Tippis

Oh god yes. There are so many “eh, let's just wing it” systems in DCS that either weren't originally interesting or that only received some token attention or work-around, but which have now become expected features that all modules have to do in one way or another without any unifying structure behind it. DTC and all the settings that go into that, dynamic mission programming, laser-guided weapons, cockpit environment controls, and (in the past) such obvious things like ground radar. So much is now standard that it should be part of the core, but we're looking down the barrel of an increasingly disparate and often mutually incompatible bunch of implementations. Sure, core systems don't sell planes, but I am kind of wondering how much effort is wasted on remaking these systems that should be universal by now.

Quite, and that's where we get into the black box. But as mentioned, you don't really need to open that box as long as the input and outcome matches what's expected — i.e. right code = thumbs up; wrong code = thumbs down. It's the failures that get tricky because you'd have to know how robust both ends are to weak or noisy signals. But then again, that also mostly comes down to a matter of ambition: much like how half the planes completely and deliberately do laser-guided weapons wrong because [reasons], there's nothing to say that that kind of detail in the error simulation must exist. Just doing IFF a little more — say by making range and aspect a factor — goes a long way since the starting point is zero in most cases.

A lot of it will come down to what you mean by “in depth”. IFF is one of those “if you open the black box, you will be put into one yourself” topics, so that depth will obviously never happen. At the other end of the spectrum, the most shallow level of where you have to input and match codes — provide input, and get the expected outcome and what happens in the black box in-between is ignored — exist in a handful of aircraft already. But the lesson there is that it can cause incompatibilities with aircraft that don't have the same detail, so it falls back on magic knowledge anyway. Having it be capable of failure would increase the depth ever so slightly, but then you'd need good info on why it can fail, but without going into details, and the game would probably have to be expanded in other areas to make room for that. For instance, the issue of the signal not getting through is actually already in the game — you can see it happen with TACAN, for instance. But that failure is a simple matter of line-of-sight and range attenuation, and the way those are handled wouldn't really come into effect if we're looking at aircraft querying each other. It could be faked with randomisation, of course, but those tend to end up over-modelled, or people won't notice. The AI issues discussed above fall into a similar “there, but would have to be expanded” category. It also depends on what systems you want to include. If it's just giving the IFF code panel a purpose, then that's a separate thing from stuff like Hornet's NCTR mode, but maybe that's unique enough that it's better handled on a per-module basis.

What would you propose instead, given the issues described above, where we now have the exact opposite problem? Displays are now too high-res and we need a mechanism to ensure that we only see as far as we should, which means we can't rely on simple geometry since that would massively exaggerate how far out things show up. How do you get around that without relying on a dot solution?

