Tippis

…and yet you are literally arguing against a bugfix.

Well, that description fits what I've seen from the spotting dots in VR so that part scans. As for the difference in distance, that can be affected by a number of different graphics settings. By the sound of it, and especially with your further clarification, it seems more like you've managed to make yours more faded than they have. The base resolution shouldn't matter since you're all on the same display hardware, but behind that, there's still stuff like oversampling and AA (and just plain old draw distance to make background clutter show up differently) and the like to create differences. They could see the dots because whatever settings they use emphasise the spotting dots to where they look pretty much the same as dot labels, whereas your setup makes them appear very differently. To be clear, it's not straight up a “your setting” or “their setting” thing — it's the difference between the two. And since we're talking about VR, it's not just the in-game settings that can impact this and need to be compared to figure out what's causing this. The more problematic (as in “difficult to track down and determine”, not as “it's a problem that has a clear-cut solution”) explanation would be one of habit and expectation. If you're used to running full labels, and those occasionally get downgraded to dot labels on some servers, you may have accustomed yourself to a certain look when trying to spot far-away targets. If they aren't, they might not, and are thus more used to seeing what the spotting dots produce. In this case, it's less about settings and more about what you expect to see and react to compared to what they react to and interpret as far off contacts.

It really isn't. They've locked down all kinds of folders and data files for very spurious reasons, often when the only thing you could get out of the data is an understanding of how parts of DCS works (or, most commonly, doesn't work), making it seem like they were trying to hide shoddy programming more than anything. Was that the reason? Who knows — that was just the “obvious” one. So whatever reason you consider obvious must be filtered through your obsession with imagined (largely irrelevant or non-existing) PvP advantages. And guess what? Even if that was the case, that's still not an argument against what the OP is asking for so catering to the insignificant PvP player base would be the wrong way to go regardless.

Have you tried reading the OP?

Then don't present it as anything else. And don't use your useless speculation as an argument as to why the game shouldn't be cater to the majority of its players rather than a vanishingly small and largely irrelevant subset. Using your imagination is what keeps getting you into these situations where you make nonsensical claims based on nothing that is even remotely related to any known reality. If it has been uncontrolled all along, what does this tell you? That the instances where it would matter in the slightest are very far and few between, so that generous assumption that 10% of DCS players are interested in online PvP is probably exaggerated to the point where you can safely remove the zero and be closer to the true number. Why should anyone ask themselves something that isn't really true? Have you considered that you might be operating your aircraft incorrectly? Or that you're just not paying attention? Or that you have no way of distinguishing player contacts from non-player ones? Or that they're using weapons that don't require radar to operate? Or that your assumption about what's going on goes counter to how DCS actually works? You're going to have to specify which game you're talking about because there are quite a few of them. And you're going to have explain why you put cause and effect in this particular order, because it's just as likely that it's the other way around…

Of course it can: the simple way is that you don't render the scratches — done. The pointlessly complex way is to tie it to sight line and apply DoF smearing on anything that is not in focus. DCS already supports this. So nothing that actually supports your assertion, then? Just some personal paranoia that is nonsensically generalised to the entire population of DCS players. No, because it is there with or without shadows. Note the word “exacerbated” because it tells you everything you need to know, and also demonstrates why your simple and misaimed suggestion does not justify not creating a better solution to the actual problem.

Balance isn't really a factor in and of itself, and MP balance even less so. Most of that is up to the mission designer to decide on, and with the new warehouse API calls (once the bugs have been ironed out), there's a lot of control that can be put into that segment. But there are still some design decisions that make things needlessly complex and unrealistic. One is the daft decision to make only one specific version be all that a plane cane be, ignoring what the exact same plane actually can realistically carry, and then tying this to something as arbitrary as the year of production rather than the year of service. Another is that weapons aren't restricted in nearly the same way as far as year of service, and instead only rely on the (still, equally) irrelevant year of production of the carrying aircraft. The most immediate and obvious example is the APKWS, which can be used by anything that can fire Hydra rockets, which essentially means any western (and a few more) aircraft made after the 1950s, and possibly the occasional '80s Honda Civic… and yet, it is nonsensically limited to just a few airframes that have are produced 60 years later because that's when the rockets were being rolled out. Actual compatibility and realistic use is ignored. The third issue is that restrictions and availability are often set not to accurately or realistically reflect airframe capabilities, but rather arbitrary peacetime doctrine, often adopted from units that have never even seen combat conditions. This, too, is something that the mission-maker should be allowed to control, but currently aren't. Having the tools and abilities to mix and match more would massively increase what mission makers can do, what they can restrict, and what they can recreate in a realistic fashion.

