Tippis

He didn't say dots, now did he? And you should definitely need them at 10nm — you need to let go of your dreams of 40nm visibility.

They made it work. Now they're tweaking it. The problem is more that they got rid of the beta client, ostensibly because everyone was using it as the de-facto live client without providing feedback, so now they only have their live environment to get mass-test data. Could you please post a screen shot of your options screen? I ask because taking something away is very different from breaking it. If you turned it off and wasn't part of the testing group, then I certainly understand that being forced back into testing is frustrating, but let's be clear about what's going on here. If it was not good before, the unfortunate reality of the matter is that it's best improved by keeping it on and providing data. In particular, it is important to have points of comparison where you can point to before and after, and what got better or worse between each iteration. Sure they can. They may prefer not to, but that's a rather different grammatical mood than “can”.

This is a forum. Without opposing opinions, there is no meaningful exchange. The problem with this opinion is that it's contradicting itself. If you want a realistic spotting system, you don't want the old one. It was catastrophically unrealistic in every way imaginable, at times in ways that shouldn't be able to co-exist, but did anyway — it was that bad. The new one is actually far more realistic, dot size aside, and that dot size is a step along the way in the tweaking process. While it is vastly better than the old one, the new system will naturally go through these iterations where targets will be too large, then too small, then large again, then small again… until we hit some sufficiently good and equitable size that works the best. Same with range — it'll go down and down and down and up and down (the first three downs is just to bring it back from the over-visibility we have, which again I want to remind you is still a massive improvement over the old numbers). The only way forward is through all of that. If you preferred how it was before, there are three options: 1) you got very very lucky and by pure accident got a good solution out of the system. This was not universal, and that's a problem — a select few being lucky is not sufficient reason to go back. 2) you didn't know better and just got used to it. That's fair enough, but the goal is ultimately to improve the perception simulation, and not knowing what's good and bad is also not a reason to go back to the objectively bad state. 3) you benefitted from it and want to go back to where you had an unfair advantage. This is by far the best reason not to go back. Except for in one very specific case (who through their incessant posting on the topic in a vain attempt to make sure no improvement ever happened accidentally let slip why they want things to stay the same), I am not trying to assign any particular one of those reasons to posters who want to get rid of the dots. But throughout the discussion, it has been shown time and again that it boils down to one of those three when you manage to get an answer as to why they want to go back. To get a good, solid, modern, well-thought-through simulation of perception along the entire spectrum of ranges — all the way from BVR and right up until you are trading paint with another plane. DCS' spotting is disgraceful and it has a long-standing and well-deserved reputation for being the worst in the business. I do not want to see ED's efforts to get out of that hole ruined by complaints from people who don't understand the need or the process, or who actively want to sabotage it. I can accept opinions and wishes just fine. But sometimes those opinions are on very shaky grounds — based on incorrect assumptions, misunderstandings, lack of a grander perspective or context — and a reasonable opinion-holder is likely to change their mind if they understand why that is. If you are of the opinion that the moon is made of cheese and will soon crash into us, then maybe you can be swayed from your plan to bake the world's largest cracker if you learn that it's mostly rock and if any of the pebbles that will remain after tidal forces rip it apart actually reach the ground for you to eat, baking will not exist as a concept any more. And sometimes, those “opinions” are actually nothing of the kind. They're just rote repetitions of known and proven untruths and fantasies, with the sole intent to maintain (or regress back to) a state of horrible brokenness and unfairness. No amount of geology and orbital mechanics demonstration will help there — these posts are just there to spread utter nonsense to try to prop up misinformed (actual) opinions in the hope that hose opinion-holders will reciprocate and accidentally support regression towards a bad state of affairs. Wishes are a bit different. You can wish for anything, but you need understand what it is you wish for. If you want more realism, then you either need to show that this is actually what will come out of your wish, or you need to be prepared to read long explanations of why the outcome will actually be the opposite of what you want. I've posted it before, but repetition is the mother of somethingsomething… I expect a good spotting system to not just deal with spotting. I expect it to be a simulation of perception. “Spotting” is really just one particular phase of that larger system, dealing with the range segment where a target crosses over from BVR to WVR, but is not yet large enough in the sky to let you identify it as another other than a tiny blob. No direction, no type, no discernible colour — nothing. Just a blob that you probably want to keep your eye on until you figure out what it is. Closer in, that “spotting” will transition into “tracking”, where you still don't know what it is, but you can tell where it's going. You can see that it has a pointy end and a burn:y end, and IT'S COMING RIGHT AT YOU! Even closer in, it crosses over into an “identification” phase, where you can now tell the make and colour of the thing, and figure out whether to shoot it or not. These different phases need to be data driven, not dependent on game settings. We have (admittedly spotty and difficult-to-acquire) data on what can be seen when, and these need to be the determining factor as far as when targets transition into spotting range, into tracking range, and (to a lesser degree) into identification range. They must not be driven by simple geometry and trigonometry, although those can be used to sanity-check the outcome. Perception doesn't work like that. It's a partially discrete cognitive process where the brain will both filter out and fill in noisy information to let us see less than geometry would suggest for some situations, and more than mere geometry would allow in others. This also means that we can't have a single solution to cover all phases. Spots can't convey aspect — they're dots — so something else is needed to provide that information to the brain. The system needs to be equitable. I use that word rather than “fair” because the whole point is to be able to play with the gaps in the other player's knowledge to create an unfair advantage for yourself. But they ways in which you can do that need to be the same for everyone. You need to be able to rely on the fact that your plane will not stand out against the sky or the ground, and sneak up on the guy that way, and whatever settings they have on their end should not change this. Just because he has a 4k display or plays in VR, he shouldn't be able to spot you at four times the distance, or fail to spot you at all. This means it needs to have pretty complex systems to account for and counteract things like different resolutions, different pixel densities, zoom levels, texture selections, etc etc. You will never be able to solve pixel-peeping, but you can try to get close. Because of this, I expect the system to have a clearly defined baseline: at what resolution and PPI, and at what range, is a specific target is exactly one 100%-filled pixel large. I expect this baseline to translate into “blobs” at higher resolutions and PPI by necessity, but I also expect aliasing to be used to create sub-pixel details for both higher and lower resolutions. I have no particular expectations of when I should see a target — let the data show what it should be — but I do expect that no amount of fiddling with settings and controls will change that. Something huge enough that it shows up at 10nm shows up at 10nm for everyone. Something that is hidden at that distance is hidden from everyone. As far as spotting goes, the use parameters such as livery, size, aspect, relation to the sun etc would be icing on top, but are far-future goodies rather than something I expect out of the gate. I also expect it to be a painful process to jump straight to the equitable part of that whole thing without having established the baseline, or any of the data, nor any additional solutions for the other parts of the perception simulation. We'll have periods of over-visbility and under-visiblity; periods of hardware advantages and periods of hardware disadvantages. But I expect it to move forward rather than regress. Missing the mark is not the same as regression.

