Tippis

Every time you stretch “cheaters” to encompass people who make use of their knowledge of game data and/or capabilities built into the game. It mostly serves to separate those who want to play the game exactly as designed (even when wrong, and when it leads to imbalances) from those who want to play the game with custom content and/or enhancements. Actual cheaters will — as always — modify the runtime, not the installed files.

What a funny sentiment. Remember that time when you accidentally let slip that you could see other players at 40nm and essentially told people to “git gud” or “git hardware” to be on your level…? But then when you were on the receiving end of a very similar advantage that other players had, it was suddenly the end of the world and it's a huge puzzle why everyone (not counting past you) don't feel the same.

It has to do with your ignorant claim that the problem is with people having bad eyesight. Setting aside that we've proven definitely what you base this claim on (the fact that you don't know how things should look, even in pancake mode) that whole non-argument falls flat when someone who has demonstrably and provable good eyesight comes along and says the issue exist and is device-dependent. It has nothing to do with their eyes. No, but VR is where the bulk of the problem currently exists and is thus of particular interest for this thread. …and DCS is infamous for going the opposite direction and ironically create very similar results: it uses no tricks, just geometry, and this causes the game to be very fun for those who benefit from this setup and who expect it to be the norm. In actuality, it's not only ridiculously unrealistic, but it is also inequitable in that their “fun” is created in direct opposition to others' fun. And they are just as entitled to theirs in this game. Because that's what it ultimately is: a game. No. They tweaked the game thanks to the many many many many comments of people who could trivially prove that the way spotting worked in DCS was fundamentally broken and unrealistic. This in spite of the comments of 3–4 people who still couldn't understand that the excessive visibility they were seeing was not universal and was not how things were supposed to look. You know very well who the other 2–3 are… Quite the opposite, actually.

Because you can compensate for that if you know the physical layout of the headset. That's where the difference lies and unlike with pancake, it's pretty much fixed and is therefore a solvable equation. Fun fact: reducing the dot size doesn't make it more realistic. No. The whole point of improved dots is to make dots as equitable as possible across different displays and resolutions, with the only uncontrollable factor being how far away a player sits from their monitor, if that's what they use. A related point is to make sure you can no longer spot planes at 40nm like you could before by cranking up the resolution.

The main reason you shouldn't buy it is because it's bunk. Mod builders who have looked far enough into the code to build actual planes for DCS will tell you as much: RCS is a simple numeric factor. I don't know where they got the idea, but I hope it's just a misunderstanding of what the programmers told them rather than a lame excuse they came up with out of nowhere just to kill the discussion. The claim also fails on the sheer nonsensicalness of the idea: that you'd be using rendering output to feed back into a sensor simulation, which means the rendering pass must be producing a massively oversampled image to get sufficiently detailed far-beyond-BVR information about how large a contact is, and then discard it all because the player only needs a 4k image, not a 32k one. And which eye is used in VR for this? And let's not forget that this would mean you could use pretty simple code injection to make the model render larger and thus cheat your sensors that way. And alteration you made to the how the game looks would affect how sensors worked. And for the purpose of this thread, if the rendering result was what determined radar returns, that would mean that planes were rendered at whatever the maximum range is of any of the in-game player radars… so 200nm(ish)? Which in turn means you could theoretically spot planes at that distance with sufficient pixel peeping since they're rendered. Which means this whole discussion about “oh, we shouldn't see planes this well at 10nm” is missing the mark by a factor of 20. We shouldn't be spotting these planes in low-earth orbit! If that was how DCS worked, they would have to rewrite everything anyway because of how catastrophically stupidly it was made, and in doing so, they'd be able to implement scaling properly without problems. As much as I like rolling my eyes at some of the decisions ED make, I refuse to believe them to be that dumb. If you actually wanted to use the 3D model for RCS and sensor simulation, that would be a fairly trivial matter of geometry and a simple point sample model, and wouldn't use the full LoD anyway. It would be done separately rather than as a pointless burden on the rendering since 99% of the rendering data would be useless for this purpose. And funnily enough, it would have to have an ability to scale that model to account for various radar-observability factors that the 3D model itself can't convey in a speedy fashion. So the argument they offered why we can't have model scaling actually means we need model scaling.