The first case sounds a lot like the server was running with a forced label setting, possibly with some custom labels. The second sounds like labels were forced off. The difference between you and your squad, and also between the servers intuitively feels like it's the difference between graphics settings. When they couldn't see the dots you were seeing in the first case, it would be because the dot labels are defined so small as to be sensitive to various AA and scaling settings, and yours make it so they don't get aliased to the same degree as with the other guys (so for them, labels on mostly just replicates the spotting dots). The mystery then would be the second case, but a pure hypothetical would be that you and your squad are describing different dots: i.e. they meant they could see the spotting dots, whereas you meant you couldn't see the dot labels, and behind the ambiguous language, both of you were looking at the same thing, or possibly that once again it didn't make any difference on their part because both types showed up largely the same regardless. Basically, it's a four-square matrix (and the forum table management is too horrid to truly make it into one) You can turn dots on and off and see the difference -> dot labels are in play, and some unknown setting on your end makes them distinct from spotting dots. Dot labels are in play, but the other guys can't see the difference -> some unknown setting on their end makes them indistinct from spotting dots. You seemingly can't turn dots on and off, and they are distinct on your system -> dot labels are not in play, and you're only seeing spotting dots. They are seeing dots but you can't -> the unknown setting that makes them indistinct on their systems makes spotting dots show up more for them than for you. …and so the hunt for the unknown setting(s) begin.

It's not a potential issue. We already know what happens if a skin is missing. It is already not a cheat. The modifications you worry about are a matter for IC to handle, and it can already handle optional downloads just fine.

Not really, no. At least not categorically so as has been amply demonstrated. But then again, that all depends on what you mean by “big black dots”, because you have to be pretty close to aircraft for them to be represented that way — it only really happens at distances where they wouldn't be barely visible IRL either, so it works out either way. The good news is, they don't appear as big dots in 2.9 either. They appear as very tiny dots — almost as tiny as they can be on a regular display — and at that range, they're also heavily aliased and faded into the background, making them smaller, less dot-like, and far from black. VR is a different matter, and it sounds a bit like they have been scaled to match the resolution rather than the actual field of view there. The problem you had in 2.8 on a 4K screen was that aircraft would be still barely visible when they should long since have become completely invisible. You even used that case yourself as an example why people with lower resolutions shouldn't complain and that spotting was actually working perfectly, even though it was patently absurd at what distances they were drawn. But then, of course, you learned that lower resolution offered different advantages than the ones you had, and suddenly it was a huge problem… On top of that was the further problem that this thread has highlighted, where some people play on TVs — a display type that is… let's call it suboptimal — for display quality and which will make things stand out far more than they should, so you ended up with a double advantage. The TV problem is hard to fix in software. That's more of a user error. But that doesn't mean that the software can't create a good foundation so that, with proper calibration, even such bad display hardware can deliver decent results.

Sure it is. You just need to decide on a couple of thresholds as far as minimal (and maximum) size and rendering distances, and not naively let the renderer do whatever it wants and is capable of on a given resolution. None of that keeps spotting from being similar. In other words, the goal should be to make spotting similar across resolutions, and not let something as arbitrary as resolution determine model scaling limits. Instead, those limits need to be fixed and determined beforehand, and the rendering limits on the hardware be calculated from there. Doing the opposite — having the user's equipment be the deciding factor and the source of limits — is as far from objective as it ever can be.

By setting limits an what is rendered, disregarding whether or not they can be rendered just because the resolution allows for it. By the same logic, the advantage of lower resolutions that you've been complaining about isn't a problem either: if you think it's an advantage, there's nothing stopping you from having it too.