And that example also highlights another crucial component in all of this: “spotting” isn't a single thing, and it cannot be served a single system. There are (at the very least — arguably there could be more) three aspects that a spotting mechanic needs to deal with, each within its own range band. Edge-of-visibility, long-range target detection. When a plane crosses over from BVR with just within WVR range. Medium-to-long range aspect detection and target tracking. When a plane is WVR and you're trying to anticipate where it's going so you can keep track of it and get a suitable pursuit solution on it. Medium-to-short range target identification. When it's time to figure out whether you should shoot or not. DCS has always struggled, and pretty much consistently failed, to deal with all three aspects. Spotting dots are, and can only ever be, an answer to the first of these. As described earlier, you have this problem on modern display systems that they are capable of rendering objects way smaller than the pilot should be able to see, and thus to render them at far too long distances. And that's before we even bring zoom into the equation, which will obviously make that much worse. To maintain a good perception simulation these days, we have to actively degrade what can be seen and what is drawn on the screen, but that in turn means we need a mechanism to cover up the gap between when we're in “this is the smallest thing you can see in-sim” mode, and when we're in “pure perspective gives an accurate target size” mode. And that mechanism needs to avoid pop-in, it needs to avoid being inequitable (and I use that word very specifically as opposed to “unfair”) for no good reason, and it needs to be responsive to zoom so that “smallest thing” remains the smallest no matter how you manipulate FoV. I can't remember seeing any suggestion other than dots that can properly solve problem #1. Scaling might, but feels like total overkill for something that, by very definition, should always result in a very small group of pixels. The two tricky parts are determining equitable size across different resolutions, and figuring out a good fade-in/out function as the target moves across the visibility threshold. For problem #2, there is an obvious solution — scaling. That's pretty much the purpose for which it was invented to begin with, after all. It also needs to solve the issue where we were looking at a dot as a representation of “smallest thing” that needs to seamlessly transition into “accurate size for what your display is capable of”. Zoom could conceivably do it the detection bit, but we're at ranges where sufficient zoom on its own would most likely also create over-sensitivity to viewpoint jitter that it's hard to keep track of where you are and how your own plane is oriented in relation to the target, which sort of defeats the entire purpose. But it couldn't really handle the dot-to-model transition in a reliable way. For problem #3, zoom should probably take over as the best solution, possibly aided by scaling, but we're now at ranges where those two need to counteract each other to not make it too easy or look too silly. That's easy enough to handle with some of the later scaling equations. I think a lot of the problems we're having with DCS' solution, and in this thread in general, comes down to the fact that people want to use one tool to solve all three things. Be it an extension of dots to cover the medium-range visibility problems (which they can't really do —they wouldn't be dots then), or just zoom (which can't solve the long-range problem, and is barely adequate for medium-range), or just badly made dots, solely for the long-range problem, but with no consideration for the other two visibility issues. Or just using dots for everything because scaling is verboten for political reasons… In light of all of that, it's hardly surprising that the complete solution that is most fondly remembered is one that not only uses more than one tool, but does so in such a mix as none of them are even apparent — it just flows together with one taking over where the other no longer works for the problem at hand.

Here, it sounds like you're against that. And yet, you're arguing in favour of even greater ranges — contrary to all data and scientific inquiry quoted to you — and against having those ranges reduced to far more sensible numbers. Why is that?

And the counter-point is that, whether you grasp why or not, you are actually arguing in favour of making it easier than it should be. Also, realise that you're not really offering a counter to his claim here: just because it's supposed to be hard doesn't mean it can't erroneously be made unrealistically hard. Under some circumstances, its. Under others, it's the opposite. That in and of itself is a problem that needs to be addressed. You state that as if it were categorically true. It's not. It depends on a whole bunch of other parameters that you're not taking into account. That's another part of the problem that needs to be addressed. The way you state that, the exact same thing holds true for every resolution supported by the game.

That is in pretty much every way imaginable the exact opposite of what we're arguing for. It is exactly because of the catastrophically unrealistic spotting distances of the old system, and the highly unrealistic continuity of how planes fade in and out of visibility, and the ridiculously unrealistic effects of arbitrary graphics settings on those spotting distances that we argue in favour of pretty much anything over the old, because almost anything will inherently be better than the old system. Even the new one is, in spite of its first-run warts and flaws. What is needed is something that can work on an arbitrary-resolution display (so fixed sizes at any given distance won't work), that doesn't draw beyond visible range (so pure trigonometry won't work), yet doesn't cause pop-in (so a fade-transition solution is needed), that compensates for and counteracts variable FoV (so variable scaling is needed). A single method will not do all of that; leaving it alone certainly won't; and relying on pure perspective will fail just about every single criterion. But there is a solution that satisfies all those needs… It is far from impossible.