The problem is that you can't math. This in spite of it having been shown to you in detail on numerous occasions. Especially, your rounding is atrocious. That 4k resolution is not “about“ 3000. It's actually 28% more. Shock and horror and surprise upon surprise! This means you have to sit 28% farther back to not see the pixel. I'm also willing to bet that you have no idea what “filling a 50° FoV” would actually look like, so when you say that you can still discern pixels, you're basing this on something very different than how large it would actually be. Upgrade from Sumerian to Greek for a moment and use radians instead of degrees. The goal you want is 0.29 milliradians (= 1/60°). In addition, your 50° FoV corresponds to 872.7 mils. What you should be asking is, at what distance does a pixel take up less than 0.29 mils, and what is the angular width of the display at this distance? One problem with this question is, what's the size of your pixel? I seem to recall that you bandied about some 52" (I may be off by an inch of five) TV as your display of choice, so let's go with that. We plug in 3840, 2160 and 52" in ye olde PPI calculator and it spits out a dot pitch 0.346mm (and a PPI in the low 70s, which funnily enough is about the same, or lower, than we had 20–30 years ago… you know, that period where you said that dots belonged?). The beauty of radians (and mils by extension) is that it's simple division and multiplication to turn those into distances. 0.346mm / 0.00029 radians = 1.193m. The 52" display is 132.8 cm wide. To make sure we rely on right angles, we look at the middle and cut that number in half — 66,4 cm. At 119.3 cm away, this equates to 0.557 radians, or 31°. So from one edge to the other, it covers 62°. Again, bam! We're back to that angle expanding out to 3820±rounding 60th-of-a-degrees. As expected. But that's just to prove the result works all the way through. Coincidentally, and just to check on that initial claim what distance would you have to be at for this TV to cover 50° (0.8727 radians)? Well, that's easy. Again, to make sure we are dealing with right angles, we take half that and measure to the centre. 66.4 cm / 0.43635 radians = 152.4 cm. Another 28% farther out. You managed to get the size wrong by the same factor twice over! Impressive. The main point is, unless you're sitting more than 1m away from that display, you should be able to resolve pixels. If they are distinct enough. How far away you need to sit depends on your actual resolution — not as in pixel count, which is often called resolution when it isn't, but as in pixel density. And note here that the huge TV used in this example actually has pretty horrid resolution in spite of its high pixel count. Its 73 PPI is less than the 91 PPI you'd get out of old 14" XGA monitors from the early '90s. Hell, it's less than SVGA (800×600) on those old displays. This is why your snide remarks about other people's poor eyesight are laughable in its massive irony. You have no idea how resolution works. You have no idea how large an FoV is. You have no idea how small (or large, in your case) pixels are. You have no idea how this size translate into angles over distance. You, quite simply, have no idea how good or bad your vision is because you don't understand how to check. So most likely, it's not that others have poor eyesight — it's that you sit too close to your monitor to get the full effect everyone else is having. That's the reason your dots are huge: you're too close to them. All of them. Because that's how large a dot is. By definition. As for the rest, congratulations, you just demonstrated exactly why spotting dots need to exist.

Exactly like that, actually: the smallest thing possible. On your display, we call those things “pixels”. That's what you'd have to use to render the smallest thing possible. Like a plane at a distance that is the smallest thing possible: a dot.

