Tippis

And the counter-point is that, whether you grasp why or not, you are actually arguing in favour of making it easier than it should be. Also, realise that you're not really offering a counter to his claim here: just because it's supposed to be hard doesn't mean it can't erroneously be made unrealistically hard. Under some circumstances, its. Under others, it's the opposite. That in and of itself is a problem that needs to be addressed. You state that as if it were categorically true. It's not. It depends on a whole bunch of other parameters that you're not taking into account. That's another part of the problem that needs to be addressed. The way you state that, the exact same thing holds true for every resolution supported by the game.

That is in pretty much every way imaginable the exact opposite of what we're arguing for. It is exactly because of the catastrophically unrealistic spotting distances of the old system, and the highly unrealistic continuity of how planes fade in and out of visibility, and the ridiculously unrealistic effects of arbitrary graphics settings on those spotting distances that we argue in favour of pretty much anything over the old, because almost anything will inherently be better than the old system. Even the new one is, in spite of its first-run warts and flaws. What is needed is something that can work on an arbitrary-resolution display (so fixed sizes at any given distance won't work), that doesn't draw beyond visible range (so pure trigonometry won't work), yet doesn't cause pop-in (so a fade-transition solution is needed), that compensates for and counteracts variable FoV (so variable scaling is needed). A single method will not do all of that; leaving it alone certainly won't; and relying on pure perspective will fail just about every single criterion. But there is a solution that satisfies all those needs… It is far from impossible.

Except you can't, because that would let you spot the aircraft further out than you'd naturally be able to. To make your idea work, you would have to somehow force specific monitor distances depending on display DPI and you would have to remove zoom. The first is impossible, the latter would cause a ton of unwanted side-effects. Just for reference, the way I have my screen set up, I get “natural vision” (as in, 1px is just below what the eye can resolve) at roughly a 60° FoV. Any amount I can zoom in further than that equates to a distance I can see planes farther than I should. The alternative is to have immense pop-in: cull planes that are beyond some to-be-decided max range, and as soon as they come closer than that, they start to be drawn. But what happens on my screen when I'm zoomed in and looking for targets then? The plane that just came into view will go from being invisible to suddenly being a 16-pixel blob that is immediately spotted, just by virtue of it showing up, when it should in fact be just about impossible to see. The spotting dots try to accommodate those issues by having something that still draws when the 3D model just resolves into a very tiny pixel blob, but which can then be faded into invisibility faster (and, perhaps more importantly, uniformly across all hardware setups) than the 3D model would. No pop-in, no removal of zoom, no reliance on the player being honest about their setup and graphics settings. True. But having dots cover the transition between “minimal drawing size” and “not visible” is probably part of the best solution. You'd still need something else for the mid-to-long distance to take care of the other silliness the DCS spotting system creates, but that's not really the purview of the dots to begin with (even if they help a bit there as well the way they've been implemented now). Just rendering the aircraft according to perspective would bump up against the old issues we had with the previous systems: aircraft being visible far too far out, and being arbitrarily tied to hardware and physical setup. A transition method to invisibility would still be needed because it can be controlled and made independent of those out-of-game parameters.

Sure. It's more that they would not benefit from user-placeable units because they don't have that kind of system simulation, almost by definition of being FC3 aircraft. They'd have to reprogram them all and completely redefine this legacy product that they'd probably be happier to get rid of. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice — just that it's such a far off possibility that they don't work as far as counting how many planes would benefit from the added beacon functionality. I suppose, sort of. You'd still have that issue of, why make the beacons at all if so few aircraft can use them, but why add it to the aircraft if there are so few beacons. It needs a bit of a commitment on either side of that equation for the thing to take off. Or land. That said, there are already code hooks to add all kinds of beacons — TACAN code was exposed ages ago but couldn't be used properly for the longest time. From what the code suggested at the time, implementing RSBN/PRMG would be very similar to implementing TACAN so going for the placeable ones first is probably the easiest “in”. The models exist (if only as a map decoration rather than a static or live unit) and hopefully, getting those hooks to work shouldn't be too much effort.

