Tippis

Liar. Prove it.

..you would have already known the ranges that I supposedly didn't mention. It's right in the post. You deliberately omitted it in your first quote, and it's plain as day in the second. No such claim was made. You're now off by six orders of magnitude rather than just two. It matters because you claimed that I “either A) do not actually know what [my screenshots] include or B) are going to lie about them?″. I do know what they include, and I don't lie about it. Hell, unlike you, I'll even be honest about my mistake and throw in an errata that will please you immensely because I noticed a very silly error when I tried to match your outcome just now: the measurement to the first row is obviously in nm, not km (but the spacing inbetween groups remains the same because yay grids). Oh dearie me, what a huge setback. The thing that matters is that those 12 aircraft were never in dispute – they're about right but if anything, I said that they should be a bit less visible, especial with that nm/km gaffe. The fact that you only spot 5 of them just reinforces my point: they're not nearly the huge black blobs out at 30-40 miles you claim everyone is seeing. Even you aren't seeing that. If you want to argue that they 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?

True enough, so how about this: Other games have long since offered a more realistic take on spotting, up to the point of basing their solutions on scientific studies of the process of perception. By moving closer to those games, DCS also moves closer to reality.

I actually explained the setup of the picture you're using in the very post you previously quoted. For the second setup. I explained how it was an expansion of the first and I even posted a zoomed-in view which clearly marked the ranges you were looking at. If you took more time to read what I actually write rather than relying on strawmen and then being abusive when your claims about what I say doesn't match what I actually say, you'd have an easier time with all of this. Go back, read again, and see if you can come up with an actual argument rather than useless ignorance and counterfactuals. There are 44 aircraft within the frame of the the second picture — 11 groups of 4. Again, the farthest range is explained right next to the quote you're using, but you have to read the words and note the phrasing. 3 of those groups are reasonably visible, but the last 4 aircraft are difficult to immediately spot. A fourth group is pretty much invisible unless you know exactly which pixels they are. 12 also happens to be roughly the right number of properly visible aircraft — maybe, as I have consistently said, they can stand to be a bit more faint so that fourth row is truly, not just virtually, invisible and the third row is something you'd have to put your nose up against the monitor to really see. What you don't see is what you claimed: “black boxes the size of small buildings” and that you “can still see them 30-40 miles out pretty clearly”. Instead, you see increasingly faded boxes that stop well before even the lower bound of that bracket. Again, if you had bothered to read, you would have known this already. Best way to tell is to set your screenshot format to PNG and just hammer the button when things start to get in range .

Show what to be the case? That smaller objects disappear at that range? Yes, they show that: a 13m wide airplane is pretty much indistinguishable against the background at 20nm. That spotting dots disappear properly at range? That too — they most definitely aren't the huge some would suggest, and that same airplane that is all but invisible at 20nm can reasonably be seen at 10nm… subject to your desktop setup and the distance to your monitor. That they're occluded by the environment? No the images don't show that, but that's because they weren't taken to show that off. I have a batch of screens to show that as well if you want. That they're not ruining the game? Given how much of an improvement they are over the old dots, I'd say that they are, if anything, improving it. What you claim is happening to everyone isn't happening to everyone. Your descriptions and what is shown in your screenshots does not match what shows up in mine. That's just how the game works: different settings and setups yield different results. That is indeed the entire purpose of those settings and of the different hardware behind them. Of course it is. Setting aside your previous examples of that, you are now misrepresenting what my (and your) images show. You are consistently erecting strawmen because you can't actually argue against what is actually said. You are misrepresenting obvious graphical differences as “excuses.” Rather than trying to be constructive and try to figure out what explains these differences, you ignore them and go after the messenger. “The way the game is now” is exactly that: different for different people. Because that's how graphics rendering works. Just because you are seeing different results than I am doesn't mean that this update is unrealistic. It just means that your results from your settings yield something you are not happy with. That is all. Don't extrapolate from there. Don't generalise your experience to be universal, because it is not. For others, the results are far more realistic now than they have been in many many years. If you want to stop being petulant and start being constructive, try to figure out what is causing you to have an unsatisfactory result where others do not.