No, yes, and no in that order. The one consistent theme in the long and illustrious history of your arguing against any and all improvements to spotting (or indeed anything) is that you argue against the more realistic option and in favour of the option that lets you (unrealistically) see targets at (unrealistically) longer distances than they can (realistically) see you. Not only can realism be achieved, but dots are a critical part in making that happen. That's why we have them and why ED are iterating on them. The fault lies in thinking that they're the only part, when in actuality they only fill one role at the very outer edge of perceptibility. Dots are not labels. Labels are not dots. One is part of the perception simulation, the other is a UI element. The two have exactly nothing in common, even on the occasions when they happen to look vaguely similar. The purpose isn't the same; the controllability isn't the same; the rendering isn't the same; the controllability is not the same; the rule set for drawing them is not the same; and the controllability is not the same. No, that is not a mistaken repetition — one has three different axes along which it can be controlled by players and mission makers; the other has none. And the (currently broken, but ultimately removable) ability to turn them off isn't even a part of that. If you mistakenly confuse the two, all you end up proving is that you have no idea how either of those two features work and your opinion on the matter is not just null and void but objectively wrong. It takes a lot for an opinion to be wrong, but this fits the bill.

Other way around. There needs to be a mission-enforceable on setting so make sure people don't try to get their old 40nm spotting advantage back. That's just it: it wouldn't. You'd be relying on rendering limits alone, and you'd now have to choose between one of two options: Unlimited and uncontrollable spotting range. Planes would be rendered out to maximum distance and it would be entirely reliant on your hardware setup whether you could see them at 160nm, 100nm, or a “mere” 40nm. Note that all of those ranges have at the very least one zero too much in them. But no matter what, you'd get hugely unrealistic results that applied unevenly and inequitably across the player base, which people would exploit to the fullest degree. Massive pop-in. If you enforce a maximum rendering distance that is more in line with how far out you should be able to see planes, the moment they cross that boundary, they will pop in and be very obvious. For some. Again, hardware and settings dependent, and people would exploit this ability to choose visibility to the fullest degree. Those are both bad outcomes. Everyone does, because the goal is to create a unified level of visibility, and unless you are exactly on the reference spec that decides what that visibility should look like, you will need some help to tone up or tone down or tone sideways how the dots appear. But they'd still have to be dots, because that is pretty much the definition of what we are trying to recreate here — if they're not dots, it has failed as an implementation, irrespective of whether they're rendered as actual dots, or if they are using 3D models that are forced to appear as nothing but dots. And without this kind of solution, it would be even worse. We know this for a fact because we've had it. The only difference is that it wasn't universally known how bad it was, so only some “in the know” could take advantage (and you can now see them clamouring for the return of that advantage, bolstered by the criticism against how the much-needed fix is developing). That is how it should be. Now, granted, you could argue for having the ability to turn off that advantage, but that option must not come with an advantage of its own, nor should it be something that can be enforced. Quite the opposite — parity should be enforceable. If a mission maker doesn't care, then yes, they could allow you to cripple yourself but there should not be an option to arbitrarily and uncontrollably give some people an advantage that others can't have. Note that I'm not saying you should be happy with how that advantage looks, but that is a separate matter. Honestly, it really isn't. But it has a couple of requirements that, for a variety of reasons, the advantage-hunters and ED don't really like, and either try to kill at every opportunity or try to avoid implementing. It still needs to be a dot system for the actual spotting part. It needs to understand that spotting is only one part of a whole, from just beyond BVR all the way into faceplanting into the other plane's engine exhausts. As such, it can't be one system. One size does not fit all. It needs to be ok to borrow from other games. It needs to yield results that are very different from how things have historically looked in DCS (because DCS is notorious for how wrong it has always gotten this). It needs to match actual real-world data. Only the last part is actually hard, in part because the data itself is disparate and hard to come by. Or, well… the fourth point is also politically difficult, but that's when the big-boy pants need to come on. No. Only one of them need that: enforce on, or player's choice. The on option is for PvP- and realism-oriented missions; the player's choice for when it doesn't matter. And ultimately, it doesn't need to be a choice at all, same as how you can't turn off other parts of the world simulation (yes, yes, I know, wake turbulence yadda yadda…). No. There was also the advantage of when people played at high resolution. One got ease of spotting; the other got spotting range. It was a bit of a sliding scale between those two, and you could pick your favourite, but both ends of the spectrum were horrible and silly. It was a late discovery that the much more intuitive and obvious high-res advantage was pseudo-balanced against a different low-res advantage, and some people were mightily upset to learn that some players had an advantage over them when they thought that they were the one with an advantage over those peons.