Doesn't really matter. That's the beauty of having it in the launcher rather than in-game. It also puts the onus on the mod maker to keep their mods up to date, and ED already know (more than anyone) when they make changes to the file structure and loading procedures in such a way that whatever was accurate for version N-1 is no longer compatible with version N. As always, your unfamiliarity with how DCS (and software in general) works makes in imagine problems that pretty much by very definition wouldn't exist.

Because it's good game and UX design and, since it's something DCS officially supports, it's something that it should… you know… officially support all the way. They already do, just not through the GUI.

I'm pretty sure they use built-in databases of all airports and their approaches, irrespective of what beacons and nav aids are available. They were around and had those capabilities long before the beacons became a usable thing on the map. I'm also pretty sure that ED have little to no interest to dive into that decades-old code to suddenly make them have enough simulated systems to make use of any kind of user-placeable beacons.

Just doubling up on this, because it's exemplary. Funnily enough, some of that is because it needs to bypass some of the actual game's antiquated in-game set-up and settings stuff, but the upside of this is that you don't have to load the entire client just to fiddle with those settings (in particular binds). It also very neatly collects all the various external tools and surrounding crud in a single, easy-to-use menu (headtracking, external comms, some mission planning and mission-making tools, data export etc). Of course, that's perhaps a bit unfair of a comparison since that whole package is community-driven, as are the tools that get included in the launcher. It would be quite a different thing if ED were to place links to SRS, Tacview, DCS BIOS, Combatflite etc right in their official commercial product. The closest we get is probably SkateZilla's update GUI, but that one is… messy, and ultimately made for a rather different purpose so that extra messiness makes a bit more sense and actually has a function.

…and with spotting dots off, you can spot airplanes up to twenty times (20×) farther than in real life. Getting that down to 8x is a massive improvement. You may want it to be more, and that's fair — I actually agree fully — but you can't get away from the fact that 8× is more realistic than 20×. You, personally, may not have experienced these massive ranges, but they were nevertheless what the old system produced if asked to. And that is also why consistency is part of the realism: because with the same set if simulated eyes, you should always see the same target under the same circumstances at the same range. It should not have a 250% margin of error just because of differences in the most basic of game settings — that's when you know the simulation has fundamentally failed. The same goes for the supposed (but not actual) “hugeness”: they may be 2×2 pixels for you, but that is the same size as 1×1 for the other guy. Just because they could be rendered smaller on your screen doesn't make them huge — it just makes them equally sized. Again, it would be an absolute folly if the same target under the same circumstances would be differently sized for reasons that have nothing to do with the simulation. The new dots are not making spotting far too easy. They make it as easy as it ever was, on an equal basis. You just happened to have a harder time of it than others before,, and the fact that it is now as easy for you as it is for everyone else doesn't mean the game has gone all “arcade”. It just means you are not being arbitrarily punished for no in-game reason. Coincidentally, most arcade games have far more realistic spotting (and spotting ranges) than DCS has ever had, so I'm not even entirely convinced that would be a bad way to go. Granted, they have it accidentally, and for vastly different reasons but still…

Depending on the exact way this plays out, a common cause for this is that you haven't given the AI enough of a run-in so it decides that it's not in release parameters for reasons only the local AI divinity can fathom. If this is the case, then the AI will usually do the overflight and then go (far) out to reposition and re-attack. To make it attack on the first run, you have to give it a lot of space to come in — and preferably from the perfect angle. Think 40nm between the IP and the target waypoint. Less so with “Attack Unit”, but with the “destroy in zone” tasks, it will also occasionally decide that it must stick very close to that zone and will never fly far enough out to give itself the long run-in it needs to be able to drop, so you have to expand the zone a bit just to slap some sense into the AI. If the AI doesn't do the whole circling around to re-attack according to its own eclectic taste — which it sounds like you're experiencing — odds are that it determines the entire attack to be impossible for some reason or another, so it's only really following the waypoints as part of the flight plan. “Wrong” altitude is a common cause for this behaviour, and good luck figuring out what “correct” altitude will satisfy the picky bastard. I haven't seen it happen in a way that clearly shows the logic behind it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the AI can be equally picky about attack angle for some silly reason. The reason it occasionally works better with the CAS task set is that it makes the AI a lot more aggressive and opportunistic in its target picking. The original plan might still technically fail under the hood, but the CAS task dictates to the AI that, according to a different logic, it should attack this very opportune target that you've line up for it. But the price you pay for that is that, as Grimes says, you now have an AI preset to a bunch of behaviours that you can't really control, so it will often do very stupid things without you being able to stop it. All of this is also why the “destroy in zone” tasks often yield better results: you give more control to the AI to satisfy its own needs, but of course, you're now targeting a large (predefined) area rather than any specific unit.