Why should it be acknowledged that the system needs to be thrown out when the screen shots demonstrate that it's working? The screenshot I presented didn't actually show anything I had said it didn't. Rather, in your hunt to prove that it was there, you ended up pointing to something completely different, which was the first clue, and then you provided another one when you finally started giving the information that was needed to constructively participate in the discussion. You are not playing on a good monitor — it is very likely that that it is distorting the image for you (including the screenshots) and showing you stuff that just isn't there. This is why you pointed out non-existing dots as “proof” of your position. But the proof wasn't there. At no point did you manage to show something that I had said didn't exist. It's really that simple. Who? It certainly can't be me since you know my name and have no need to refer to me as “the other guy”… so your reference here is quite unclear. And if you are saying that it was me, then I'm afraid that no, that's most likely you misinterpreting rendering artifacts as something they're not and you need to be very clear what it is you think you're seeing and where. The farthest out anyone — including, and especially you — has been able to accurately point to an aircraft in the pictures I've provided is out to 50km. At that point, they are by very definition of the word, not clear. And they are, as I have repeatedly mentioned, still too visible… but even so, it's a massively improvement over how it used to be. It is working. It is moving in the right direction. There is no reason to rip it out at this point when we haven't even seen the results of any tweaks. If you want to present an argument why these at-the-very-edge-of-visibility dots are rendered incorrectly or shouldn't even exist, present that argument. This constant sniping and misrepresentation is utterly useless and unhelpful for everyone involved. So here's a simple one to start with: why should the planes shown in my images not show up at the distances they do? If 50km is too much, what would you suggest was a more sensible upper limit for being able to after very close examination, spot the presence of a large fighter aircraft?

Much less. It suffered the double problem of being visible at impossible ranges if your resolution was high enough, only to disappear at closer ones… except if you had a low resolution, in which case it was the opposite: far too visible close up, but invisible at longer range. It was an inconsistent mess, and none of it was even remotely realistic. Depends a bit on your definition of “see”. By the time it is readily apparent, it is passing through a stage of increasing opaqueness, from being colour-blended and transparent to being a “huge” (read: 2×2 pixel) dot. Unsurprisingly, it's the colour shift more than anything that catches the eye. The size doesn't really change in any appreciable way because we're dealing with something so small that there's very little size that could change to begin with — ±1 pixel is the difference between not existing at all. By the time it gets larger than that, it has already transitioned into 3D model. But this is in high-res pancake mode at “invisible-pixel” distance from a calibrated monitor.

Because, realistically, the pilots that we're simulating would not have the bad eyes that the players have.

He already said that he's playing on a cheap TV on stock setting. So that goes almost without saying. There's also the matter of viewing distance. Anything closer than 70cm is going to cause further issues (at least at the zoom levels discussed so far).

They all use different methods, is the point. IL2 BoX uses scaling and contrast variation (earlier it was contact dots transitioning to low-LoD models). WT uses contact dots and supersampling to create aliasing. BMS uses distance-variant scaling — no dots at all. I have seen discussions about them moving to more complex variants like Sanpat 2, but don't know if that ever happened (also, they're even more into tedium than DCS and don't make money from any level of attention span… but that's a different design intent conversation ). DCS's solution with contact dots and distance aliasing — and I can already see the fury this will cause — is closer to WT than anything, and always has been. Back in the impostor-dot days, the comparison would probably skew more towards IL2 46. But they're also picking those solutions for different reasons and to serve different purposes. IL2 BoX wants you to be able to find and join fights in a world without radars and precision GCI — upper-limit visibility is what needs to be enhanced to make that happen, but also needs to strike a balance where individual planes are not super-obvious. WT partly wants that, but also wants to show off a spectacle and a perception of huge fights — just showing more is a goal in and of itself. BMS wants you to correctly see (and track) target aspects at modern dogfighting ranges, which was the original purpose of the scaling model — max-range spotting is more of happy accident. …and DCS wants… well, as many have pointed out, that's still bit of a question mark. “Better” is the description used, and the specific changes also point towards them wanting to make it more equitable between resolutions, display types, and also zoom levels. It's difficult to discuss which method would work best without a clear purpose, although everyone will have their favourite because it serves a purpose that is close to their heart. Whether that wish matches with what ED want to get out of it is a separate matter. Tl;dr: it would be really helpful in all of this to know the underlying intent. It's easy enough to pick any other game and go “hey this works because [reason]”, but not only are game comparisons largely frowned upon, they're also not very helpful when we don't know if that even relates to the problem the spotting dots are meant to solve. It would be prime dev blog fodder, if that was a possibility.

Funny how that happens when you set up the game properly. What are your other rendering settings? AA and scaling and the like? Do you have a sense of how big the dots are, and how big the 3D model is when it takes over? That's going to be the tricky transition bit to get right, both in term of size and in term of distance when it should happen (relative to the resolution used).

