James DeSouza

PNG. I posted 0 compression PNG myself (hence 19MB) but the original screenshot has compression.

The first time you posted the image you mentioned 10km, the second time you posted the image (which is what I quoted and didn't cut out despite you claiming I did..?) you mentioned 50nm. I don't know why you think I am lying but... Also yes, the dot in that image is very clearly visible. If it is not to you then.... That explains why you think this spotting system is good I guess. Again, a reminder, I have 6/12 vision, or in other words vision half as good as a normal person and I can clearly see the 40km line without zooming in and can see the 50 and 60km/artefact lines while zooming. Oh and can also see the 20km line (the line at which a rough fighter sized target should no longer be clearly visible) just on the preview image in the forum. Again, 6/12.

No lie. You mention 10km and you also mention 50nm as the maximum. Do you not understand what an increment is? You need to mention the increments for a comparison to be useful. The picture you posted shows increments. Anyway as for the proof. null

Actually you didn't mention range in the one I quoted, you just mentioned maximum range without increments and so that isn't enough to make a judgement. Because I have you on an ignore and only notice your posts others quote (because you're kind of... well...) but I didn't notice this beautiful picture. You can notice 2 rows below that 40km row, so your own picture shows aircraft visible at 30 miles (assuming you keep the distance interval consistent), the thing you have been claiming isn't true all along. lmfao. God, what a disaster. Also is that 40km line the line you consider "barely visible"? In actual reality the 20km line should barely be visible, never mind 40, never mind the actual 50km that is clearly visible in the picture (underside of the same cloud the 40km is in). You can also see an additional what would likely be the 60km row, but at the same time they are vague enough to the point where they might be compression artefacts.

Hey now, Eagle Dynamics should be copying the premier in realistic aerial combat, ACE COMBAT.

Ah yes, if I bothered to read I would be able to discern knowledge you never posted in the first place. Very rational. Anyway your claim that there's 20 million aircraft in that picture kind of doesn't matter. The thing that does matter is that the 5 aircraft I can see at a glance (I am not even pixel hunting) including the three very clear blue blobs, should not be visible. Since you mentioned 11 I actually decided to go pixel hunting and just loading the picture in to gimp and zooming in 4x (which is the best way to approximate max zoom in DCS that I can think of) and I can obviously see 4 rows of 4 planes, with a potential 5th row but it is hard to tell. The 5 I could initially see without zooming were the ones downward in the picture from the obvious blue one. What are the ranges of those first 4 rows of aircraft? Also what aircraft are they? I'd assume 5 nm per aircraft except that doesn't fit with a 50 mile maximum. Actually why even bother doing that, it doesn't matter. That you can initially see the obvious blue one while it is in a 1/3 scale image preview on the forum should be bad enough. And the worst part is that I have 6/12 vision lmao.

You never actually explained the set up in the pictures of yours I have seen, but your screenshots absolutely do show obvious spotting dots, same as mine. No idea what the ranges are or if those ranges would be "appropriate" since as far as I know you never said, but really spotting dots just in general are inappropriate. Why even post the screenshots if you either A) do not actually know what they include or B) are going to lie about them? Again. Incredibly obvious giant blue dot right above the tower (or whatever it is), obvious but less so blue dots to the left of it in the other clouds. There are at least 5 very visible aircraft in this picture, I have no idea how many there actually are (nor do I trust you to say) but there should be 0 very visible aircraft in this picture. Hell the really obvious one that is directly up from the tower you do not even need the picture to be full screen to see. Is the plane there the size of a small country?

Sorry if this is not the right forum, the KA-50 subforum seems to be specific to control issues and this is not a control issue. I am also not entirely sure it is a bug though it verymuch seems like it is. I was just flying around with the KA-50 and went in for a landing, I noticed that the aircraft is wildly responsive to cyclic inputs while landed even with the collective all the way down and the throttles all the way down and reading 0 blade pitch or torque, a slight tip backwards causes it to rock on to its tail and, the seemingly most glitchy part, slight cyclic forwards makes it taxi forwards even with the brakes fully applied and not only does it taxi but it will exceed 250kmh while taxiing, again with the collective all the way down, the throttles all the way down, and 0 blade pitch or torque. Is this a known bug? If not do you want me to try to get video of it?