Looks like it should, yes. A worry would be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: they arrive without proper RSBN (or something built-in, akin to the -21) because so little of the system exists in the game, which then perpetuates the problem that only one module actually uses the system so there's little reason to implement it properly. Best-case would obviously be if the whole bunch is rolled out in parallel, but technical debt is a bit of a DCS forte.

No, I'm answering your question and giving you a short rundown of what the thread is about. The discussion is basically bouncing back and forth between those three positions.

In one corner: the new dots are large and too apparent, and make it too easy to see planes to the point where you don't need to use your radar. In the other corner: the new dots are now of reasonably comparable sizes across different hardware, and show up at shorter ranges. In the third corner: why do we even have dots?

It really isn't. It contradicts what has been known about the spotting system for many many years, and mislabels them as something that was discarded a long time ago. The simple fact is that the old system let you spot targets out to absurd ranges. A prolific poster in this very thread posted a screen shot of one showing up clear as day at 50nm in a long-since archived discussion on why the old system had to be changed. The simple fact is that the old system let you make those dots trivial to see by simply changing your graphics settings. The simple fact is that it is no more an “icon” than the old system. That's a better description of a system that was removed back in 2016. It was — if such a thing can even be believed — somehow even worse than the old dots. …with your settings. With other settings, none of that is actually true. In actual fact, with only the simplest of changes, they'll be the same size (or larger), appear sooner, and be harder to miss (since they will have faded in more at the equivalent range). Not my belief, no. But the long-established and well-documented history of the many quirks and oddities and downright daftness of the old spotting system does. You can try this yourself.

Indeed, the mobility is sort of the entire point of the system, as part of its design intent is that it can be erected (more like “parked”) at any old bit of hardened surface to create a temporary dispersal field or road base. …but yes, the need for such a unit as an active and usable beacon sort of hinges on their being aircraft that actually makes use of it. If it were just a static unit, then the model is effectively in the game already, just not user-placeable. The L-39 isn't exactly the most common combat aircraft to build missions around, so it alone would be pretty weak as an argument in favour of the full implementation. The -21 would need to be rewired to make use of them. We'll see what the -29 will bring.