Prove you wrong? No, that's not very shameful at all. If you're going to make a claim, check it first. If you get absurd results, double-check them. It is not my job to figure out and fix your mathematical blunders — that's all up to you. And when it falls into a pattern of you repeatedly misrepresenting or misstating facts, then it's quite natural to add this latest gaffe to the pile and see the larger trend. …and as demonstrated, smaller objects basically disappear at that range. If they don't for you, then be constructive: try to figure out what it is about your setup or your settings that make them appear anyway for you. Don't assume that it happens for everyone. Why would we? Spotting dots do all the things dot labels do not: they disappear properly at range. They're occluded by and fade into the environment. They're (imperfectly, but at least attempt to be) resolution-independent. Just because your settings aren't producing results you don't like doesn't mean anyone else is ruining the game. The only one doing that to you is you by refusing to contribute and be constructive, and instead hoping that sniping and misrepresenting other people's opinions will help your case. Funny thing: that doesn't actually solve the problem (but may cause some performance issues). What happens when you do that is pretty much what we had before: where people with low resolutions see the planes better than they should; where people with high resolutions see them farther than they should. Neither is realistic and neither is sensible or equitable. It might have worked if zoom didn't exist and if everyone's desk setup was standardised. But neither of those two will happen, so that's not a workable solution. It's also not a very realistic one, funnily enough, since it doesn't account for the many factors beyond simple geometry that goes into the cognitive process of perception. For your solution to work, it would have to incorporate the science that you have very adamantly deemed impossible and utterly ruinous to implement…

Good news: no-one is saying that it does. Just the fact that it's vastly more realistic than previous iteration and that it very obviously can be tweaked to become even more so, belies this notion. The 50nm plane spotting you were so proud of with the earlier dots, and which you used to illustrate that actually spotting was fine, are not coming back. Just because the tweaks have now made it more realistic doesn't mean that it's flawed or that it can't be tweaked even further so you see even less. No-one is saying that either. No. That is me posting a picture where they appear at a reasonable size and density for the size and distance their at. It matches the maths pretty much as it should, but that there's a margin of error depending on the actual FoV of the camera. The notion that it's not having it is just some strawman you invented and not something that I actually said. I can't help noticing that you chose not to include the description since doing so would immediately expose your silly little lie. So let's repeat what I said it shows: “This is what it looks like at 10nm — nothing huge, nothing particularly dark (they appear a bit sooner but very faint and at 10nm is where they start to stick out against the background properly). I'm not sure exactly what FoV the F12 camera is supposed to have, but if it's in the 70° range, the 1.5–2.5px width of the spotting dots is pretty much spot on, and the range is about right as far as how faded in they should be.” So. Did I specify a range? Yes, so if you had bothered to read what you're commenting, you would have not been so confused. Did I say they weren't there? No, that something you made up. What I said that they actually appear sooner than the moment the picture captures — meaning the picture shows the dots after they have appeared. It is not “so obvious it might be a bug” — it is so obvious that it seems to be working pretty close to what's intended and what's sensible. 2×2 pixels is not a “big ass block” by any stretch, and is if anything a bit smaller than one might expect. If you're going to misrepresent what people are saying, it helps if you don't link to them explicitly not saying whatever dribble you falsely try to attribute to them. If you want to argue my points, argue my points, and do it to my face. If you're going to fail at maths and reading, go do it somewhere else.

And another bunch of people have posted pictures without giant dots. So not everyone sees them, because that's how the game works: it depends on your hardware and software setup and config. 2×2 pixels, half of which are aliased into the background, is not “giant”. Good news: with the appropriate setup, you don't. You might, with your setup, but that is you — not everyone. Stop generalising your experience to people who aren't you and who demonstrably and clearly don't get the same results you do. Instead, if you want to not see nose-on F-16s at 35nm, try figuring out what settings you're using that makes them appear that way. Experiment. Be useful. Stop whining. And stop exaggerating massively… 78° = 1.361 radians. On a 4k monitor, 1px = (1.361 / 3840 = 0.000354 = ) 0.354 mils. For 0.354 mils to represent 7,000', the distance to that object must be (7000 / 0.000354 = ) 19,774,011' or 3254 nmi — over 6000 km; one seventh the circumference of the Earth; almost twice the diameter of the Moon. Distances of this scale are not represented or present in DCS. So no. No it does not. Your maths is off by TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE! That's how massively and catastrophically nonsensical and unreliable your claims are. That one 0.354 mil pixel (on a 4k display) at 10nm = (18,520 × 0.000354 = ) 6.56316 meters. An F-16 would thus be 1.5px wide; just under 1px high; 2.5px long. On a standard 1080p display, the simple solution is to just notice that it's half the linear resolution so that's your scale factor, but lets run though it from the start anyway: the same 78° (still 1.361 radians) comes out as 0.709 mils per pixel; at 10nm, that means (18,520 × 0.000709 = ) 13.13142 meters. An F-16 would be 0.7px wide; about 0.5px high; just over 1px long. In both cases, entirely visible, if aliased — doubly so in the 1080p case. At no point is it 7 feet / 2.1 meters, so who knows where on earth you pulled that number from… but hey, at least it's roughly the same order of magnitude so that's an improvement, I guess? You can, of course, provide numerous examples of people saying this, proving that it's not just one more of your inane strawmen, I hope?