And that's the whole problem. When you confidently shout that “THE OLD SOLUTION WORKED FINE AND WE WERE NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT IT”, you are objectively wrong. You are at best generalising from your own unique experience, but you need to realise that that's exactly what it is and nothing more. It's your experience, and it's unique to you. A lot of others were complaining because the old solution did not work fine. For some, it created huge blobs that were far too easy to spot, and there were plenty of complaints about how unrealistic and unfair this was. For others, they created smaller dots that you could see at 40nm and beyond, and there were plenty of complaints about how unrealistic and unfair this was. If you never came across those issues, you either didn't pay attention or you were incredibly lucky, neither of which is a good reason to bring it back. Quite the opposite. Alternatively, whatever nonsense outcome was given to you just worked to your advantage so you didn't care for that reason. Like the people who saw targets at 40nm — they did expect this to be the norm and didn't see a problem with until it was pointed out how ridiculous that was, and then they got very defensive and whingy when that range was reduced to half (never mind that it should have been reduced even more). That's exactly why it had to go: because what you experienced would differ from what others experienced and there was no telling who got a good outcome and who didn't. If it worked, it might have been good or bad, but at least consistent. The old system couldn't even provide that. But no matter why you didn't experience anything you'd label as a problem, that doesn't mean the problem wasn't real and wasn't well-documented. The old solution did not “work fine” in any sense of the word. At best you accidentally got a good result out of it, but that in and of itself shows how massively broken it was. Targets that could be seen at two or three times the current ranges; targets that couldn't be seen properly at any range — the old system had it all, somehow at once, and must not under any circumstances be allowed to return. It wasn't that you didn't have an issue. It's that you didn't know that you had one, or what kind of issue it was. That's a whole problem in and of itself.