Except you can't, because that would let you spot the aircraft further out than you'd naturally be able to. To make your idea work, you would have to somehow force specific monitor distances depending on display DPI and you would have to remove zoom. The first is impossible, the latter would cause a ton of unwanted side-effects. Just for reference, the way I have my screen set up, I get “natural vision” (as in, 1px is just below what the eye can resolve) at roughly a 60° FoV. Any amount I can zoom in further than that equates to a distance I can see planes farther than I should. The alternative is to have immense pop-in: cull planes that are beyond some to-be-decided max range, and as soon as they come closer than that, they start to be drawn. But what happens on my screen when I'm zoomed in and looking for targets then? The plane that just came into view will go from being invisible to suddenly being a 16-pixel blob that is immediately spotted, just by virtue of it showing up, when it should in fact be just about impossible to see. The spotting dots try to accommodate those issues by having something that still draws when the 3D model just resolves into a very tiny pixel blob, but which can then be faded into invisibility faster (and, perhaps more importantly, uniformly across all hardware setups) than the 3D model would. No pop-in, no removal of zoom, no reliance on the player being honest about their setup and graphics settings. True. But having dots cover the transition between “minimal drawing size” and “not visible” is probably part of the best solution. You'd still need something else for the mid-to-long distance to take care of the other silliness the DCS spotting system creates, but that's not really the purview of the dots to begin with (even if they help a bit there as well the way they've been implemented now). Just rendering the aircraft according to perspective would bump up against the old issues we had with the previous systems: aircraft being visible far too far out, and being arbitrarily tied to hardware and physical setup. A transition method to invisibility would still be needed because it can be controlled and made independent of those out-of-game parameters.

Sure. It's more that they would not benefit from user-placeable units because they don't have that kind of system simulation, almost by definition of being FC3 aircraft. They'd have to reprogram them all and completely redefine this legacy product that they'd probably be happier to get rid of. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice — just that it's such a far off possibility that they don't work as far as counting how many planes would benefit from the added beacon functionality. I suppose, sort of. You'd still have that issue of, why make the beacons at all if so few aircraft can use them, but why add it to the aircraft if there are so few beacons. It needs a bit of a commitment on either side of that equation for the thing to take off. Or land. That said, there are already code hooks to add all kinds of beacons — TACAN code was exposed ages ago but couldn't be used properly for the longest time. From what the code suggested at the time, implementing RSBN/PRMG would be very similar to implementing TACAN so going for the placeable ones first is probably the easiest “in”. The models exist (if only as a map decoration rather than a static or live unit) and hopefully, getting those hooks to work shouldn't be too much effort.

Doesn't really matter. That's the beauty of having it in the launcher rather than in-game. It also puts the onus on the mod maker to keep their mods up to date, and ED already know (more than anyone) when they make changes to the file structure and loading procedures in such a way that whatever was accurate for version N-1 is no longer compatible with version N. As always, your unfamiliarity with how DCS (and software in general) works makes in imagine problems that pretty much by very definition wouldn't exist.

Because it's good game and UX design and, since it's something DCS officially supports, it's something that it should… you know… officially support all the way. They already do, just not through the GUI.

I'm pretty sure they use built-in databases of all airports and their approaches, irrespective of what beacons and nav aids are available. They were around and had those capabilities long before the beacons became a usable thing on the map. I'm also pretty sure that ED have little to no interest to dive into that decades-old code to suddenly make them have enough simulated systems to make use of any kind of user-placeable beacons.

Just doubling up on this, because it's exemplary. Funnily enough, some of that is because it needs to bypass some of the actual game's antiquated in-game set-up and settings stuff, but the upside of this is that you don't have to load the entire client just to fiddle with those settings (in particular binds). It also very neatly collects all the various external tools and surrounding crud in a single, easy-to-use menu (headtracking, external comms, some mission planning and mission-making tools, data export etc). Of course, that's perhaps a bit unfair of a comparison since that whole package is community-driven, as are the tools that get included in the launcher. It would be quite a different thing if ED were to place links to SRS, Tacview, DCS BIOS, Combatflite etc right in their official commercial product. The closest we get is probably SkateZilla's update GUI, but that one is… messy, and ultimately made for a rather different purpose so that extra messiness makes a bit more sense and actually has a function.

