't have the appearance of perfectly groomed lawn. Nice! Saturation and contrast are quite high, but - again - this is just the DCS default. I can live with it.

Took a week off from the forum and now that i'm back, the map has been released. Hooray. Skipped through a few videos on youtube and didn't notice those lime greens. I haven't yet bought it (want to wait until it's further developed and on sale maybe) but will keep having an eye on preview to check for colours. The greens are still very saturated of course, but this is just how DCS does things. Again - to those who commented on user control for custom CC: This is not about that! I would appreciate such a feature, but what i was reporting here, is potentially an artistic error or a systemic technical problem of the renderer (or both). It's not as subjective as you make it to be. If you want to disagree with me on the severity of the issue, this is fine. Maybe it's a non-issue and the problem is already fixed, maybe the screenshots were just showing worst-case scenarios (the video i saw, looked better IMHO). User-customizable CC does not help when there's a fundamental colour issue with the assets or renderer, because you would need to dial in different CC for every map and lighting conditions i assume. Thinking about the problem a bit more, i remembered that i also noticed similar issues with a lot of ARMA user-made maps. I now think that badly matched satellite imagery is at least a major factor here. This would also explain why it's less visible at low altitude, where the images is more defined by the procedural textures. Notice that the low altitude picture from my side-by-side examples did change only minimally with the colour correction. This is talking only colour (hue). The lower altitude images still don't look perfectly natural, but this is probably the combination of relative high saturation (an artistic decision by ED) and the way that grass and fields often look in DCS (what i described earlier as model-railway-effect, which might be a result of the usual workflow and/or technical limitations in ED's SDK).

This is the only acceptable core monetization scheme and the only one that would actively incentivize ED to push meaningful updates. If core updates were deemed lackluster, people would keep playing on the old version. The problem with this are -again- EA modules: There would be pressure to upgrade simply for your favorite module to keep getting updates. It would not be feasible to develop modules for more than one version of DCS at the same time...

I admit, we're getting into territories of pedantry now.

I'm not exactly sure what it is, but i sure know, that i don't like it. It's probably a combination of a few things. I remembered that i also saw those "lime" greens in MSFS, that got me thinking that it may have to do with satellite imagery. I scrolled through Kola on google maps and noticed that in certain areas the satellite imagery also showed those jarring hues. This were often areas were the exposure was higher. Often there was also a bit of blooming from reflective surfaces in those areas. Areas with lower exposure also had more muted colours. Hard to tell what's going on there. It might be a combination of the following: - DCS in general has an highly saturated look to it, which is a question of preference and taste, but not objectively bad. It does however highlight issues with hue. - DCS terrain often has uniform green areas, because of engine limitations and/or the way the terrain is crafted ("model-railway-effect" / fields looking like English lawn) - Simplistic atmospheric modelling in DCS gives a blue hue to everything, making greens appear more like lime, sometimes even cyan. - Satellite imagery often shows grass in a similar way. Maybe those satellite images were used for terrain without CC (which would be a very tedious process if done by hand) I did not want to do image correction, because i was too lazy, but since being called a mild cat feels like kind of a compliment to me, i did a quick and dirty CC. All i've done was using the archaic hue/saturation tool in Photoshop. Very basic global adjustments only, not localized edits. It took me a few seconds per image. The most work by far was putting my stupid avatar in the corner. If i feel like it, i'll add some more examples, but honestly the images you posted last didn't look too bad to begin with... some color i'm not too thrilled about, but with all the detail in the image, one would really have to focus on those to feel upset about them. Oh... and if someone from OrbX is reading this: All in all the screenshots look very good. I'm excited for the map and wouldn't have made the post, if i hadn't seen that issue crop up with other maps as well. I think it is something you should absolutely investigate, but nothing to despair about! If it's the atmospheric modeling, maybe talk to ED, if it's the satellite imagery, maybe do another CC pass on the source. Ps: It really bothers me, that some of the promo pictures don't have the correct DCS typography.

ok. thanks.

On some shots it looks to me, as if the external textures got updated. Not sure though...

