Tippis

Because we already know what happens and how much more unrealistic that is. Not to mention how it would completely break the PvP balance you claim to strive for. Those are the two things you repeatedly return to to argue against and/or in favour of any and all improvements to spotting. Now you're arguing that it should be made worse than ever in both regards. Oh dear…

It really isn't. It's called “a challenge” and there are entire game genres — very popular ones at that — built on scratching that itch. It's also not unwitting. It's well-known and long-established that the game's spotting is horribly broken in ever which way. People have known about and been fine with that for ages, so how does it change now that the game is more enjoyable to him? It matters a great deal to you who gets what advantage; it doesn't matter to him (or many others). Not caring is not the same thing as not knowing. It really isn't. We've had to expand the number of servers we run to deal with the increased interest as ED have finally started to make headway with some of the game's biggest flaws and add new features that make missions — in MP or SP — much more interesting. Of course, I understand that what you wanted to say was PvP, not MP. Those are two very different things. Coincidentally, PvP isn't particularly broken either. At least not more so than it was with the old spotting system. It was just broken in your favour back then… That's not all that surprising. Remember, the old spotting system was broken. The new one is improved, not in the sense of “you can categorically see better” but in the sense of “they get rid of some of the silliness of the old system”. Being able to see contacts far too easily is one of those things that it is meant to address.

Yeah, no, it really isn't, nor should it be “obvious” that this misconception is true. At least not as far as “resolution” goes. You can dig out a 480p screen from the mid-80s and it will still be able to exceed what the human eye is capable of. It's not a matter of resolution but about pixel density and distance. Get a small enough a screen for any given resolution and place it far enough away (and neither of those two parameters end up being all that extreme), and you get the effect. We've already done the maths before, but let's do it again since the whole PPI thing keeps tripping you up. We are looking to go beyond the angular resolution of the eye — 1 arcminute or 0.0003 radians (i.e 0.3 mils). Let's punch in a fairly standard display, let's say 27" @ 2560×1440 in our trusty old PPI calculator. It comes out as 108.8 pixels per inch or 42.8 px/cm, or more usefully 0.2335 mm/pixel. Since we want that single pixel to occupy less than 0.3 mils, we simply divide the pixel size with the angle to get the radius (distance from the monitor) at which that pixel size equates to the desired angle. It comes out as 77.8 cm — about arm's length, which is how far away your monitor should be anyway. And if you stack up a bunch of keyboards and joysticks and table mounts and button boxes, in front of it, chances are it will be a bit farther away still. So no. Even at a pretty standard ergonomic distance from a regular monitor, it may already have beaten your eye in terms of how small details it can display compared to what the eye can perceive. Of course, if we mix colour differences and contrast into all of that, it can get easier still to trick the eye, although colour representation is one area where ye olde RGB spectrum doesn't cover the full gamut of what the eye is capable of (but that's more around the edges — even good old 24bit RGB does still allow for smaller differences in colour than the eye can resolve). But remember, if you have a larger monitor, that threshold moves further back. A nice big 4k TV becomes outright atrocious. For a reasonably standard 55" @ 3840×2160, the PPI drops to just 80 px/in — 26% lower than the humble 1440p monitor, and it thus needs to be placed that much farther — over a meter away — to make the pixels too small to see. Zoom isn't there to fix the issue of the level of detail a monitor can achieve. It's there to deal with the small coverage of that monitor — it's a field of view slider, after all — in combination with the fact that none of the distances mentioned are fixed. What is very tiny for you, where you need to zoom in, might not be the case for someone else, simply because of the physical position of exactly the same hardware. You ironically mentioned something about misinformation...?

"Not before" as in the last patch, or as in with the 2.8 and earlier dots? Because contact loss was most definitely an issue before as it transitioned into fully using the 3D model. It may not have been as pronounced as it is now, with the VR contact dot being more apparent, making the transition from that dot to the smaller, less visible model be far more obvious and jarring.

And again, with a bit of tweaking (or lots of it... that remains to be seen), this can provide both. Yes, really, and for exactly that reason: servers that want to offer a more realistic environment will most likely enforce off a setting that they perceive as a "helper" of some kind, but the effect will be the opposite of that – they end up with an environment that has less realism and is more open to tweaks to further inflate that lack of realism. Meanwhile, the "gamey" servers, operating on the same assumption, will create an environment that is actually more realistic and more equitable. But I suppose fair play is pretty fitting for a gamey environment too. Quite true. Dots are perhaps not the most advanced and all-encompassing of solutions to all of that, but they can help with a lot of it. Their main strength lies in the transition from just-beyond-WVR to just-inside-WVR. To some degree they can help with the upper WVR range as well, but that's where dealing with resolutions will cause problems as we are, pretty much by definition, at ranges where the full model could and probably should be used, but the outcome will be very different depending on the setup. I don't think anyone is thankful for the oddball fluctuation of visibility that happens at mid-visible ranges. The happiness with the new system stems from the combination of pancake + outer boundary of WVR, which is the game has long had problems of every variety and the new dots offer a welcome (and, for this particular group, functional) solution.