…and with spotting dots off, you can spot airplanes up to twenty times (20×) farther than in real life. Getting that down to 8x is a massive improvement. You may want it to be more, and that's fair — I actually agree fully — but you can't get away from the fact that 8× is more realistic than 20×. You, personally, may not have experienced these massive ranges, but they were nevertheless what the old system produced if asked to. And that is also why consistency is part of the realism: because with the same set if simulated eyes, you should always see the same target under the same circumstances at the same range. It should not have a 250% margin of error just because of differences in the most basic of game settings — that's when you know the simulation has fundamentally failed. The same goes for the supposed (but not actual) “hugeness”: they may be 2×2 pixels for you, but that is the same size as 1×1 for the other guy. Just because they could be rendered smaller on your screen doesn't make them huge — it just makes them equally sized. Again, it would be an absolute folly if the same target under the same circumstances would be differently sized for reasons that have nothing to do with the simulation. The new dots are not making spotting far too easy. They make it as easy as it ever was, on an equal basis. You just happened to have a harder time of it than others before,, and the fact that it is now as easy for you as it is for everyone else doesn't mean the game has gone all “arcade”. It just means you are not being arbitrarily punished for no in-game reason. Coincidentally, most arcade games have far more realistic spotting (and spotting ranges) than DCS has ever had, so I'm not even entirely convinced that would be a bad way to go. Granted, they have it accidentally, and for vastly different reasons but still…

Depending on the exact way this plays out, a common cause for this is that you haven't given the AI enough of a run-in so it decides that it's not in release parameters for reasons only the local AI divinity can fathom. If this is the case, then the AI will usually do the overflight and then go (far) out to reposition and re-attack. To make it attack on the first run, you have to give it a lot of space to come in — and preferably from the perfect angle. Think 40nm between the IP and the target waypoint. Less so with “Attack Unit”, but with the “destroy in zone” tasks, it will also occasionally decide that it must stick very close to that zone and will never fly far enough out to give itself the long run-in it needs to be able to drop, so you have to expand the zone a bit just to slap some sense into the AI. If the AI doesn't do the whole circling around to re-attack according to its own eclectic taste — which it sounds like you're experiencing — odds are that it determines the entire attack to be impossible for some reason or another, so it's only really following the waypoints as part of the flight plan. “Wrong” altitude is a common cause for this behaviour, and good luck figuring out what “correct” altitude will satisfy the picky bastard. I haven't seen it happen in a way that clearly shows the logic behind it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the AI can be equally picky about attack angle for some silly reason. The reason it occasionally works better with the CAS task set is that it makes the AI a lot more aggressive and opportunistic in its target picking. The original plan might still technically fail under the hood, but the CAS task dictates to the AI that, according to a different logic, it should attack this very opportune target that you've line up for it. But the price you pay for that is that, as Grimes says, you now have an AI preset to a bunch of behaviours that you can't really control, so it will often do very stupid things without you being able to stop it. All of this is also why the “destroy in zone” tasks often yield better results: you give more control to the AI to satisfy its own needs, but of course, you're now targeting a large (predefined) area rather than any specific unit.

Looks like it should, yes. A worry would be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: they arrive without proper RSBN (or something built-in, akin to the -21) because so little of the system exists in the game, which then perpetuates the problem that only one module actually uses the system so there's little reason to implement it properly. Best-case would obviously be if the whole bunch is rolled out in parallel, but technical debt is a bit of a DCS forte.

No, I'm answering your question and giving you a short rundown of what the thread is about. The discussion is basically bouncing back and forth between those three positions.

In one corner: the new dots are large and too apparent, and make it too easy to see planes to the point where you don't need to use your radar. In the other corner: the new dots are now of reasonably comparable sizes across different hardware, and show up at shorter ranges. In the third corner: why do we even have dots?

It really isn't. It contradicts what has been known about the spotting system for many many years, and mislabels them as something that was discarded a long time ago. The simple fact is that the old system let you spot targets out to absurd ranges. A prolific poster in this very thread posted a screen shot of one showing up clear as day at 50nm in a long-since archived discussion on why the old system had to be changed. The simple fact is that the old system let you make those dots trivial to see by simply changing your graphics settings. The simple fact is that it is no more an “icon” than the old system. That's a better description of a system that was removed back in 2016. It was — if such a thing can even be believed — somehow even worse than the old dots. …with your settings. With other settings, none of that is actually true. In actual fact, with only the simplest of changes, they'll be the same size (or larger), appear sooner, and be harder to miss (since they will have faded in more at the equivalent range). Not my belief, no. But the long-established and well-documented history of the many quirks and oddities and downright daftness of the old spotting system does. You can try this yourself.

