HUD visibility

[Gloom Demon]

Please take a look at the picture below. The color of the HUD is distinctly not white, however it is not visible over white clouds... Is there something wrong with the simulation or this is the way it is IRL?

 

[leapingrodent]

I don't know if it is like this in real life or not but I have noticed it, and it is annoying.

[Kayos]

Did you change the color of your HUD?

[Gloom Demon]

Yes I did - using CTRL H - the default color is utterly invisible on a lot of backgrounds.

Edited September 15, 2014 by Gloom Demon

[SFJackBauer]

Turn HDR off?

[Pizzicato]

Turn HDR off?

 

I think that's a valid suggestion, but it sucks that we (potentially) have to make the rest of the game look much worse in order to be able to see the HUD.

[Kayos]

Yes I did - using CTRL H - the default color is utterly invisible on a lot of backgrounds.

 

I never have a problem with the default green. I've gotten an older graphics card though.

[Zabuzard]

Green is the default HUD color because its the most suitable color if you have the sky behind your glass. Other colors like yellow are more suitable for ground attacks e.g. if there are wide fields or forests.

 

If you can't see the HUD having sky in the background with the green color theres something wrong and you should check your settings :)

[Tvol]

If you can't see the HUD having sky in the background with the green color theres something wrong and you should check your settings :)

 

Or your eyesight. Someone with tritanopia might have trouble distinguishing between the HUD's default green and blues, though that's pretty rare (1% of the male population). Someone with dueteranomaly (most common, 6% of males) has less sensitivity to the green spectrum than normal. Tritanomaly would also do it (blue sensitivity shifted toward green), but that's exceedingly rare (0.01% of the population).

 

Turn off HDR, see if that works. It's extremely unlikely that this is the case in real-world applications, principally because the contrast ratio of even the best monitors for the task (and I guarantee you aren't playing with one, because those monitors are usually limited to refresh rates of 30Hz or less) absolutely pale in comparison to what the eye can perceive. It's easy to understand roughly using photography terminology. In photography, the principal measure used for differences in luminosity are stops. One stop = twice as much light. Most IPS displays are limited to a contrast ratio of about 8 stops. The human eye can perceive 16-20 stops (I may be overestimating that; memory's a bit sketchy), easily. (Incidentally HDR photographs, at least the data used to make them, has even more data than that, landing at around 32 stops of contrast on average. So...yeah...we are way, way better at taking images of things than we are at reproducing them. Odd.)

 

In real life, I suspect pilots just ramp-up the brightness of the HUD so they can see it over the surrounding environment. Those things use fairly powerful light sources; the latest generations even use lasers. They were almost certainly all purpose-built to overpower daylight reflections from clouds. Even the HUDs in cars are able to be seen by the driver easily in daylight.

 

So the main issue here is the limitations of the displays we're using. HDR in games isn't true high dynamic range by any stretch of the imagination. What the game engine is doing is dynamically adjusting the total luminance of the entire scene up or down to fit most of it within the display's ability to, erm, display. Incidentally, this can make HDR a really, really undesirable feature in competitive gaming where loss of shadow detail can be extremely detrimental. It's also why many games still give-up on HDR wholesale and stick to gamma adjustments made by the player in settings (which also has the handy effect of compensating for the player's own ability to distinguish between luminance, which can vary; and no, gamma is not the same as brightness).

 

Can the issue be fixed if it's indeed caused by HDR? Maybe. Probably not the way you might be hoping for. One quick fix that comes to mind is to darken the environment so that the HUD is always the brightest thing on it's part of the frame, even when extremely bright objects are filling most of the frame (that's more-or-less HDR in a nutshell: whatever takes up the most of the screen gets priority, with some tweaks to make it less garish and the effect more subtle). The problem there would be that whenever you pointed your nose at a patch of cloud in daylight, the environment would noticeably change, an effect which can be extremely jarring. It might even look kinda, off, because it is. It's not how our eyes work.

 

Without having any real tangible information about your settings though, let alone the display you're using, all I can offer is the above guess work based on the assumption that you're using HDR and that's the root cause. I'd lean toward the use of HDR since the problem is clear from the screen shot. (That or your eyes aren't normal and that's why you can't see the green on blue, but that'd be pretty improbable.) And that I'm playing with an iMac 27" IPS display without HDR and have had no issues (and I have normal colour vision).