That would be self-regulating. There are certainly enough servers, and give than it's mostly a PvP concern and those players are a tiny minority, they don't really matter anyway but would also end up self-regulating regardless. If you want your thrills, you go with what is offered or build it yourself if you think there's a market for it. If it turns out not to be a market for your particular flavour to match your personal concerns, then guess what? Your concerns don't really matter so you can set them aside. It has. It just doesn't yield the equalised result that would be the best outcome, and it will never yield the small dots you are expecting. The fundamental flaw in your thinking is what you think of as “bigger”, without any regard as to what that supposed big:ness is in relation to. Funnily enough, it has exactly what people are loudly saying they don't want here. If that's what you want, you need to try even more to make sure the complainers don't make ED throw up their arms and give up As for the graph, you need to show at least 2 years worth of data to make that kind of claim. Games have seasons, and DCS is no different. Can you show that this supposed slump is different from what it looked like in 2023 and 2022? Because if not, that flat graph shows pretty much nothing. Every single year, without fail, the guys that head our little community get into a panic somewhere around late January because numbers are down. Every year. Because it turns out that, for whatever reason, January is not DCS season in that particular slice of community. Maybe people are going back to jobs and school and trying to get a good start for the new year or something. Same thing here.

Speak what? Something we (and ED) already know and thus doesn't really matter? You really need to make up your mind. First it needs to be an option, then not. Then it's absolutely necessary to MP and now it's apparently bad for it. No, a UI option is not the same thing as a simulation option, and if you ever want to see how many of the simulation options are available to be set on a mission level, you just need to open up the ME and poke around. You might also want to reconsider the self-defeating logic in that statement: if there aren't enough servers, then obviously, offering more with different options would be a good thing. If there aren't enough players, then changing what the servers can offer would be a good thing. Either way, allowing player choices is inherently good — you just don't like it that they are allowed to make different choices than you do. That's an unusually laughable stance, even for being you.

But you are irrelevant. Your experience is not generalisable. The way it looked to you cannot be a guiding principle on what direction the development must take. The simple fact of the matter is that they are no smaller for some. And bigger for others, sure. But more importantly: they now tend towards a mean for everyone, with the ultimate goal of being the same size not matter what. If you were used to very very tiny dots before, then this will mean the end result will be bigger. This is a good thing. Similarly, for others, the end result will be smaller and that will be a good thing too. The simple fact is that they are seen at shorter ranges for some, and longer ranges for others. But again, they now tend towards a shared mean that will actually be more realistic than the 5/40nm split between players that we saw before. This is a good thing. Not just from a balance perspective but from a realism perspective. And the simple fact is that they can be controlled and tweaked to a much higher degree to make sure both the visibility itself and the range can be brought back into the realm of sensibility and simulation. I will happily agree that they're still a bit too visible a bit too far out, but the beauty is that this can be changed and has already been changed. But its demonstrably closer in and less visible than the old system. It has already proven its capability for improvement — something the old system never showed itself capable of. And again, you are irrelevant (as am I, for that matter) so our personal desire to see it farther out, closer in, smaller, bigger, painted polka-dot pink or whatever doesn't matter. Only the actual data for when they should realistically be seen does. And that's the point, ultimately. By simple virtue of the new system tending towards a common mean — even if that means they are bigger/smaller/shorter/longer than what we're used to and want to see again — and of the fact that this common goal can be tweaked to match reality, the new system is just inherently better in every way. You may not personally like the way in which it is better, that doesn't really matter, now does it? Only because “everyone” include people who don't want it to be right for others. It may not be perfect for everyone, but that's an impossible only because it would have to cater to completely opposed goals and desired outcomes. But it can be good enough for as many as possible. That's where the development is aiming for, and in doing so will improve on parameters that many might not even notice or care about. Perfect must not be the enemy of good, especially not if the individual is what defines “perfect”. Sure. And that's part of the iterative process. We just need to get the baseline done first, and the we can go on a new spree of “too big, too small, too close, too far off.” And let's not kid ourselves, that will happen whenever new parameters are added. It's kind of the defining characteristic of the iterative process. I'm sure you're familiar with this old thing: Is it too little? Too much? Too whatever? Adjust and try again, and some of those adjustments will overshoot, some will undershoot, some will feel like regression or making things worse. But in the end, they simply set upper an lower bounds for what the next round should work within. We're barely half-way through one of those iterations. Going back to where we started will not improve things. No, it wouldn't. It could only ever end up as being a self-imposed challenge. Running the game as normal is never actually an exploit, even if you want to paint it as such when others settings differ from yours. By your logic, changing resolution is an exploit. Oh wait, that's exactly the utter nonsense you've been trying to peddle all along. So no, such a setting wouldn't and couldn't be an exploit. It would just be a setting that you could use an excuse for whenever someone was better than you.