Because DCS tries to be a simulator and dots are part of that simulation — specifically the simulation of the pilot's perception. It's a cognitive process that can't be adequately represented by just throwing polygons into the renderer. It's a bit like asking to turn off drag: it may be troublesome with the effects it has on your flying, but if you could turn it off, you would suddenly be playing a very different game to everyone else with advantages that they can't have (and you shouldn't have). The infinite-energy AI planes are bad enough. Imagine if opposing players could choose to play by similar rules. They'd be even more meaningless if we were to return to the previous state where some players could see planes rendered out to 40nm and others had issues seeing them well within visual range. No amount of stealth or sensor supremacy or clever paint schemes would help you — the other guy could see you before your radar could even resolve his contact, all because of his particular hardware and setting setup. All your skills are for naught because the other guy paid to see you. Indeed this is why some posters are so eager to clutch at the ups and downs of this tweaking period as an argument to bring the old system back: because they want their unrealistic and nonsensical advantage back. So have many others. That is not a factor in whether or not the game should strive for accurate simulation in the realm of spotting.

And replace it with what? Describe a mechanism that fulfils all these needs: It must display the smallest thing possible. It must display equitably across a wide array of display types and resolutions. Its appearance must be tied to actual distance, not resolution. Its appearance must be unaffected by FoV. It must not pop in. Its being turned into a fully-featured 3D model must be tied to resolution (and FoV), not distance. It must not blink out. Come up with a scheme that does this, that is not some variation of a dot solution. Unless and until you can, all you're asking for is the return of your preferred cheat and exploit because you can no longer hack it when you don't have that advantage over others. If you want to cheat, just cheat. Don't beg the devs to do it for you. Because that's what you're asking for here. And before you even go there, don't beg for a cheat on the back of some appeal to realism, when what you're asking for is by very definition the most unrealistic “solution” that must inherently affect different players unequally. If you don't want a simulation, may I suggest Afterburner Climax as your next flying game of choice? It even has a cheat menu built in to cater to your needs. It really isn't. But you wouldn't know this because you have no idea what model enlargement does, how it works, how it looks, or what it's even for.

No, that's not what they are. They are a solution to a problem that will always exist: the difference between resolutions and avoiding pop-in, especially when dealing with variable FoV. This is a bigger problem now than it was 20–30 years ago when resolutions and display systems were vastly more uniform. And I'll reiterate, before you try throwing shade at “players being convinced by videogames” that you are that player. By your own admission. That's why you thought 40nm rendering was realistic and ok. That's why you didn't want to see any changes to spotting until you realised other players had a different advantage over you than you had over them. It was never about fairness or realism for you — it was about preserving your advantage and nerfing the other guy's.

Coincidentally, what we're discussing here is an improvement in rendering. How it is affected by lighting is another improvement (a tweak, if you will) to that system. No new labels have been introduced, only a necessary transition mechanism from rending nothing to rendering something — a something that by its very nature cannot have any of the details or any of the resolution you'd get out of a geometry-based solution.

Good news: not anyone can altaer it. Yes, that's how resolutions work. That is also not an exploit. And yes, spotting dots are meant to solve this. They don't, but that's why tweaking is needed. In fact, they're the only way to solve this, and by doing your utmost to try to make them go away, you are actively arguing in favour of applying nonsensical advantages solely based on game settings. You mean like back in the day when you were arguing vociferously for keeping the “exploit” around where you demonstrated that you could see planes at outrageous distances? You showed off being able to see planes at 40nm and argued that this was realistic and good because it proved that there was no problem with spotting and people should just git gud. Or git gudder hardware. Or something equally inane. Well, good news: the exploit is gone. You will not get your advantage back. Stop complaining just because you have to play on a level playing field with everyone else. If you feel that you're at a disadvantage, explain how this should be solved without giving yourself an advantage instead. It's that last bit that you are unwilling to do, which is why your spamming doesn't have the effect you're hoping for. That's a good goal, but the problem here is that it needs to be the same for everyone and it needs a number of solutions to work together to make that happen. Dots are an unavoidable part of the package, and the question there is in what range bracket they should be in effect. At what distances should you not be visible, no matter what? At what distances should you be visible, (almost) no matter what? At what distances should you not just be visible, but discernible enough to figure out where you're going? At what distances should you be identifiable? How much do you feel size and aspect should factor into the first two, knowing that this will come at a rendering cost? And, from a more technical standpoint, what should be the lowest common denominator in terms of perceptual “smallest possible” dot size? While we could discuss it in terms of angular size, it's probably best to state it as 1px at a benchmark resolution. Without these questions answered, we can't actually tell whether the dots are too large or too small, too visible, or too obscure; rendered too far out or too close in.