Indeed, the mobility is sort of the entire point of the system, as part of its design intent is that it can be erected (more like “parked”) at any old bit of hardened surface to create a temporary dispersal field or road base. …but yes, the need for such a unit as an active and usable beacon sort of hinges on their being aircraft that actually makes use of it. If it were just a static unit, then the model is effectively in the game already, just not user-placeable. The L-39 isn't exactly the most common combat aircraft to build missions around, so it alone would be pretty weak as an argument in favour of the full implementation. The -21 would need to be rewired to make use of them. We'll see what the -29 will bring.

Nothing really happens to them. The dot labels are just rendered on top of (and possibly slightly offset from) them. Oh, and also, of course, you can redefine the dot labels to not be dots at all, and to render at full opacity out to max range and all kinds of other fun stuff. The font used doesn't have the full Unicode table, but if you want to be really silly, you can circumvent that too and have dot labels show up as “” for friendlies, “” for enemies and… idk… for incoming weapons if you like. This makes the game… a bit odd, visually. I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm simply saying say that your opinion is incorrect. Spotting dots are not icons. They also allow players to spot planes later than the old dots because their range has been reduced. This makes them more realistic than the old dots. Depending on your circumstances, the dot may be larger than before, making it easier for you to spot the spotting dot (I realise that putting it this way sounds a bit redundant, but it is actually a key point in all of this). But all that is really happening is that you are seeing the dot at a normalised size, the same as everyone else. Before, we had the issue that the spotting dot had a fixed size of 1px, and this in turn meant that it was difficult to see for some but very easy to see for others. It all depended on your resolution. So not only were the spotting dots previously rendered at wholly unrealistic ranges — far longer than they are now — but they were also rendered in such a way that, while you may not have (easily) seen a target at that extreme range, they could easily have seen you. What you feel is now “too easy” is actually how other players have been spotting you all along. An important part of this new system is that they're trying to eliminate this inequality: you can now see them just as easily as they can see you. …whether or not it actually succeeds in doing so is a different matter altogether. They are actually far more realistic than the old ones because the possible detection range has been reduced. It might not have been reduced as far as you would like it, but it has been reduced nevertheless. If you didn't see things as far out before, then once again, that was solely due to your settings — other players could see them very far, and even came to this forum to use that as evidence for how the spotting system was not broken and shouldn't be touched (the 50nm figure mentioned before was from one such post). This is why I keep asking you by what measure you say they're not realistic. You are confusing the improved realism (as far as detection range goes) and the normalisation of dot size. Under certain circumstances, the latter somewhat counteracts the former, but only to a point. You can see targets more easily, yes, but that's actually realistic too — not because of the size at any particular range, but because you are no longer suffering from the artificial disadvantage of running a higher resolution than another player. Your virtual pilot is has the same eyesight as the other guy's virtual pilot. Now, it seems like the main reason behind your saying that they're unrealistic is the detection range, but again, that has also been improved. Can it be improved further? Sure, probably, but that doesn't change the fact that the possible detection range has been reduced already. Reverting makes it less realistic. That easier-to-see dot can not be seen as far out as the harder-for-you-but-not-for-others dot could be seen before. Maybe, but you have to compare that against the other option: spotting dots OFF = “ICONS” (by the exact same token) that I can arbitrarily make larger, which means easy gameplay and easy spotting at even longer ranges. Your complaint is effectively that your unwarranted arbitrary disadvantage has been removed. The game will not be better (and definitely not more realistic) just because you want it to be harder than it should be.