Nothing really happens to them. The dot labels are just rendered on top of (and possibly slightly offset from) them. Oh, and also, of course, you can redefine the dot labels to not be dots at all, and to render at full opacity out to max range and all kinds of other fun stuff. The font used doesn't have the full Unicode table, but if you want to be really silly, you can circumvent that too and have dot labels show up as “” for friendlies, “” for enemies and… idk… for incoming weapons if you like. This makes the game… a bit odd, visually. I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm simply saying say that your opinion is incorrect. Spotting dots are not icons. They also allow players to spot planes later than the old dots because their range has been reduced. This makes them more realistic than the old dots. Depending on your circumstances, the dot may be larger than before, making it easier for you to spot the spotting dot (I realise that putting it this way sounds a bit redundant, but it is actually a key point in all of this). But all that is really happening is that you are seeing the dot at a normalised size, the same as everyone else. Before, we had the issue that the spotting dot had a fixed size of 1px, and this in turn meant that it was difficult to see for some but very easy to see for others. It all depended on your resolution. So not only were the spotting dots previously rendered at wholly unrealistic ranges — far longer than they are now — but they were also rendered in such a way that, while you may not have (easily) seen a target at that extreme range, they could easily have seen you. What you feel is now “too easy” is actually how other players have been spotting you all along. An important part of this new system is that they're trying to eliminate this inequality: you can now see them just as easily as they can see you. …whether or not it actually succeeds in doing so is a different matter altogether. They are actually far more realistic than the old ones because the possible detection range has been reduced. It might not have been reduced as far as you would like it, but it has been reduced nevertheless. If you didn't see things as far out before, then once again, that was solely due to your settings — other players could see them very far, and even came to this forum to use that as evidence for how the spotting system was not broken and shouldn't be touched (the 50nm figure mentioned before was from one such post). This is why I keep asking you by what measure you say they're not realistic. You are confusing the improved realism (as far as detection range goes) and the normalisation of dot size. Under certain circumstances, the latter somewhat counteracts the former, but only to a point. You can see targets more easily, yes, but that's actually realistic too — not because of the size at any particular range, but because you are no longer suffering from the artificial disadvantage of running a higher resolution than another player. Your virtual pilot is has the same eyesight as the other guy's virtual pilot. Now, it seems like the main reason behind your saying that they're unrealistic is the detection range, but again, that has also been improved. Can it be improved further? Sure, probably, but that doesn't change the fact that the possible detection range has been reduced already. Reverting makes it less realistic. That easier-to-see dot can not be seen as far out as the harder-for-you-but-not-for-others dot could be seen before. Maybe, but you have to compare that against the other option: spotting dots OFF = “ICONS” (by the exact same token) that I can arbitrarily make larger, which means easy gameplay and easy spotting at even longer ranges. Your complaint is effectively that your unwarranted arbitrary disadvantage has been removed. The game will not be better (and definitely not more realistic) just because you want it to be harder than it should be.

No. You keep using that word. It doesn't mean what you think it means. The spotting dots are a very naïve and simplistic way of simulating an edge case of perception on something as complex as an arbitrary-resolution display. They react (somewhat) to their surroundings and vary over range. They're also a massive improvement over the old spotting dots, since they aren't rendered at the same unrealistic ranges, and don't create arbitrarily uneven results on different systems. So you agree, then, that keeping the spotting dots on is more realistic than keeping them off, since the old system lets you spot aircraft out to 50nm on some setups — 20 times farther than the supposed real-life example — rather than the more sensible range we get now. Even if it's three times farther than perhaps it should be, that's still an improvement over twenty. It can probably be further tweaked, yes, but that's exactly what they're doing, and you will still come run into the need for some kind of system that hides the transition from “not seen” to “fully rendered in 3D”. Again, if you want to suggest that the old system was “more realistic”, you need to square that with the results the old system actually produced. You have yet to do so. So to actually summarise: • Spotting dots are not “icons.” • Spotting dots on = new spotting dots, no spotting at absurd ranges, more equitable gameplay across all ranges. • Spotting dots off = old spotting dots, ridiculously unrealistic spotting ranges, and inherently unequal — under some circumstances almost downright cheaty — gameplay. So your suggestion is that the devs keep on doing what they're already doing. The UI element that has traditionally been used to compensate for the atrocious spotting system can already be turned off (those aren't icons either by the way — they haven't been for almost a decade). They have introduced new dots to fine tune the mechanism for spotting dots and have created a more realistic (and equitable, as a bonus) gameplay experience.

To clarify: the dot labels can be seen at even greater ranges, whereas the spotting dots are hidden by the cockpit. And aside from that, they are quintessentially different since the former is a customisable user-selectable UI element whereas the latter is part of the simulation. Also… This is a catastrophically bad idea since it would mean completely abandoning all aspirations towards simulation and having a coherent and consistent gameplay experience.