Well, have you considered not complaining so much, then? That way, actual improvements to the game would be able to go through with much less fuss and your necessity to protect your advantages over other players through constant spam goes away. Everyone wins. That's not really what server options do. They are there to restrict who gets in and why (and to some extent what data leaves the server). They don't change how the game behaves, especially not on the client side. Mission options (which is probably more accurately what you're asking for) are essentially just gameplay options enforced across all connected clients, but this isn't really a gameplay option so it doesn't properly fit there either. It's a graphics option, and those can't be enforced — it would break too much. But more importantly, turning spotting dots off will create a whole slew of issues that aren't actually better than having them on, such as making planes unrealistically visible at hilariously unrealistic ranges, but only for some players. That might work for those who only play SP, but ruins MP for both PvP and non-PvP players. This whole thing is occurring because the naïve implementation of spotting through trigonometry alone was by a galaxy-wide margin the worst implementation imaginable. As much as the dots may have their issues as well, they actually solve things, and the way to proceed from there is to tweak them, not to go back to horrible brokenness and unevenly distributed unfair advantages.

No they can't. You're just not familiar enough with the topic or with VR or with DCS in general to understand what the problem actually is, so instead you insert your usual imaginary issue and refuse to accept what people are actually telling you. Look at what they're describing. Look at the thread you linked. Try reading. Notice how they speak of very different issues. By the way, this is rich coming from the guy arguing in favour of being able to see targets from 40nm away and then trying to support that catastrophic nonsense on the notion that it is more realistic than any of the solutions that actually have to do with spotting rather than hardware compensation. You want to keep your advantage and make sure no-one else gets one as well. We get it. Your foot-stomping to maintain this imbalance in your favour is futile and has failed every time you tried it. Maybe you should start using arguments instead.