@BIGNEWY Can you confirm texture updates for the Sabre, Mig and F-5E? The "short" video on the official youtube channel makes me think that at least external textures got updated, but it's hard to tell with the fast cuts and relatively low resolution...

Mk 83 bombs ???

I think that's the wrong solution, because this is not about personal taste. If there's something off with the colours, it should be fixed through the engine or the assets. On top off that, picture adjustment could help user to finetune for their taste or to overcome limitations of their display hardware. Those "synthetic" colours are definitely NOT INTENDED by the artist who made the map. Of course, you can make the point, that the issue is not big enough to warrant more dev time, but declaring it an issue of "personal taste" is wrong, IF we can agree that the artist was going for a realistic or natural look. I just translated colournames from German to English to be honest. German Giftgrün is literally poison green. Just came up with a better descriptor: "Lime green". I also like @Hiob's "synthetic" colours. Again, i know how professional photography works. I feel you're just trying to derail this with discussion-bait, because what you say about 12bit to 8bit conversion is wrong (in the context of what this discussion is about) but also not wrong enough, that i would want to argue against it. It's a moot point anyway. I could see that the combination of DCS having saturated colours by default in combination with the blue tint from the atmospheric modelling could result in the weird colour shift, that manifests in the "lime" greens. However you would not need complex raytracing to correct for that. You could simply do a PP colour effects to adjust the green channel slightly, or you could apply some effect to the ground textures depending on altitude. The simplest solution would just to slightly desaturate the whole image, but that would change the whole look, pushing it more towards naturalism. I'd be ok with that, but it would not solve the real issues. Greens would technically still be off, only less noticeably now. Another aspect of the "problem" is the fact that the way DCS maps are built, grasslands are often quite monochromatic and even, which makes potential colour shifts more visible. Basically DCS grasslands often look like perfectly groomed English lawn. That gives the world a bit of a model railway look, which can be nice, but is even more jarring when the hue is off. I agree that your examples match the screenshot relatively close, but my issue is with screenshots from altitude. Yes, i included that ground screenshot in my initial post, because i wanted to make my point based on the screenshots you provided. I think the screenshots from the ground look decent (great even, if not focusing on the colours). Maybe i'm sounding more harsh in my critique than i intend, because English is not my native language. I would honestly think that a lot of players would not even notice if the issue was corrected, NOT because "all colour is subjective", but simply because an untrained eye is less likely to catch slight differences in hue (There are standardized test for this by the way). Not everyone noticing it, does not mean there's not an issue.

Look, i'm a professionally trained photographer and worked many years explicitly doing color stuff (soft proofing etc.). It's an absolutely moot point, if we perceive colours differently. This is about reproduction. In reproduction objective truth should theoretically (or ideally) be possible, even for someone who is colorblind. Be assured that i know about the pitfalls of photography though. That's why i would generally not use photos as reference in such a discussion. Some of the photos you posted are grossly oversaturated and look in a way less natural than the screenshots. Your first and fourth image on the other hand look natural while demonstrating my point: The greens have a different tint. It's a warmer (and slightly less vibrant) green. Quite the opposite to the poison green from parts of the screenshots. But let's ignore the photos. We both know how deceitful those can be. Take the last picture i posted (the screenshot with the Work-In-Progress-Watermark). Look at it on a well calibrated monitor. Ask yourself if it looks natural to you and what features give away that it's CGI. Then open it in a graphic processing program like photoshop. Try slightly desaturating the green channel and/or pulling the hue slightly towards a warmer green. Make very small (!) modifications only. You'll end up with a more natural looking image. You could make the argument that DCS does not try to be 100% naturalistic, but that it goes for a hyper-realistic look or whatever. Fair enough. I'd still think that the poison greens are not intentional but some sort of oversight and/or a quirk of the DCS engine. Again, some other maps also show this. The opposite example would be the Caucasus in DCS. Ingame it looks really muted. The whole map is green, but it's not overly saturated. It's also not the greatest map (visually). That's not the point.