The thing is, the spotting dots serve both those goals, so there's really no contradiction there that needs to be prioritised between. The point of the dots is not to make the game easier – it's to make it more equitable over a wider range of displays and settings than had to be served a decade ago. Just because it's not there yet as far as VR goes does not mean there's some grand conspiracy to cater to any specific group over another. It just means exactly that: it's not there for VR yet. That's all. The problem here is that, as this thread has begun hinting at, that advise rather works in the opposite direction: a calibrated good-quality device means the spots are working better, meaning they are less visible. A bad display and bad settings make them stand out more. Doubly so if the dots are turned off and you revert to the old system where they were already more visible to being with. A mission-enforce setting would most likely do the exact opposite of what everyone expects when doing that. The game is kind of funny that way. That is not to say that a wizard or walk-through on how to calibrate your display (both in software and hardware) wouldn't be a nice think to have, but the pitch for it wouldn't be "you'll see better" but rather "you'll see correctly"… which might not be the desired outcome for the user. Still, it would probably be a good idea to try to include those factors as well in trying to figure out how to best tune your setup for the new dots. It probably won't be anything that be compared one-to-one since all displays will have very different settings and calibrations are in relation to the environment the monitor is in, but it could still be an interesting point to see if there is a trend where certain display types and environments are particularly affected. Oh, and as for the most vocal group… that would historically be the ones who have claimed against all evidence that DCS' spotting was fine and must under no circumstances be touched. Fortunately, ED didn't listen to them and instead started working on this improved system that offers an avenue towards greater realism.

You need to actually point to some dots that are “gigantic”, yes. A single pixel — the smallest anything can possibly be — does not qualify. That aside, yes, that's a good illustration why the old system has to go and why the new one is far more promising and more realistic. And it is possible to make the game realistic in this regard, but remember how some people argued vehemently against any change in the spotting system because it was supposedly fine? Remember how they used the ability to see contacts at these ranges as an argument that actually, the problem with spotting was that people weren't looking closely enough? Fortunately, ED didn't listen to that, so here we are, with a much better system even in the first iteration. And there are quite a few posters in this thread saying that it should be removed completely. Your position here is getting a bit muddled, though. On the one hand, you have come back to the notion that the new spotting dot system has to go and we should just use the old system. One the other hand, you now come back with these screen shots, demonstrating and arguing that the old system is pretty darn horrible and actually provides the very “huge black dots” that you lambasted the new system for having. So which one is it?

Setting aside that you've conveniently not framed them in such a way as to show that the circled contacts are what you're ranging, you should probably try comparing them side by side. You'll notice that the old “no dots” are actually more distinctly drawn, and darker than the supposedly less visible new ones…

So basically, they're more visible under the old system — you can clearly see the “huge black dots” at over 50km range — than under the new one in the region where they shouldn't appear at all, meaning we've gained a degree of realism with the spotting dots. And of course, on top of that, the old system still has the whole inverse-visibility issue at different resolutions that needs to be solved, so the old system has to go regardless even if it didn't have that over-visibility problem. …except that what you're describing is not realistic. So there's that problematic detail on top of it being fundamentally flawed as far as how it is affected by resolution settings. No wonder you said that the new system was good.

Well, then it's probably doable, but DCS has a nasty habit of restricting mouse axes to only be possible to bind to very specific things. Come to think of it, does Windows even support multiple and separate mouse inputs, or do they just get mangled into one big current position?

What does it report itself as to windows? It's usually the device itself that dictates whether any specific control is an axis, a button, or some kind of HID input (key press or mouse movement).

How is it silly? You have never once managed to offer an actual argument for that stance. Possibly because, by your own admission, you have never actually read the research or bothered to understand what it even is or how it works. No. That is not how it works. Read the paper and look at the implementations No. That is not how it works. Read the paper and look at the implementations No. That is not how it works. Read the paper and look at the implementations I understand that you will once again go on one of your catastrophically ignorant and uninformed posting sprees about this topic but it would really help if you — just once — had actually read the paper, looked at any of the examples, understood its intent and end goals, and/or seen it in action in any of its multiple implementations. But since you actively, deliberately, expressly and obstinately refuse to do any of that, it will be fun to see what kind of laughably nonsensical fantasies you come up with this time to fill in the gaps (i.e. everything) in your understanding of the topic. If you want to disprove the usefulness and applicability of smart scaling, there is exactly one thing you should focus on: post your research. Or someone else's research. Anything, really, that has the same empirical and mathematical basis, and as many tests of different implementations, but which conclusively show that it doesn't work for some reason. Do that, and you might have a point. You won't, so you don't.