And that's an improvement over the blobs being unrealistically bigger, just as ugly, and visible from over 40nm… and unevenly applied just to make all of that worse. If they ended up looking sensible for you, then that was pure happenstance and does not mean that they were working properly. No, this is tweaking. It will go back and forth until some kind of (hopefully) sensible equilibrium is reached. But it will invariably be vastly better than the insanity of the old dots. Actual regression would be to go back to that nonsense and to reintroduce all the exploits that those allowed. No, I know for a fact that some who are complaining about dots as a mechanism want to go back to the olden days where they had no real upper limit to their spotting range and could lord it over the peons who, for whatever reason, did not see targets as far out as they did. I know this because they accidentally said as much when trying to argue that the old system was fine and dandy and actually super-realistic. Somehow. These are the people who were horrified to learn that some of those peons had an easier time closer in due to how the rendering was affected by resolution, and they made the smallness of their own dots a core component of what they deemed “realistic” (again, remember, along with their 40nm visibility). Funnily enough, it was those attempts to first prove it was fine and then prove it was “unfair” (as soon as others had advantages as well), that really pushed the issue over the edge and showed that spotting had to be fixed. Quite contrary to what they were hoping for. It has nothing to do with some people feeling the current iteration being too big — it has to do with some other people using the opportunity where that complaint aligns with their own wishes to go back to unlimited-range dots for them, and invisible dots for everyone else. They are pretty much explicitly out to exploit such artificial and nonsensical advantages, but they do not constitute “all” complainers. They just ride on the wave of a larger group who may have a valid complaint, but they do so for very different reasons. The only problem with the complaint that they're too big, when offered by players who are just looking to have a good game, is that there is very little constructive input as to what size would be “right”, then, if the current ones are not. And in particular, the question needs to be, what size is “right” that is also the same across as many display systems as possible.

Oh god… don't give them ideas.

They really didn't. You just didn't notice it. They were just as huge as the new ones. For some. They were visible at outrageous ranges. For some. They were invisible at far too close ranges. For some. They were wholly divorced from any kind of realism. For everyone — it just differed exactly how from one client to the next. Graphics settings bled into the lack-of-simulation in the most nonsensical ways possible. They were fundamentally incompatible with modern hardware, either because they didn't show up or because they showed up too well — pick your poison. Consequently, they were exploitable, and unfairly so (on top of the exploits themselves being unfair, obviously, since that's the whole point and goes without saying). You'll be happy to learn that there would be even less of a point if they went back to the old system due to how broken it was. There's a reason why a certain set of posters are so rabidly against any kind of iteration on the system, because every such step moves them away from their preferred state where they used to have advantages over other players. They want those advantages returned, and preferably having some additional disadvantages applied to anyone who isn't them. If that happens, you'd get a far less playable game that has completely abandoned all pretences of realism, and playing it would truly be pointless. No, because all the above issues have been toned down significantly and it's now actually a workable basis to create a sensible and modern spotting simulation. The old one wasn't, so it is inherently and unquestionably worse in all the ways that matter. Is it there yet? No, but it is an improvement by pretty much every conceivable measure. Perhaps not over the previous iterations, but absolutely over the old dots. The old system was only “good” for people who wanted to exploit the system. That's why they want it back. It would work about as well in multiplayer as the system you're in favour of, where players can decide their own spotting distance and exploit the system. Which, as you once let slip, is why you like it.