That is a massive improvement. Especially since the range at which they get “very good visibility” is much shorter than it used to be. LMAO no. For one, 2.8 had dots. Just not this type, and they were not realistic — far too visible at longer ranges, not visible enough at shorter, and with zero parity between different hardware setups. They were bad in every way conceivable at once. You realise, of course, that the reason the old dots were introduced was to replace an earlier and arguably even worse system. It was also a form of dots — just not a very good one. And remember, you have vociferously argued that the old dots were good. That the new dots are good. You are now pivoting to some dots you weren't even aware of were good. You need to make up your mind and actually hold an opinion other than “nuh-uh!”, preferably one where you actually know what you're talking about and stick to that opinion. The only fixed point in your long history of arguing against improvements to DCS is that, if someone likes it and it improves the game in some way, you are against it. The problem with those is that they're not actually a solution the problem at hand. In fact, they take just about every every problem and amplify them in, especially in the areas where you like to draw your arguments the most: parity between players and realism. You demonstrated amply that you don't even fully understand what they are and what they look like, so to suggest that they solve a problem you also don't understand is quite… silly.

It is an improvement. Tiny clusters of 1–4 pixels total, already well faded into the background at 10nm, is far better than the old system where people would show how planes were visible at 50nm and used this to claim that, because of this, spotting was fine and everyone should just git gud. Here's the tricky bit that you need to get your head around: Seeing this improvement is not the same thing as asking for giant dots at 30nm, because they are not seeing giant dots at 30nm. You may be seeing that, and if you do, it would be quite constructive of you if you could provide a bit of data on your setup to figure out why that is. Different setups yield different results. People are seeing different things, no matter how much you want to ignore that fact. Where I see 1–2×2 aliased pixels, as shown earlier; you seem to be seeing somewhere between 2×2 and 3×3 clusters (although the compression makes it hard to tell — PNG is your friend) with little to no aliasing at twice that distance, and Simultaneous says he sees 4×4 clusters out to 2–3 times the distance. Oh, and btw, spotting dots are occluded by clouds over here, just to annoy you even further. If everyone was seeing everything the same, this thread wouldn't exist, nor would this happen: (And yes, I understand that GIF will forcibly remove some of the nuances in contrast, but it's mostly blue and the differences are clear enough anyway.) Clearly, the system is capable of delivering results that would make you happy. They just aren't giving them to you. That is not the same thing as giving a bad result to everyone, nor does it equate to anyone asking for a bad result.

You're assuming the game renders individual bullets.

Yes, but not for the reason you suspect.

I'm talking about all integration. The stuff listed in the sales blurb: …which is only barely true on one point: it is indeed a GPS receiver — a very bad one that can't navigate properly. The rest isn't the case. It is not a comms radio. It is not a navigation radio (that part is handled via a GPS database of known beacons). And the actual real-world device spends a fair amount of space in the manual on how to integrate it with the standard components that should already on on your aircraft — up to an including the ability to provide commands to the autopilot.

It certainly was what we had before, and you were quite adamant that this was a good thing and that spotting should not be improved in any way. Until you learned that the advantage you had (that others didn't) was counterbalanced by an advantage they had (that you didn't). Suddenly, the game had to be changed to remove their advantage. Also, understand that you can always be forced like that. It's part of the controls mission-makers (and to a lesser extent server managers) have over their creation. Nothing is likely to change that. Sort of. What we have now is something that can be forced four ways over, with the latest setting being a bit unclear as to who's the ultimate authority. In particular when it comes to the application of custom labels via the mission file… The fundamentally good thing with this change is that it is finally an attempt to achieve what you describe. It is not likely to ever fully get there because the possible combination of parameter is just too large to fully account for all of them. But unlike before, some semblance of reasonable parity is at least achievable. That's not the “seeing different things” we're talking about though. The topic at hand is the input given by what shows up on different people's screens, and why we get all these different results depending on the hardware and software and settings involved. How those results are then seen by the user is a wholly different topic for another time. But ultimately, it is entirely possible to have a constructive discussion about what should be the gold standard — what should show up everywhere. Oh, and actually, the different abilities of the user can be accounted for. For one, that's why games have all these settings. For another, it's quite entirely possible to create a guide for how to set up your workspace and default zoom levels to match, at which point there would even be an equal baseline for those who followed those principles. It's also a matter of other graphics settings, where VR users often run with slightly less demanding ones to compensate for the inherent extra oomph needed to continuously render two separate frames at resolutions that equal (and occasionally even exceed) what the pancake use case involves. It also depends on whether either of the two displays run any kind of AA and/or scaling, and where in the pipeline it happens — VR oversampling and pixel density settings will yield different results, even when everything in the game is set to the same. And now we have the ability to further muddle the picture with scaling settings for normal screen use as well. Depending on how that scaling is handled, it may enhance contrast levels just as well as it may reduce them. So it's not as simple as just being closer to the individual pixels.