I am fairly certain this is what this update is kind of trying to achieve. Since the spotting dots are 2x2 on 4k and 1x1 on 1080p (or at least seem to be, I can only run 1080 on a 4k screen) which is roughly in line with giving everyone an even spotting "baseline" for lack of a better word. It's not realistic of course but that seems to be the goal. I assume it is why VR is a mess too, as not only does every different VR headset have different resolutions but they also apply different transformations to the images to provide the impression of peripheral vision through the lense Except your own screenshot you brought up to try to disprove this shows it to be the case my friend. It is not something peculiar to me, it is happening to everyone (because it is the way the game is programmed). That's why all of the excuses are being made. This isn't sniping, this isn't strawmanning, this isn't misrepresentation. It is just the way the game is right now. Sorry if I am being petulant by the by, we are both wanting the game to be better even if we have different ideas of it. Just everything about this update is unrealistic, ugly, and unpleasant and I am worried that they ultimately won't give people the option to disable it which will ruin the game I have spent thousands of dollars on the ability to play with good quality.

And mathematics does not also describe human vision because there's extra steps. That phantom pilot seeing spotting it at 8 miles as an achievement for example, the phantom belches out clouds of smoke, is (essentially) the size of an F-15, is in a location where the guy already knows it is going to be, the guy has 20/10 vision, he still sees it as an achievement to spot it planform at 8 miles. Meanwhile in this game 35 mile nose on F-16s is met with both "This is fine" and also "Your images are lies and you are a liar!" at he same time. Lunacy. And hell there's even a guy posting "definitive proof" images to disprove it which themselves have big ass blocks on them, which I guess he didn't see? Which is why the blocks aren't a problem to him? (Though I suppose I should add, I don't think he said what distance they're at so I don't know if they're particularly egregious). I mean look at this, there's a string of them above the tower, one of them is even a really dark blue spot in the middle of a cloud (which is so obvious I am kind of suspicious it might be a bug). But that is "people showing pictures of them not having it".

I posted a picture of giant dots my friend, as have a bunch of other people. Everyone sees them because that is the way the game works. They're not earth shatteringly titanic like they are in VR, but they're still giant. You should not be seeing a nose on F-16 at 35 miles. You just shouldn't. There's no other way to put it. Making all of the contradictory excuses you want doesn't change that you should not be seeing a nose on F-16 at 35 miles. As much as I was joking about "large building territory" earlier that is actually an understatement of the scale of the objects you are seeing. A single pixel on a 4k monitor at 78 FOV represents an object 7000 feet in size. The aircraft are showing up as 2x2 blocks, or an object 14,000 feet x 14,000 feet. 14 Gerald Fords lined end to end. I don't know about you but an entire fleet of aircraft carriers is something I class as "giant". Even 1 pixel at 10 miles is ridiculous. "Oh but it just needs a little tweaking". No, you are always going to have the same issue no matter what, all you are going to do is have the same issue at a different severity. For example an F-16 at 10 miles on a 1080 screen with 78 FOV. Each pixel there is a 7 foot object. What part of a nose on F-16 is a 7 feet cube? None of it (fuselage comes close though). Now at that point there's a vague argument to be made that you should still see the single pixel because there's parts of the plane that are greater than that in specific axis and also that the human eye can determine that, but ultimately even that is artificial and ugly, never mind stretching out to 30+ miles. Actually had a brainfart here because I am flustered that this awful system is going to be railroaded through, actual 1080 10 mile pixels are 4 feet squared, so ~15 miles is about the limit of visibility an F-16 sized target should present at. And the only leg people have to stand on is "oh but it is realistic because in an ideal situation at an optometrists you can just about make out 30 minutes of arc (or whatever), but you aren't looking at an optometrists chart. And that is why in actual reality fighter pilots have trouble finding and maintaining visual on their own wingmen, never mind on targets 30 miles out.

In front of clouds, this claim used to be behind clouds. Funny though how it's just one excuse after another.... Also a couple of the dots aren't even in front of clouds. As for no one is asking. I am just hallucinating all of the people saying this update was an improvement then? I knew what reaction I was going to get as I had already seen others get it, and yet I still wasted my time getting the screen grabs. What a goddamn oaf I am lmfao.