The new spotting dot system is just another form of the spotting dots we had before, only rendered more intelligently. They are not related to the much older impostor system (which might conceivably be considered some kind of icon), nor to dot labels. They're not meant to make gameplay easier — they're meant to make it more equitable and more sensible. It achieves both of those goals, albeit perhaps not to the full extent some people would like. By what measure? Because of the decreased range? Because of their being less tied to your hardware and more to the actual simulation? Because of their smoother transition? What is it about them that makes you call them less realistic, especially in view of those improvements? By their default setup, dot labels are visible out to 30km (for aircraft), 20km (for ground units), 10km (for weapons), and 40km (for naval units). But they're customisable UI elements so you can crank up those ranges to your heart's delight. Not so with the new spotting dots (which also do not ID aircraft). Dot labels are also visible through all obstructions and have no real means beyond a predefined colour fade to vanish into the background. If all of that counts as a fair compromise, what is it about the new labels (which shed some of those shortcomings) that makes them not be an even fairer compromise? Anything that the new spotting dots do in this regard, the old ones did even more because they were visible at far longer ranges. You may not have noticed, but that was because of your hardware setup, so while you couldn't see them, other players could see you at absurd ranges without using sensors in the exact same way you're complaining about. The only difference was that it was not a feature shared among all clients. Some people had advantages over others because of the differences in rendering (and conversely, they also had disadvantages under different circumstances). This, more than anything, ruins the gameplay experience — doubly so when you're not even aware of why others are seeing you long before you can see them. If you want to play with “icons” on — i.e. turn on the dot label UI element — you can do so, but that is a very different thing from the spotting dots. You need to stop confusing the two. The impostor icons went away half a decade ago and haven't returned since. Nope. • Spotting dots on = new spotting dots, no spotting at absurd ranges, more equitable gameplay across all ranges. • Spotting dots off = old spotting dots, ridiculously unrealistic spotting ranges, and inherently unequal — under some circumstances almost downright cheaty — gameplay. The new shorter ranges are more realistic. The new decoupling from hardware differences is more realistic. The smoother transition between rendering modes is more realistic. And on top of that, unfair advantages between client setups are being… if not removed, then at least addressed.

You're going to have to qualify that. The visibility range is reduced over the old dots. Their size is more decoupled from display hardware so there's at least an attempt to make sure people see the same thing rather than wildly different contacts. They have a smoother transition between dot and 3D model to try to get at the problem where targets would pop in and out of visibility as range decreased. Where is the reduction in realism in that? It's no different from the old system in that regard. It works the same as far as putting a dot on top of a contact, only with a more nonsensical rendering limit. And again, while the new dots may not be a better solution than you can find elsewhere, just the fact that there is cap on how far out they're rendered makes them inherently more realistic than the old dot system. There's just not way around that fact. Whether you feel that the minimum size they've picked to make it equitable between display hardware ruins that effect is a slightly different matter. But for the core purpose of indicating contacts at the far edge of visibility, they're just objectively better. They can be made better still but further reducing that range, sure, and that doesn't mean this first step isn't an improvement over the old.

Classic dots could be seen out to 50nm and beyond, so no, they're not really more realistic. The problem you're seeing already existed, but only for some players. They had none of the restrictions of the current dots and would also be visible beyond maximum label ranges. Classic dots also caused things to be more visible at lower resolutions, which was a different problem. This meant that the problem appeared very differently from one player to the next, so not only were sensors not always necessary — it happened in an unequal and counter-intuitive manner. The new dots may be easier to see, but they're more equitable across display types and also cap out at much shorter ranges.

Yes please. You didn't even bother to skim the OP, did you?

For the in-game, it would make a whole lot more sense if it followed the nomenclature of the coalition the player was part of. With the way internationalisation and localisation already works, and with how there are already multiple options to change things like cockpit and voiceover languages, this could be a surprisingly simple thing to deal with. The mission editor is a different matter because there are a couple of different logics that could be applied. Having them be named consistently and correctly is a good start, but then what? Do you want them to be grouped by system/component? Purely alphabetical? What about components that are used in multiple systems? If we were to dream big, having an underlying tagging and searching system would get rid of most of that issue. That and/or just a sort toggle in the unit list.