Not to spotting, no. It is there to solve completely different and separate problem. It is inherently unrealistic. That's the whole reason it exists to begin with. It is therefore fundamentally unable to be a spotting solution. In fact, at best, it's a work-around to complete a failure to simulate perception. But that's also not its job so it shouldn't be shoe-horned into that role. It's a work-around for factors outside of the game. It doesn't account for having to have a maximum viewable distance. Because that's not its job. It doesn't offer an equitable solution across different display systems. Because that's not its job. It doesn't offer an equitable solution across resolutions. Because that's not its job. If it helps with spotting, its implementation is broken and needs to be fixed or removed outright — it should only matter for identification, which is a very different matter. If anything, smart scaling can do everything zoom does. Zoom cannot do any of the things smart scaling does. One is a part of the multi-faceted solution to accurately simulating spotting; the other is a work-around for the user's out-of-game situation. Of the two, the game could do away with zoom and be better off for it, but it would still need a functioning solution to the spotting simulation. Nope. That's not how it works. If you had actually read up on the topic or looked at any of the examples, you would know this. Don't substitute your wild imagination for reality. …to seeing small details that are too few pixels on your screen but which you should be able to make out clearly, or at least be able to distinguish in some way. As in “is he flying left or right? Is it painted red or blue?”, not as in “is it there or not”? The former is an identification question; the latter is spotting. They are not the same question. This means it is actually the worst solution imaginable for spotting since the whole point is that you can't make out any details, and can barely see the thing to begin with. For the purpose of spotting, having no zoom at all would be a better solution. In actuality, “spotting” isn't one thing and cannot be solved with one methodology. It's at a minimum, five. The actual spotting, which needs spotting dots to ensure that contacts appear at very specific distances at very specific sizes. Only dots can do this since they are… well… dots, and thus not tied to trigonometrical solutions to how large a model would render with a given resolution or FoV. They can also be faded in and out which is critical for the transition phases. A transition between dot and 3D model, which needs smart scaling to ensure that visibility doesn't dip as new rules for what gets drawn and what doesn't take place. Aspect identification, which needs smart scaling to highlight the cues that lets your simulated pilot uses to figure out where the target is going. Indeed, that is the entire raison d'être for the methodology while still keeping the target small enough to make sure its actual visual detail can't be seen, even if you zoom in. This also needs to be able to transition smoothly into… Target identification, which needs smart scaling and possibly zoom although the latter shouldn't be strictly necessary, to highlight shapes and colours that let you figure out (or not) whether to start unloading on the thing or not. Target tracking, which might need zoom, but ideally doesn't, where peripheral vision comes into play and might not be fully covered by the pancake mode frustum. Note how zoom is only a solution to one of these — the one farthest away from the actual spotting phase — and the need there isn't to zoom in, but the ability to zoom out. And it's still really just compensating for out-of-game limitations rather than doing something the simulation should be representing in-world. Welcome to arguing with Sharpe — he detests research that proves his unfounded guesswork wrong and his argument will without fail defeat itself because he has no idea what his argument actually is or what it's for, as long as, in isolation, it is contrary to what you said. His imagination of how things work trumps any recorded reality of how it actually works — including when he records it himself and proves his argument wrong that way. He has never and will never actually watch a real representation of the solution because what he imagines is the foundation for his argument. Can't get rid of that with reality and facts. Above all, anything that improves the game and gets rid of his artificial and arbitrary advantages must be fought until the mods step in and lock the thread — such dangerous ideas as him not having an advantage cannot be allowed to live. That's really all there is: he was against spotting dots when he believed they would give other people an advantage over what his hardware gave him (most notably they would nullify his stupidly unrealistic spotting range; spotting dots would let others do the same). Then he was for them when he realised that other people had an advantage over him (notably, lower resolutions than what he ran at created more easily spotted targets; spotting dots would make them the same for everyone). Then he was against them when he realised that

The only thing that might not be immediately available is PPI, but the number of HMDs is low enough that it should be trivial to keep track of that as a database, or at least get a suitable ballpark figure. It's not like with monitors, where there combinations of size-resolution-distance are pretty much infinitely variable, even when sizes only really ever come in a couple of standard flavours.

It's the other way around that is the problem, and where the normalisation needs to happen. It is unacceptable if a target is shown at different sizes on different displays — the goal with the dots is to eliminate those cases, and to make sure the transition from “smallest possible” to “invisible” happens the same on both.

It's what they're trying to do, but because of that very reason, “a pixel” can no longer be just a pixel. It needs to be a normalised dot size that may be anywhere from 1px to somewhere in the region of 3×3 pixels ± aliasing. That the fundamental cause behind the “huge black blobs” complaint (which was never actually any of those three things): what suddenly looked huge on one display was how it always looked on another. VR, of course, was a something of a problem since its resolution was treated a bit naively, assuming that pixel sizes were roughly the same as the equivalent pancake display and accidentally forgetting how much closer those pixels were to the user's eyeball. But ultimately, that's just another scaling factor to be dialled in to determine how large that normalised dot should be. It's really no different than any other display other than that it has to operate on different assumptions of how large the optical dot will actually turn out to be.

But this isn't real life. We are not using real eyes. We are using simulated eyes with capabilities that should show up equally on all hardware given the same simulated situation. The counter-point is basically that something as irrelevant and arbitrary as hardware should not dictate that difference. Something in the simulation should, if it's there at all otherwise the simulation has fundamentally failed. And if it's there, then it would need to be selectable and enforeable in the client so that you, as the player, choose to have good or bad vision, same as they can choose to fly a good or a bad plane. Or the mission-maker dictates one or the other to apply equally to everyone. And then we end up with exactly what we're having now: something that tries to equalise the perception across all hardware (spotting dots), with the option to also have something that is completely player-customisable (labels). And of those, labels are a luxury, whereas spotting dots must exist and need to remove hardware differences to the greatest degree possible. Sure, ultimately there will be differences because of external factors, but the simulation should do its utmost to nullify that difference.