According to your profile you're 60 something, weren't flight sims in the 60's a plastic cutout of the plane over the top of a rolling bit of printed canvas? Oh double checked, remembered wrong, only a spritely 57.

You will always have an advantage by running an uglier game through greater FPS and less visible clutter (ie foliage). It is something that is unavoidable. That being said regarding resolution specifically what counts as running an uglier game to get an advantage? You have guy A complaining that the spotting dots in 1080p are larger and you have guy B complaining that at 4k the spotting dots are more visible further away. Seems like no matter what you do you will have an advantage and a disadvantage, because that is how it normally works. You can't strictly speaking render something smaller than a pixel (though I think composite might actually be the right term, but as for whether or not it becomes a single pixel at ranges where it is less than a pixel that is entirely down to the programmers. Except users aren't seeing different things. It's just the way the game works. As pointless as this is going to be as you guys keep ignoring it, here are screenshots at 4k and then another screenshot at 1080. The first screenshot has labels on so you can see that the ranges are as I say (or at least the first range increment, the spotting dots outdistance the labels :D) null Notice the line to the right of the altitude readout on the HUD. That is 25nm, or 29 real miles. You can clearly see the B-52 (top), F-16 (middle) and F-15 (bottom). See the line of them to the right of the HUD's right "strut" for lack of a better word, the one where you can still see all 3 but only the B-52 is incredibly blatant? That is 30nm, or 35 real miles. You should not be seeing an F-16 35 miles away. And all of these are NOSE ON! null null This isn't VR, they'd be the size of small planets in VR, but it's still a massive problem. Oh and I forgot to add, IT'S NOT EVEN ZOOMED. It's just 78 degrees FOV (couldn't remember what the default is and went with that). Why did it not put the screens where I dragged them in? Ah well.

Wait, so you are saying that I am strawmanning when all I am doing is describing the actual game, which has been displayed in screenshots multiple times in this thread, whereas a guy going "Oh hey when an F-16 is perfectly planform to you at 10 miles it is just about twice the absolute minimum possible angular resolution your eyes are capable of in a perfect hypothetical ergo it's perfectly reasonable for a nose on F-16 at 30 miles to be a giant black square." Anyway on to the actual meat of your post, no not everyone wants what is most realistic as if they did there would be no one defending this awful update. And even just from a conceptual level generally people do not want what is most realistic, the whole Jeff and Gazelle super missiles (which were actually just realistic missiles) thing is an obvious example from this game alone. Just that the idea of turning your multiple thousand dollar "sim" into space invaders is a very odd idea. Legitimately the only people saying positive things about this situation are happy that they can now easily spot everything, and the thing is that in reality you can't perfectly spot everything, the F-16 (and the F-5) are renowned for being basically invisible due to being tiny for example. They aren't applauding the update for realism, they're applauding the update for turning on the dot labels and so letting them see things they couldn't otherwise have. This is not realism. Visual spotting is the hardest part of air combat. Giant black blocks remove this. Anyway no it is not a VR vs Flatscreen thing, as multiple screenshots have already shown. This system is also awful in flatscreen (it's just the dots label system), it's just less awful. Now all of us pointing out what an absolute <profanity>show this is just want an option to remove it, since some people like it obviously. We don't really care that it'll put us at a disadvantage vs people who will effectively have cheats on. But even this you see people in this thread arguing against, because if it is a toggle then it might become etiquette on some servers to toggle it off (or might even be forced, like labels). Which gets into the basic dynamic that it seems as if everyone who says this update is good are just doing so as it gives them an excuse to functionally have the dot labels on all of the time.

"Hey I am going to spend several hundred dollars on modules and several thousand dollars on a computer and flight sim hardware for this realistic flight sim, but being able to spot planes at realistic distances is bad so I want them to be black boxes the size of small buildings." (Though I say small buildings, you can still see them 30-40 miles out pretty clearly while the aircraft is nose on to you, might be getting in to large building territory at that point). If you find some way to disable it that works please let me know.

They aren't. If you can see the mountings for the wires (such as pylons) your mind fills in the gap and you might believe you can see them but you can't actually see them. It's why chopper pilots kill themselves on power lines all the time, or why tank commanders get scissored between power cabled and their hatch. It's the reason why you are supposed to fly over the pylon and not the line, you can actually see the pylon far enough away to be sure to overfly it.