In the far distant future when we all have retina-level resolution VR goggles, sure. And even then, it might have its UX use cases where it's still necessary. But until then, it needs to stick around to get around the fact that we are viewing the world through monitors with arbitrary resolutions that sit at an arbitrary distance away from the player's eyes.

Lol. No. You see, in the real world, eyes don't have zoom or variable FoV. In fact, those two are the biggest problems when it comes to making sims replicate real world visual acuity because on the one hand they're needed to overcome the inherent limitations of a very tiny view frustrum, but on the other hand, they open up for the game showing far far more than it ever should. The problem isn't with players or their “understanding” of zoom (except in the cases where they claim that this is in any way, shape, or form realistic which is just laughably ignorant) — it's in how you have to counteract the zoom functionality when dealing with far-away stuff. Object scaling is actually by far the best way of dealing with that because it gives you a mechanism to not make ships be too big when zoomed in and at the same time not too small when zoomed out. Real world visual acuity can only be replicated by having hard caps on rendering distance — and far lower ones than people who zoom a lot will want to have. The problem, then, becomes one of pop-in: how do you make sure that someone that is at max zoom doesn't go from seeing nothing to seeing A HUGE MASSIVE SPLODGE as a contact crosses over that visibility threshold? Non-linear scaling is one way. Drawing the model even later and covering up the transition with some kind of dot is another. Either way, zoom is a complication; it's an accommodation to technical limits; it is something that has be compensated for to maintain proper replication. The best case would be if zoom didn't even exist as a function, but we're not there yet in terms of display tech.

Ok, that makes a bit more sense. Lost functionality is always tricky since it occasionally went a way for a good or technically complex reason. On the one hand, it makes sense that “pause” is “pause” and that controls don't really work, but on the other hand, some of them do work still so I wonder if it's somehow linked to how the camera exists in the world. If it's treated like some kind of pseudo-vehicle that, like everything else, can't be interacted with during pause (and the manual camera slewing is simply explicitly set apart from that), then it would probably be tricky to get it back. On the other hand, since we know for a fact that even the full pause isn't… well… fully pausing everything, it would indeed be neat to get some of that non-world-interaction back. I wonder how much work it would be to make a clearer distinction between “pause”, maybe as a sort of world-scale (rather than just player-scale) active pause, and a full on freeze that truly only allows for camera manipulation. So basically, +1, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's trickier to get back than it seems.

Without dots, it goes both ways. One the one hand, you are able to see airplanes at unreasonable distances because of how naive the distance rendering is. Even if you zoom out, the renderer seems to really dislike not showing things that are smaller than a pixel so if you're good at pixel peeping, they show up anyway. And when zoomed in, it just goes by pure trigonometry to decide that something should appear too big at distances where the planes should just not show up at all. There is no (sensible) upper limit to how far out the models are drawn. On the other hand, you are able to lose planes at distances where you should reasonably see them, or where they show up clearly at lower resolutions. It's that awkward cross-over distance where they are no longer just tiny dots on the screen, but are now fully rendered aircraft with (single-digit-pixel) details, which means that colouring starts to matter, and they get lost in the general noise of the background. FoV obviously matters here, but almost the opposite way: if you compress the contact into a smaller cluster of pixels, it often comes out more sharply than if you zoom in… or at least if you only zoom in half-way (ie you maintain a 1:1 scale). Fully zoomed, they obviously show up more clearly again, but are harder to track because of the inherent jitteriness of those higher zoom levels. It is consistently inconsistent and nonsensically counter-intuitive. The biggest promise of all of the spotting dots is that they make it possible that all of that goes away.

Have you tried reading what people write? Because it becomes quite clear then. It's reasonable because it provides much more realistic view distances than before. It's reasonable because it is much less resolution-dependent than before. It is reasonable because it is much more subtle than before where needed, and much more pronounced before where needed. It is reasonable because it creates a foundation for an infinitely more equitable solution across different hardware and software setups than before. And let's not forget that you said it was good. No, they really won't. Partly because graphics settings matter. Partly because display type matter. Partly because physical setup matter. Not many will play in portrait mode, for instance… Not everyone sees the “giant black cubes” you complain about. And your posts show that neither do you. This is objectively false.