…and a guy who mistakes clouds for planes, and using that mistake to conclude that he sees even more things that aren't there. You wouldn't want to forget that guy, now would you? You have offered a good hypothesis for the first point though: people running on bad display hardware that exaggerate what it being drawn. You finally contributed something constructive. Yay.

That is the likely source of your “mistake”: you're running with accurate colour representation and no pixel filtering. You probably sit at a sensible distance too.

This is the formation grid in the sky: You can ignore his 60km line because it's pointing to clouds, not towards an aircraft. There are a few blotches in the 60km squares, close to where you'd expect aircraft to be, but note how they also exist in duplicates as part of the differences created by the cloud formations. Any suggestion that you'll be able to distinguish one from the other is just hopeful reverie. So… with all the image and colour processing still turned on? Also, on the topic of eyesight… Why is it that a 13.1m object at 20km (= 0.655 mils) is somehow “barely visible” (which you have yet to provide any reasoning for, btw) but two pixels that cover 0.528 mils — i.e. 20% smaller — at the edge of possible colour distinction, are somehow “clearly visible”? How do you justify that double standard? Why does the latter signify “severely deficient eyesight” when the former is supposedly entirely normal eyesight?

And as mentioned, that's DCS cloud rendering — not spotting sots. Nor are they compression artefacts because that's not the something the file format has. In fact, just in general, there's nothing abnormal about that patch. There is an aircraft at 60km — in fact, there are four — but not where your line is pointing. That explains a lot. You should.

And I did. In the first post. In the subsequent posts. In the very posts you quoted. You had all the information you needed if you had bothered to read, but then you claim that you didn't. You lied. Own it. …and there are limits to how small a variation is detectable, especially when in the periphery, and especially when they affect an area that is smaller than the eye can resolve to begin with. “Clearly” is not the word you should be using here. Especially not when the original claim was something about huge black boxes out to ranges that aren't even shown. Let's get really funny and check the ∆E: RGB(182, 202, 208) vs RGB(179, 200, 207) = 1.7758, which falls in the bracket of “perceptible under close scrutiny”. I.e. not clearly. If you compare against the cloud above it, it rises to a massive 3.3725 (= “perceptible at a glance”)… so that would help if it were actually in the cloud. e: Dammit, now I can't even find the same reference pixel when trying to create a second comparison. Oh well, it's still below 2 which is what matters. That aside, you have yet to provide any semblance of explanation as to why you feel the visibility at the given ranges are wrong. You may want to read up on how PNG works.

I think you're lying because you claim that information that was in the two respective posts wasn't there. You can find it by clicking on the quote links in your own posts. In the second one, you even included the information that supposedly wasn't there in your quote. By the way, they're two different pictures. You'd know this if you had actually read the posts and not chosen to ignore the information in them. Uh-huh. -1° hue; +1% saturation, -1% black compared to the background. That does not qualify as clearly visible in any sense of the word and world apart from the huge black blobs that have been claimed. Can you see it if you hunt for it and know where to look already? Yes. But you don't. And that's if you sit so close to your monitor that the pixels are above the visibility threshold to begin with. The artefacts you're confusing for spotting dots is DCS cloud rendering. Let that sink in for a bit. And again and again, If you want to argue that a dot at any given distance shouldn't be visible, present that argument. Why shouldn't they be visible? What in their nature, or in this setup, makes them invisible in this situation?

It's right in the post. Click the little arrow in the upper left corner of your own quote to go there. The range was mentioned from the get go. You quoted the post but chose to ignore and cut out the information. You then went on to claim that the information you ignored wasn't actually there at all. I also mentioned the increments. I also mentioned the max range (which doesn't even show up). You ignored it all and claimed it wasn't there. So yes, lie. Just own it and move on. As for your proof, your 60km line is wrong. There are no compression artefacts. And let's check what that 50km dot looks like. You know, the one that is apparently part of “black boxes the size of small buildings” and you “can still see them 30-40 miles out pretty clearly”, according to you? Here it is in its full glory: Again I'm going to have to ask you to read the actual post you quoted and check the context because context holds meaning. And again, If you want to argue that a dot at any given distance shouldn't be visible, present that argument. Why shouldn't they be visible? What in their nature, or in this setup, makes them invisible in this situation?