I have personally never heard of an RAF pilot seeing a formation on the other side of the channel (which would likely be more than 20 miles as an aside, the channel is only 20 miles at its absolute narrowest point), that wouldn't have been the norm. There is this thing called "chain home", which was the early warning radar system. They also had swarms of ground observers using telescopes and an audible equivalent of a telescope that I do not remember the name off right now, all hooked up to a landline network. And this was to spot raids specifically coming over the channel. If you could just see it, none of that would have been necessary. Especially considering they had to create an entire second Chain Home (Low) system after the germans realized they could just fly lower than ~200 feet to bypass the radar. What value would bypassing the radar have if guys could just see you. Remember, almost all of the blitz was daylight bombing (for accuracy), they only switched to night bombing towards the end of it to lower losses. And remember, Chain Home had a maximum ideal range of 100 miles, but it was practically lower than that (like always) and had a positional accuracy of ~10 miles. What value does that have when you can just use your eyeballs? Maybe in rare situations RAF pilots really could spot things at 22 miles, entire formations of bombers by the by, but it obviously is not the norm.

I just thought I'd throw this in here, since I just got it working to a satisfactory level. I originally tried this by strapping an index controller on to the back of my hand and while that worked fine it was uncomfortable. However you can get vive trackers cheap, vive trackers do not innately work with DCS (or at least I couldn't figure out how to) but using a method shown in this reddit thread; you can have the lighthouses recognise it as a controller. Using the same JASON you edit in that method you also rotate the tracker so that it aligns with your finger by editing; "head": { "plus_x": [ 1, 0, 0 ], "plus_z": [ 0, -1.5, -1 1.5 being okay for me. Once you have done this you need to have another controller which actually has buttons that steam VR recognises (which you'll probably have), which you need to set to toggles to toggle the Left and Right grip buttons to be permanently on. Then using a ring mouse (or in my case a ring powerpoint presenter) you bind one of the buttons to show/hide the relevant hand (and hide it when not in use) and bind two of the other buttons to left and right click, all in the UI section. You could probably use an actual finger mouse for this but there were none on sale on amazon when I was initially looking that had any reviews. Once you do this you have a perfectly functional pointer and a way to click and it works nice and is comfortable. I have done a couple of startups with it like this. Not as good as a pointCTRL I would wager, but no waiting time.

Flight sims are played by older and less healthy people, both of those tend to have bad eyesight, any attempt to make things easily visible for those with bad eyesight will lead to them being ridiculous to those with good or okay eyesight. Or at least that'd be my guess. Look at the amount of people on this thread who say they do not see giant black dots on flat screen. They do, because everyone does, it's what the renderer spits out, but the filter is their own individual eyesight.

Only thing that makes sense to me too, since it is just the dot labels but forced on. Either way as long as I can disable it personally I don't care. It'll put me at a disadvantage but my <profanity> eyesight already did that :D. If they permanently force it on then hopefully I can get some refunds. I bought a flight sim, not a game where you fight the damned borg.

It doesn't. That's one of its many problems. The thing you put in your autoexec that is supposed to disable it doesn't work. Hopefully at some point it will, who knows.

Everyone has giant black blocks. That's the whole point. VR players have GINORMOUS black blocks, but even flat screen players have giant black boxes because it's just the dot label setting. Hell this thread is full of screenshots of it. So when you look up into the sky to see overflying aircraft, do you see the jets 40,000 feet up as giant black blocks? Because that way turning it on means it was your choice to do it, so you don't have an excuse. If you have to turn the label on then you can't pretend to yourself that you're doing it "realistic", but if you dont have the option then it's the game forcing it on you.

They have to pander to their audience to have a product. And this isn't the first time. Remember when the Jeff came out with missile models that are actually realistic and so just effortlessly killed everyone and people wanted it nerfed? I just want an option to toggle this awful system off, that's all. Though I am deeply curious what the day to day life of people saying giant black blocks in the sky are realistic is like. How do they see things? What is their vision like? Is their vision better or worse than the norm? How does it effect their daily lives.

Spotting is supposed to be hard. It's why sensor suits, radars, JTAC'S, AWACS, etc exist.