The old spotting dots were a horrid implementation and desperately needed to be reinvented. It was bad and wrong in almost every conceivable way at the same time.

No, but curiously enough it can give you better HDR for the purposes of this discussion. Ponder that for a moment.

…and that's a problem, which is not what we need now. Would or wouldn't? If it would, how? And how would you make sure that it doesn't affect visibility unfairly? If it wouldn't, why do you even bring it up since it's irrelevant?

Yes, this would be the perfect moment to introduce yet another visibility variable that needs to be made equitable across hardware to ensure that those who have the equipment to display that wider gamut doesn't gain some nonsensical advantage and turn the whole game into P2W just to please some microsopically irrelevant subsegment of the already very tiny PvP subsegment of the rather small MP subsegment We know this is the outcome you want. For that reason alone, we can conclude that it is not in the game's best interest and especially not until the baseline has been established to your disliking.

The fix is two separate tracks: The realism track — make an informed decision on what the inner and outer limits of dot rendering should be. At what range(s) should nothing be rendered, no matter what? When should a clear and obvious dot be rendered? At what range(s) should that dot be replaced by a 3D object? As a bonus iteration, figure out if and to what extent size, aspect, and colour should affect those. This is just real-world data that needs to get fed in as hard caps on the rendering pipelines, and hardware should at no point be a factor. The equitability track — figure out what should be the desired common outcome. What size at what resolution at what display type should be the benchmark, and how do you make sure any other variations match that? Part of this will have to go into the question of fade-in and -out to make sure larger dots don't clearly blink out of existence. This is all about rendering pipelines and hardware differences, and is arguably the much harder problem. This is part of what's going on now, although there is some question as to what degree a benchmark has actually been established internally so it might not be built on a solid foundation. Beyond that lies a number of different iterations where other spotting-adjacent issues might need to be looked at to create a smooth perception simulation and visual experience all the way from BVR right into having to scrape off bits of enemy paint from your fuselage. Dots are only really suitable for the outer-edge-WVR segment of that problem, but would most likely have to be (re)adjusted to fit into whatever mid-range solution is chosen.

No. The only way to improve spotting dots is to improve spotting dots. Getting rid of them would be moronic since that would introduce a far far worse exploit than what you're complaining about. In fact, your complaint here is simply that others have an advantage, the same as you. That is not actually an advantage at all. It's just the you don't have it uniquely, and this is of course the core reason for your complaining. You were so used to being able to see targets at outrageous and unrealistic ranges, and now you grasp at straws to get that advantage back. It won't happen. Your exploit is gone and you won't get it back no matter how much you wail and whinge about others getting some perceived advantage (that you can also have, by the way, but which you don't actually even understand what it is). Drop it. Dots will be improved and once they're suitably tuned, the option to do anything to them should go away exactly to get rid of the kind of exploits you want for yourself and not for others. Don't introduce reality into Sharpe's assumptions. It ruins his quest for unfair advantages. Also, don't confuse him by explaining how monitors… you know… work. That also ruins everything.

Objectively wrong. Objectively wrong. Both of them. You see, it's not the number of pixels that determine visibility — it's resolution in relation to distance. Oh, and remember that time you used exactly that version to show that actually things could be seen just fine and therefore there was nothing wrong with spotting? To be the annoying person who answers with a question, what do you mean by “works”? Spotting has never worked in DCS because it has never had a functional and realistic simulation of perception. Spotting dots work(ish) but have a limited applicability and are currently in a bad place because they are trying to use them to solve a problem they are not suited for. But spotting is dependent just a s much on your physical display setup as the graphics settings you've applied. They barely work for me (34" ultrawide) but a large part of that is having made sure that the monitor sits at a distance where individual pixels are just visible but will happily get smeared out if the contrast or ∆E* is too low.