Yes. Because that last bit in bold is not something that anyone has actually said. That your strawman right there. Actually, most people want what's most realistic, and that's why some are defending this update that massively improves how spotting works. And even if it didn't, there would be ample reason to defend the update on simple basis that ED are now addressing an area of the game that has been in dire need of adjustment for many many years — just having a system in place is a step forward almost irrespective of the first-run outcome. It's so odd that it hasn't even been raised so far. Well, other than as some kind of strawman that is. At no point has any intent in that direction been implied and no point has anything of the kind been proposed or argued for. Not very legitimately no. For instance, I'm saying positive things and the reason why is that I'm happy I now can't easily spot everything. Instead, unlike before, I have to resort to pretty large aircraft to make them appear at longer distances, and even then, they're well faded into the background. I'm applauding this update because it is no longer the horrible and clunky (and massively exploitable) solution of dot labels, but rather something that shows promise as far as already providing far more realistic visibility and which can be tweaked towards an equitable solution for a wider range of display systems. Visual spotting is the hardest part of air combat, and no longer having black dots doing the job for you and showing up at absurd ranges is a step in the right direction. There is. If it's not working for you, post a bug report. But don't come into the feedback thread and try to pretend that this is a solution that works differently for different people, and for some it's doing exactly what it should. And that's very clearly and explicitly and demonstrably not the same as dot labels.

You don't need an inaccurate GPS to make accurate dumb bomb attacks. And since it doesn't integrate with anything, all it does is tell you your position — the accuracy is all down to your flying. Nor do you need it to navigate independently of your on-board nav system. Especially not in anything more modern than WWII, which already has the ability to be reprogrammed on the fly. Oh, and that all assumes it actually navigates correctly, which is far from certain. And the way it is supposed to work is to integrate with all kinds of on-board systems. It doesn't. Its meant to help you navigate to and from fixed positions and airbases. It doesn't. It's supposed to be able to guide you along programmable routes. Often, it doesn't because it confuses magnetic and true heading. That is fundamentally the problem with this module: no matter what niche use you can squeeze out of it that isn't already there through other means, it doesn't actually work. In the many years since its release, aside from a few cosmetic fixes here and there and making it compatible with new cockpits (and core engine stuff like MT and VR), it has received all of one bugfix, which does not address any of its missing functionality or any of its numerous bugs to what little functionality there is.

The first thing that happens is that I go “eww” the the mere thought I'll have to experiment. But even before that, it depends on what you mean by “uncomplicate” — it certainly reduces the range of possible outcomes. But it also becomes more complex in the sense that you ultimately want that fuzziness because that's the only way to hint at details that are smaller than a pixel. Cutting out that creates complications in a different direction.

It is. It'll always end up as becoming a matter of shading an dealing with anti-aliasing the second you start dealing with sub-pixel details. Doubly so if you also want to do the intuitively right thing of shading the dot based on the colour of the airframe… and the less said about the headache of adding in active lights on top of that, the better. I think my main point is more that, given those numbers and given all the parameters that you maybe should take into account, and given the whole sub-pixel problem in general, when it comes out looking like this (well… apart from being scaled up 20× to clearly see the individual pixels) for a target that is ~50% larger (an F-15) on a display that's 35% larger (ultrawide), that seems pretty darn good for a first stab: …but of course, that's on my hardware and settings, and even setting aside the obvious exaggerations some bandy about, that's obviously not what everyone's seeing. On the parametric curve/surface/n-space manifold between people leaving nose prints on 60" TVs and people having a wall-mounted 1080p display on the opposite wall to where they're sitting, they've managed almost nail my position perfectly. You understand that the detection range is reduced in 2.9, yes? That this was the right direction compared to the lack of limits we had before.