Because it's the first roll-out and it has yet to be tweaked. Fortunately, even in this early state, it makes sure that there is the absolute minimum of information given beyond 10nm — just a hint that something is there. By 5 miles, there should also be very little information unless we are talking about very large aircraft. The rest might as well just be a tiny dot, which is what they're represented as at the moment. The "tiny:ness" is subject to the same tweaks as before, and it's about spot on for high-res displays. e: Oh and, I'm not sure people are having trouble with flat screens. If anything, it seems like pancake mode makes these spotting dots work wonderfully, and it's more when you move to other displays that issues arise. There are some hints that TVs are causing problems too, which seems natural since modern ones have a nasty tendency to over-process the image signal to amp up saturation and contrast because it "looks good" for certain types of media. For games, though, you really need to turn all that junk off to make the colours appear correctly and something as detail- and (lack-of-)contrast reliant as spotting dots would be extra susceptible to over-processing.

Sure there is. But you know what there isn't in real life? Eye pixels. Because we don't use screens to look out through the window (and if we did for whatever reason, then yes, there would indeed be tiny featureless pixel blobs, same as in the game).

The main point of the dots is to hide the fact that there is nothing being modelled behind it for the simple reason that there shouldn't be. At the ranges where the dot should be active, any kind of modelling will be reduced to the same four pixels and thus offer no information anyway, meaning all the processing can be skipped and you save a couple of milliseconds on your frametime. Remember, they're spotting dots – not identification dots or figuring out aspect dots. That shouldn't happen until much further in. The problem before was that the ranges for some of that were stretched out far too long (which parts it happened to depended on your setup, but it was far too long for everyone in one way or another). By having these dots, DCS can now hide the transition from showing you a model that you can identify and track to having nothing at all with a featureless dot and make that seamlessly fade away. The loss of information can happen much sooner and much more realistically, and with a bit of tweaking look good in the process. The loss of information is a good thing. Because it is how it should be. Not because people like it that way – it should be that way because people dislike not having information that they shouldn't have anyway.

And you're your basing this strawman on.... what, exactly? Don't extrapolate other people's opinions from your own. Lolno. For one, they're hellalot more realistic and consistent than the dot labels are even able to be.

It's a bit unclear what you feel is missing. The new cinematic camera can do a lot of what you had to do manually with the F11 camera before, and of course, the free cam itself is still around (with proper WASD controls and even a “sprint” button to move around really quickly). The old controls still work, but have become a bit more complex with the new options they've added. Are you looking for specifically a speed matching function so you don't have to fiddle with the mouse wheel to stay in place? Is it the ability to look off-axis (without using headtracking, which sort of provides that by default)? Or is it the behaviour while the game is fully and/or active paused that you want changed?

The goal isn't really to make it fair and balanced, as such, but to make it less a product of your hardware, because ultimately, if it was possible to make the display system a complete non-factor. Spotting being entirely a matter of player skill — being able to see things properly with their own eyes — rather than due to the hardware they're using would be the most realistic outcome. It's part of the simulation: not just the planes, but the pilots flying them who should be seeing the same thing and therefore that's what ideally should be presented to the player. Now, it will obviously be impossible to make your display and settings be 100% irrelevant, but any move in that direction is still a move towards better realism and towards that simulation of perception you (and many others) are dreaming of. Player acuity isn't really a part of what they're trying to deal with here — that would require very different mechanics and be part of the player display settings anyway. To an extent, the ability to modify dot labels could be seen as that, but that's not really a feature they're advertising. It's not about taking the player out of the equation, but about making the hardware factor as invisible as possible. Sure, why not? The setting is there exactly for that reason, and whether it defaults to on or off is more of a customer-statistics choice if anything. Now, the reason it isn't on by default for most of them is probably because the assumption is that most players will have more complex controllers.

It's called "first iteration of a system". It needs tweaking, and as such it needs input to get the tweaking right. This is not a matter of a superior attitude but about explaining how you'll be better off offering constructive input rather than digging your heels in and demanding to go back to a worse system. The one about the previous system offering a level playing field, you mean? The problem is that it didn't. it just offered a system that was unequal in every every direction and often in a way that was completely counter-intuitive (like getting benefits from having a worse system and downgrading your graphics). Now, if you weren't familiar with those flaws, then I suppose that might have felt like something better but in actual fact, you were worse off for not having noticed the advantages others gained towards you. Now that you've ended up on the side that accidentally gains advantages with this new system, you obviously want those to be gone, and that's admirable. But going back to where others gained them without anyone being able to do anything about it is not really a way forwards. Continuing to improve and tweak this new system is. This is why I'm asking for your actual, constructive, input. Unfortunately, this means that your problem is less likely to be addressed. That is your choice of course, but it is an unfortunate one if you truly want there to be a fair and equitable system.

That is the solution you've clamouring to get away from ever since you learned that under the old system, other people had an advantage over you than what you had over them. Coincidentally, we had spotting dots before -- they were just worse than the current ones in a number of ways.