Hell, just being able to self-designate a coordinate in CA would go a long way towards making artillery just that bit more useful. The sad part is, unlike with JTAC, I think most of the actual code is already there to make artillery viable. It's just the connection between one unit (or player) being able to transfer target coordinates to another unit (or player) that is truly missing. Even it were just the ability for one side to give a grid reference and for the other to go “ok, I'll mark in on my map” to start the targeting calculation. Sure, there could probably be tweaks made to the time to ready or the control precision and all that, but the interlinking is… well… the main missing link at the moment.

Again, it's not incomplete. It's outright wrong. That is the only excuse you need to change it to something completely different, i.e. something that is right. You're not getting what's on the box at the moment, and worse than that: because this thing isn't what it says it is, all those other planes also end up not being what it says on the box. So yes, changing it into something completely different — namely a functional and reasonably accurate JTAC — is the right way to go. The control issue that annoyed you is merely a player convenience in all of that: the AI will always be stupid. Making it possible for a player (be it in a commander role or directly from the aircraft, and again, there's already a way to lock out and separate those two roles and functions) to dictate what gets hit and what gets deprioritised might not be according to doctrine, but it is in accordance with good gameplay and useful mission design. Sure you do. Sometimes the bathwater turns out to be reactor coolant and the baby is already lost. Junk needs to go. The longer it lingers, the longer it stinks up the place. Again, we have already seen this effect in how the antedeluvian JTAC code has made a bunch of planes — even very recent ones — inaccurate for no good reason. Building on top of this junk pile will only ever create more junk. It has already happened and keeps happening. There is exactly two salvageable components: the lasing functionality (which is already fully detached from the JTAC function so nothing is lost there anyway) and a handful of voice clips. This would also offer them an opportunity to go through and optimise the whole thing and make it ready for everything else that is to come, such as the aforementioned dynamic campaign. It was built for a single function with no real eye to the future. It was overburdened from the get-go. Oh, and no, it's not really running. There's a reason why there are numerous JTAC scripting packages out there: because you simply cannot rely on the built-in JTAC to work for anything but the most basic single attack with the most compliant player. And that's not what people want from their missions these days. Again, it's a very simplistic script that cannot handle the dynamic situation it's intended to handle, and any deviation from that script on the player's part breaks and locks up the whole thing. You can't LShift+R a dynamic multiplayer mission just because you accidentally missed a step and now the JTAC won't give you the time of day for the rest of time. At a minimum, allowing the player to break in and reset that script — i.e. telling the JTAC what to do because it's not smart enough to do it on its own — would alleviate a heap of problems. It's still junk that keeps infesting other modules, though, so that's just kicking the can a few inches further down the road. No-one is saying that this wouldn't be a pretty significant task to undertake. In fact, that's fundamentally the whole problem: this is a function that was made incorrectly from the start and which has caused other modules to be made inaccurately. If a revamp is done at all (and it must be done at some point) it needs to be done from the very core, uprooting every darned silly thing the nonsensical JTAC code has imposed on other modules so that those modules can finally be made to work properly. It will be scary, yes, but so was multithreading. This actually already exists. They're not used much because they only really work with the A-10 (again showing how ancient all of this is). Part of that is because only the A-10 has a nav system capable of holding all that extra information, and part of it is because other planes handle IPs differently (eg the VRP and VIP modes in the F-16 or the different types of attack points in the Viggen). There's also the issue that, as other modules have come out and desperately tried to avoid dealing with that old stuff, they have implemented semi-duplicate functions in the form of per-flight mark points or target points or whatever-points to feed into their systems in a sensible way. And of course, none of that interacts in any way with other modules or with the game world, so the IP function has gotten pushed even further into obscurity over time. The level of pre-programmability varies and that makes it difficult to generalise, but yes, showing some of them on the map would be a good first step. As long as you could dictate which ones should show and/or for which flight. But that also highlights the problem: it's something that would have to be expanded to every module out there, and that's no longer a simple task. Especially since it would need to optionally override, sit alongside, or just outright replace some of the flight programming that's made in the mission editor. And honestly, if anything, that functionality should probably be tied into a much larger unified DTC functionality, which as luck would have it would also solve the issue of having umpteen different ways of setting laser codes and other weapon ground parameters.