Weeeeeeell… Let's take the F-16 as a “small fighter:” a wingspan of 9.5m, at 8–10nmi (14,816–18,520m) comes out as a 0.51–0.64 mils at a head-on aspect. So about twice the lower limit of a good eye's angular resolution. If this was drawn as a single pixel on a 2560×1440 display, your FoV would be in the 74–95° region. So even a pretty modest zoom level would increase them to more than 1px. On a 4k display with the same FoV range, they'd obviously come out 1.5× larger. And remember, the default zoom in many cockpits is at the lower end of that range: 75–85° or so. So For the most part, without even touching the zoom axis, that small fighter would already be more than 1px wide in many cases. But that's just the rendering part. As you point out, that then runs face first into the issue of how close you sit to your monitor in relation to its size and pixel density, and whether or not you can even see individual pixels at that distance (and we haven't even dug into how the dots are shaded over range to remove contrast, and what happens when you slap AA on top of that). It doesn't seem like much of a stretch of the imagination that your average flight-simmer has enough junk in front of them to require the monitor to sit even farther away than every-day desktop use, so the single pixel that represents a just-above-visible target then becomes invisible to player's eye. tl;dr: the issue these days probably isn't so much the monitors — it's more a factor of the geometry of the desktop setup. • Fails to solve the problem that aircraft are seen too early and far away, and that this is hardware- and settings-dependent. • Fails to solve the problem that are at the same time both too visible and not visible enough at upper WVR range, and that this contradiction is also hardware- and settings-dependent. • Fails to solve the problem of creating an equitable transition from unseeable to minimal model rendering size. • Fails to offer any functionality for simulating perception. The only thing your change “solves” is that some people that aren't you lose their advantage that you don't have whereas you get to keep an advantage that they don't have.

That would not achieve the objective, no. Nor is it easy. That's why this thread exists. No. If they stopped having these dots, we'd be back to how things were before and that was nowhere near what he's describing. The lighting aspects in particular were ridiculously off. That is pretty much what they're doing now. Hence why super-visibility at long ranges and sub-visibility at shorter ranges are both going away. The problem is that what you think it should be is not where this will end up, and you've been arguing against any change against your preferences since forever, using all kinds of contradictory pretzel logic to try to make a claim that your preference was more realistic. Now they're seemingly going for something that's actually realistic, which will rob you of the advantages you had, and that's too bad… well for you. It's very good or the game.

I've seen conflicting reports on it, and my headset is just too old and jank to really give a good indication, but do you get the effect in VR where the parallax and distance is off? Where the dot appears to be at infinity when it's just about to switch over to full 3D model, or vice versa, where it appears closer than the 3D model is when the switch happens? It certainly seems like they're going to have to tweak this separate for the pancake and the VR render paths, not just to get the size and colour right, but also to try to hunt down that issue. Of course, since I've heard different people say different things about the issue — which way the error goes, or whether it even exists to begin with — it's going to be… a fun one… to hunt down.

Nah. And since the purpose of the thread is providing feedback, I'm doing just that. Why bother? Because some tweaks are still needed – visibility is still a bit high and starts a bit too far out, for instance. Also out of morbid curiosity about where some of the seeming exaggerations (and outright misinformed claims) are coming from.

There are quite a few local options that are overwritten by whatever the server provides, so a couple of immediate questions: exactly which file are we talking about here? What you describe usually goes in the SnapViews.lua, and specifically the one in your Saved Games\DCS\Config\View folder. In a similar vein, which are the parameters you're adjusting? It might just be the way it is because it is possible for a mission to include and enforce all kinds of user-profile files, but I can't really remember hearing about anyone doing it with the snapviews (but now I have to experiment because I immediately had some very evil ideas… ). If that's what they've done, then yes, not only is it what it is — it's even intended to work that way. It also won't give you any warning about this because that's just part of how settings included in missions work. But most of the times, keeping the client from doing things is usually done via integrity check, which should give you a warning that your client isn't up to code, as it were. If it's the server.lua found in your main install directory (DCS World\Config\View), then it's quite likely that you're running afoul of that restriction and that it works on your own server because, well, it's what your server is set up to use so of course it will accept it. e: Posted before I noticed your edit. So hmm…

What are your graphics settings? As shown above, they're not black boxes, nor the size of small buildings, nor visible out to 40 miles. This sounds more like you're running some kind of overlay. e: In fact, I changed my test setup to really fill the sky with them out to 50nm, and the result was… not that.

What are your graphics setting and at what point do they disappear and reappaer? Are you running any kind of AA or resolution scaling? This is what it looks like at 10nm — nothing huge, nothing particularly dark (they appear a bit sooner but very faint and at 10nm is where they start to stick out against the background properly). I'm not sure exactly what FoV the F12 camera is supposed to have, but if it's in the 70° range, the 1.5–2.5px width of the spotting dots is pretty much spot on, and the range is about right as far as how faded in they should be.