Edited September 16, 2014 by Tvol

[Gloom Demon]

Ok, I'll try turning the HDR off and see how that works. Strangely though, I do not recall having the same problems with the Su-25T...

[TAW_Blaze]

It's not eyesight issue really. The brightness is too messed up, if you put any color against a cloud or white monutains it's impossible to read. Adding customizable color would solve the problem.

[SFJackBauer]

I think that's a valid suggestion, but it sucks that we (potentially) have to make the rest of the game look much worse in order to be able to see the HUD.

 

I think its a false assumption to consider the game looks worse with HDR off. It seems based on the (also false) assumption that you are obliged to tick all the boxes in the graphics options. You're not.

 

I remember when HDR came off with the A-10C it was horrendously exaggerated, like someone had smeared butter in your eyes. Never turned it back on since then. I also found that HDR generated unrealistic situations where you would had, in real life, a greater clarity of vision, which is ironic, since HDR is supposed to increase the dynamic range, and not reduce it.

[TAW_Blaze]

What looks good for you depends on your hardware setup. Screen and VGA most notably..

[Tvol]

I think its a false assumption to consider the game looks worse with HDR off. It seems based on the (also false) assumption that you are obliged to tick all the boxes in the graphics options. You're not.

 

I remember when HDR came off with the A-10C it was horrendously exaggerated, like someone had smeared butter in your eyes. Never turned it back on since then. I also found that HDR generated unrealistic situations where you would had, in real life, a greater clarity of vision, which is ironic, since HDR is supposed to increase the dynamic range, and not reduce it.

 

As I explained in my post, HDR effects in games do nothing to increase the dynamic range or contrast of any frames. You're already maxed-out on that without it. What it does is dynamically adjust the contrast and luminance of the entire frame to attempt to fit as much of the important bits (or rather, the parts that the engine thinks are the important bits) in the dynamic range of the monitor. If you get a bright explosion, the entire scene will get reduced in luminance so details of the explosion aren't lost.

 

Again, when it comes to getting the most out of your display, games already do that. You don't need HDR. HDR is just digital fakery that only works reasonably well half the time. Most of the time it'll screw you out of details you want to see, mainly because it doesn't work like your eyes do (your eyes will adjust to see maximum detail of whatever you're focusing on without damage from bright light sources; HDR effects have no idea what you're focusing on, they just guess).

[ricktoberfest]

HUD visibility

 

I have also turned off HDR due to the same reason. I'm hoping DCS 2.0 will fix this as I remember it might have something to do with ATI graphics cards and HDR in dirextX 9. I guess we'll see soon.

[SFJackBauer]

As I explained in my post, HDR effects in games do nothing to increase the dynamic range or contrast of any frames. You're already maxed-out on that without it. What it does is dynamically adjust the contrast and luminance of the entire frame to attempt to fit as much of the important bits (or rather, the parts that the engine thinks are the important bits) in the dynamic range of the monitor. If you get a bright explosion, the entire scene will get reduced in luminance so details of the explosion aren't lost.

 

Again, when it comes to getting the most out of your display, games already do that. You don't need HDR. HDR is just digital fakery that only works reasonably well half the time. Most of the time it'll screw you out of details you want to see, mainly because it doesn't work like your eyes do (your eyes will adjust to see maximum detail of whatever you're focusing on without damage from bright light sources; HDR effects have no idea what you're focusing on, they just guess).

 

You are kind of preaching the Old Testament to Moses :)

 

I did not contradicted anything of what you said. In fact, I emphasized that the HDR in this case works opposite of its intended effect.

 

However arguing that a monitor doesnt work like your eye is a moot point. What, the monitor is also flat and we are "seeing" a 3D scene with volume, depth... Computer graphics by itself is fakery, the problem is people just overdo all these bloom and lighting effects without taking in consideration how to "realistically fake" the real world. I do think its possible to apply HDR in computer graphics to simulate real-world effects, but not at the expense of clarity. This all boils down to the choices done by the developers.

[EAKMotorsports]

sweet fx helps to minimize that problem.

[TAW_Blaze]

sweet fx helps to minimize that problem.

 

Actually it might make it worse. On my screen I was able to read the default green hud against anything. Now that I'm using sweetfx I can barely read the yellow against clouds or white mountains. As I said before it's a matter of your hardware.