No. You keep using that word. It doesn't mean what you think it means. The spotting dots are a very naïve and simplistic way of simulating an edge case of perception on something as complex as an arbitrary-resolution display. They react (somewhat) to their surroundings and vary over range. They're also a massive improvement over the old spotting dots, since they aren't rendered at the same unrealistic ranges, and don't create arbitrarily uneven results on different systems. So you agree, then, that keeping the spotting dots on is more realistic than keeping them off, since the old system lets you spot aircraft out to 50nm on some setups — 20 times farther than the supposed real-life example — rather than the more sensible range we get now. Even if it's three times farther than perhaps it should be, that's still an improvement over twenty. It can probably be further tweaked, yes, but that's exactly what they're doing, and you will still come run into the need for some kind of system that hides the transition from “not seen” to “fully rendered in 3D”. Again, if you want to suggest that the old system was “more realistic”, you need to square that with the results the old system actually produced. You have yet to do so. So to actually summarise: • Spotting dots are not “icons.” • Spotting dots on = new spotting dots, no spotting at absurd ranges, more equitable gameplay across all ranges. • Spotting dots off = old spotting dots, ridiculously unrealistic spotting ranges, and inherently unequal — under some circumstances almost downright cheaty — gameplay. So your suggestion is that the devs keep on doing what they're already doing. The UI element that has traditionally been used to compensate for the atrocious spotting system can already be turned off (those aren't icons either by the way — they haven't been for almost a decade). They have introduced new dots to fine tune the mechanism for spotting dots and have created a more realistic (and equitable, as a bonus) gameplay experience.

To clarify: the dot labels can be seen at even greater ranges, whereas the spotting dots are hidden by the cockpit. And aside from that, they are quintessentially different since the former is a customisable user-selectable UI element whereas the latter is part of the simulation. Also… This is a catastrophically bad idea since it would mean completely abandoning all aspirations towards simulation and having a coherent and consistent gameplay experience.

The new spotting dot system is just another form of the spotting dots we had before, only rendered more intelligently. They are not related to the much older impostor system (which might conceivably be considered some kind of icon), nor to dot labels. They're not meant to make gameplay easier — they're meant to make it more equitable and more sensible. It achieves both of those goals, albeit perhaps not to the full extent some people would like. By what measure? Because of the decreased range? Because of their being less tied to your hardware and more to the actual simulation? Because of their smoother transition? What is it about them that makes you call them less realistic, especially in view of those improvements? By their default setup, dot labels are visible out to 30km (for aircraft), 20km (for ground units), 10km (for weapons), and 40km (for naval units). But they're customisable UI elements so you can crank up those ranges to your heart's delight. Not so with the new spotting dots (which also do not ID aircraft). Dot labels are also visible through all obstructions and have no real means beyond a predefined colour fade to vanish into the background. If all of that counts as a fair compromise, what is it about the new labels (which shed some of those shortcomings) that makes them not be an even fairer compromise? Anything that the new spotting dots do in this regard, the old ones did even more because they were visible at far longer ranges. You may not have noticed, but that was because of your hardware setup, so while you couldn't see them, other players could see you at absurd ranges without using sensors in the exact same way you're complaining about. The only difference was that it was not a feature shared among all clients. Some people had advantages over others because of the differences in rendering (and conversely, they also had disadvantages under different circumstances). This, more than anything, ruins the gameplay experience — doubly so when you're not even aware of why others are seeing you long before you can see them. If you want to play with “icons” on — i.e. turn on the dot label UI element — you can do so, but that is a very different thing from the spotting dots. You need to stop confusing the two. The impostor icons went away half a decade ago and haven't returned since. Nope. • Spotting dots on = new spotting dots, no spotting at absurd ranges, more equitable gameplay across all ranges. • Spotting dots off = old spotting dots, ridiculously unrealistic spotting ranges, and inherently unequal — under some circumstances almost downright cheaty — gameplay. The new shorter ranges are more realistic. The new decoupling from hardware differences is more realistic. The smoother transition between rendering modes is more realistic. And on top of that, unfair advantages between client setups are being… if not removed, then at least addressed.