Already in. Oh, and g-induced pilot movement is also already in.

Sure it is. Because nothing else solves the full spectrum of issues that fall into the panoply of “spotting”. We can't rely on pure geometry, because we have tried that and have seen the inequitable and unrealistic results this yields. It is an unacceptable solution from a realism standpoint, as well as from a general game balancing standpoint. Graphics settings should not unevenly and haphazardly dictate how the world is simulated. It is only the cheapest solution, but that puts it on the opposite scale from “good”, much less “best”. We can't rely on just hard-capping that geometry because we even have a term for what happens, and it's not a good one. Pop-in is generally regarded as something that looks ugly, that draws the eye to itself (that's pretty antithetical to representing something that is defined by how hard it is to see), and that should never happen. It is also not acceptable, but at least it has some vague notion of realism to speak for it that puts it at… oh… “not worst”. But still definitely not “good” and nowhere close “best”. Relying solely on dots has some significant limitations, in particular in how it doesn't gracefully transition into 3D models and how it doesn't solve the mid-distance issue with models fading in and out of visibility depending on settings. With sufficient tweaking, it might offer an acceptable solution to edge-of-visibility spotting, but it is lack-lustre for other range segments. It's good enough, potentially even “best” in its niche, but that niche is rather narrow. There is a gap here that needs to be filled. If you want to suggest that there is some other “best” or at least acceptable solution to fill that gap and also to solve the problem all the way out to the edge of visual range, then please describe it. But just going “nuh-uh” is a vapid statement.

Oh, sure. I'm not saying there aren't any methods for it. There are, but those include the very things people are up in arms about and want gone at the moment due to the current state of the dots. I'd almost venture so far as to say it's simple (but that's always a dangerous word to use in relation to this topic): Dots. Make sure they are large enough to cover up a target even in a high-res-high-zoom situation. You'll probably need 2±1px for that, and then you can controllably shrink it down to 1–2px and then fade it out. This is what they're going for right now, but it's… well… you know how it is right now. Scaling. Once the target goes beyond a specific range where you determine it should have no details visible anyway, rapidly and forcibly shrink it down to 2±1px, and then fade it out to zero as the target passes beyond WVR. Requires a bit more coding, but offers a foundation for immense flexibility in tweaking as well as the foundation for a good tracking solution once further in than just outer-edge spotting. Both. Fade in to dot; fade out to scale; sale into 1:1 size at gunfight range (to make sure HUD and fixed reticle cues to determine lead are accurate). What isn't a viable option is to just rely on the raw model geometry + perspective trigonometry, because that's what brought us all the exploits and abuses that highlighted how broken spotting is (or was) in DCS at every point along the spectrum. So it's not that there is no mechanism in all of programming to make them fade gracefully — it's that, at the moment, the one available to DCS is exactly the one everyone dislikes because of where we find ourselves in the iterative tweaking process. And that the best solution has a ton of political opposition, both within ED and within the community. For some reason.

This would yield pretty much the exact same thing. They'd pop-in at the max distance and most likely be ugly blobs at that stage since there is no mechanism for fading them in gracefully. Oh, and most likely we'd be back at the state of affairs where you want to run at strictly lower resolutions in MP.

“Support” is a very flexible term.

Because I use TotalCommander as my general file manager (and it has a very competent mass rename tool in it) and just needed to find a PS solution because I wanted to script up a way to swap things around whenever my MFDs decided that, today, this one, not the other, would be the middle one. Since it's a swap rather than just a rename, it's a three-step process (mfd1 -> temp; mfd2 -> mfd1; temp -> mfd2), and since the names were fixed and 100% knowable, doing that via scripting was just a much quicker solution.