It's not really a question — what would happen is well-established and known. And no. That would contravene the entire purpose of having 3D models to begin with, much less having different levels of detail on them. The reason you don't remember this is because what you're describing never happened. That would be a pointless, backwards, and pretty darn stupid solution since — aside from being dots — the two are nothing alike and it would in fact make every problem you're complaining about even worse. Not only would you be able to see them at much longer ranges, the visibility would be entirely a matter of resolution where higher resolutions make them more difficult to spot, they'd be trivially easy to manipulate to give yourself even more unfair advantages, and on top of that there's the fact that one is a UI element rendered on top of the world, whereas the other is a world object and part of the simulation. Every bad thing imaginable at once. If you believe dot labels are a better solution, just turn them on. Problem solved. Or, well… problem caused, really since the outcome is the exact opposite of what you want (assuming you do not dearly desire having an unfair and unrealistic advantage).

And that's the whole issue: it does. And the distances are too long. And it creates P2W. It sounds like they're trying to improve how the system works in VR.

What's wrong is the assumption that they'd vanish from view “like they should”.

Our current one. I have only shown it about a bajillion times, but fine, I'll demonstrate it again. If I zoom in to a 20° FoV, the frustrum covers 349.1 mils. On my display, that angle is rendered using 3440 pixels. Each pixel thus covers 0.1 mils. For the wingspan of an F-16 (just under 10m) to be less than 0.1 mils and therefore only cover one pixel, that plane would have to be 100km (54nm) out. That is quite a lot more than “a few miles” and an order of magnitude beyond what most semi-qualified guesstimates suggest should be reasonable. It's even more than what the old spotting dot system allowed for, and that was already ridiculous. And that's on my modest hardware. For others, it could be even farther. Or much much shorter. All three cases are bad because none of them are the same. Even if by pure accident, someone gets a proper and sane spotting distance limit on their system, that limit only applies to them and their accidental realism puts them at a severe disadvantage and others throwing money at the problem would be at a severe advantage. No. Unified spotting dots show up for less than half of that. If dot labels bother you, redefine them or turn them off. The spotting dots also need to be dialled back — I have never stated otherwise — but they are massively better than relying on the unlimited range that pure trigonometry and the 3D model would inherently provide. We can also discuss what the proper size for the dot should be, but then we immediately have to figure out what should be the benchmark — the lowest common denominator — that can be reliably and equitably the target for all displays irrespective of their resolutions. It is quite obvious that the VR one is bonkers, but that doesn't really help us answer the question of which one isn't? Which one should be picked as the standard? If you want to argue that we should do away with zoom, then I wish you the best of luck on that debate. If you want to argue that I can't see that single pixel anyway on my display then, sure. With my current setup you're actually correct. There's just one problem: I can move the display closer, or just lean in, and the problem immediately comes back. And if you want to argue that, screw all that trigonometry noise — just put a rendering cap in, then fine. That would indeed work for limiting how far out you can see other planes. But realise that this means they will pop in at, oh, let's say 5nm and be about 1 mil, or in my case 10 pixels wide. It won't exactly be subtle. I'm talking about what would happen if we didn't use a dot system to put a hard cap on how far out a contact would be rendered on modern hardware. You've never seen it because it's not done that way, and for very good reasons. You didn't have to worry about it in the olden days because the hardware couldn't display it anyway, and in many cases there was a hard cap on rendering contacts, and the same hardware limitations made sure you couldn't see the pop-in. Much. Would you prefer it were three times that number? Because if we remove the cap and the dot, and only rely on the model, that's what you'll get. Well, not in VR, obviously, but that is sort of the problem. You wouldn't get it but others would. You would have to rely on radar, AWACS and RWR, but others wouldn't.