The problem with turning them off (and with using the old implementation to a different degree) is that this removes the cap on spotting distance. In MP, this is a spectacularly bad idea since it lets some players view opponents at utterly ridiculous distances. Emphasis on “some”. In SP, it's merely a horribly bad idea, since it lets players view AI units at highly unrealistic distances. The only way to fix that without using a dot solution is to set a hard cap — an a very short one — on rendering distance. With nothing to cover up the switch-over from not being visible, a target will pop in as it crosses that threshold, which will be very obvious and most likely draw your eye immediately to it. If you happen to be looking in vaguely the right direction with anything other than 1:1 zoom, suddenly a huge blob of airplane models will show up where nothing was before. You better bet you'll see that, clear as day, which sort of defeats the purpose. This will be somewhat resolution-dependent, of course, but that is also a very bad characteristic. For MP, that resolution dependence and the ability to potentially spot planes out to max rendering distance would cause very different outcomes for different players and this would make it trivially exploitable and unbalanced from one player to the next. Indeed, it is exactly this exploitability that makes some poster champion for a return of that (failure of) functionality. The old spotting dot solution was…ehm… naive, let's call it, as far as resolution dependence goes, which caused a related issue where lower resolutions got a significant advantage by having (optically) much larger dots than if you were playing at a high resolution. It made planes easier to spot than they should be. It was also sort of the low-fi counterbalance to the range advantage that high resolutions got. And again, this rubbed people the wrong way: it was (somehow) very unfair that lower resolutions got an advantage of their own, and not just the players who ran high-res. So, again, some are championing hard to make sure that low-res players lose their advantage, but high-res players get theirs back. Spotting dots are a necessary part of fixing these issues. They let you have that hard cap without causing pop-in. They let you counteract different resolutions by having a unified dot size. They let you transition in and out of full-3D-model use in a controlled manner. At the moment, it's that second part that is causing issues, where the unified size isn't properly unified and ends up being too large for some. That is a fault in the tweaking and implementation. It is not a sufficient or even a remotely good reason to scrap the whole system and go back to the exploitable situation — especially not the one where only some could make use of that exploit. At least it was fairly exploitable when both ends of the spectrum got their particular advantage. Dumb, but fair. Ultimately, dots are a natural part of a sensible and working perception simulation. This simulation should not be optional, especially not in an MP setting. If it were optional, the related MP option would not be to force it off, but to force it on, to ensure that everyone runs at the same level of realism. For SP, it doesn't matter as much, but again, the mission maker will most likely want to retain the option force it on, because they have designed their mission around that level of realism.

An advanced version (and for the love of all that's holy, make sure your saved binds are in a safe place so you don't fiddle with those) is to go through PowerShell. The way its file listing, filtering, and renaming tools work means that once you have both the old and the new GUID figured out, you can do a search-and-replace kind of thing across all of your input files. Figure out the path to your Saved Games directory (XXXXX - something like c:\Users\whateveryoucallyourself ), some sufficiently large identifiable part of the old GUID (AAAAA) that has now been replaced by a new, equally large and identifiable part (BBBBB) in the new GUID. In the example in silverdevil's PDF, we can see that the old GUID contains "5A9967D0-9A59-11e8-8001" so we can use that for the AAAAA string, and in the new GUID it is instead "98C8D120-A501-11eb-800E", so that would be the BBBBB string. Then plug those into this powershell command line: gci "XXXXX\Saved Games\DCS\Config\Input" -filter "*.diff.lua" -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace "AAAAA","BBBBB"} The components are: gci (Get-ChildItem) : look in a directory and return a list of what's in it. -filter : only return the stuff that matches the file name pattern we input (in this case, the diff.lua files that are used for bindings). -Recurse : check all subdirectories as well (because it won't find anything directly in the Input folder). | Rename-Item : feed the results into the rename command. -NewName : if a match is found, give it a new name of… {$_.Name -replace "AAAAA","BBBBB"} : …the current name, but replace all occurrences of one specific string with a new specific string. If you type the new string incorrectly and the game doesn't pick it up, just reverse the placement of the AAAAA and BBBBB strings and run it again. If everything works, all your old files will have new and matching names. If something is left over, it's because it couldn't rename because the new file already existed (e.g. because you were experimenting to see what the new GUIDs were).