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Suggestion for the model visibility


xXNightEagleXx

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I like the last update, that improved even more the visibility in the game but I'd like to suggest a couple thing.

 

1. Different options between air, land, naval and static models. Currently the large option allows almost the right visibility to aircrafts but at the same time it is just too much for tanks and things like that. So separating all sort of models would allow a better fine tune to fit each person.

 

2. The only thing that is missing to improve even further the visibility skill is the reflection (again with the ability to set it for each model type so people can set it according to their system - in case it might be a bit heavy on CPU), so please guys take this into consideration.

 

NE


Edited by xXNightEagleXx
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+1 To reducing the size of ground vehicles, I thought the old enlarged setting for ground vehicles was absolutely perfect. Now the impostors are so large they clip into one another.

 

With regard to the current air impostor sizes, Whilst the extra visibility if great, a more gentle scaling with range is definitely needed. At the moment it seems that aircraft seem huge at any range, even around 100km away!

[sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]

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What are you guys basing your "feels right" off of? Don't get me wrong, I enjoy being able to see a group of 2 or 3 planes 10 miles away like it is normal, but it isn't. It's hard enough to spot a plane a few miles away when ATC is telling you a distance, direction and altitude, IRL I mean. I appreciate that they made an effort to make it easier to see aircraft but lets don't forget that it isn't really that easy to spot them and if it gets taken any further, its going to be more of a game than a sim.

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There's at least one air force study on aircraft visibility, and if you're seeing a large modern fighter pay some 15km when you KNOW where it is AND is on a bank so you're seeing the top of it, you're seeing too far.

 

Same thing with ground targets: you may be able to see a nice shiny car on a road from 45000' slant, but you might have serious trouble spotting a camouflaged one beyond 3000-5000'. And I don't mean under a camo tent.

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Until you guys are playing without using ZOOM then you should probably not get on your high horses about realism. I would love to see ED remove ZOOM just so you guys would understand.

 

When you play DCS on VR HMD like the RIFT there is no ZOOM. There is NO ZOOM. On the RIFT you only have a pre-distorted half-HD image for each eye; without a "Visibility Feature" you can see lumps of things at 500m and basically nothing past 2000m.

 

So yeah ... bang on about realism all you want but understand that ZOOMING is not realistic.

 

I'd love to see ED remove ZOOMING .... just to see the reaction. :rolleyes:

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Remember that how big the imposters appear depends heavily on your resolution because their size is based solely on pixel size. The link uses tests from the old visibility settings, but the results only become more exaggerated as the imposters get bigger. What might look right for one person, might look very wrong to another depending on resolution.


Edited by Why485
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Until you guys are playing without using ZOOM then you should probably not get on your high horses about realism. I would love to see ED remove ZOOM just so you guys would understand.

 

When you play DCS on VR HMD like the RIFT there is no ZOOM. There is NO ZOOM. On the RIFT you only have a pre-distorted half-HD image for each eye; without a "Visibility Feature" you can see lumps of things at 500m and basically nothing past 2000m.

 

So yeah ... bang on about realism all you want but understand that ZOOMING is not realistic.

 

I'd love to see ED remove ZOOMING .... just to see the reaction. :rolleyes:

Every 3D game has a "Field of View". Your PC screen is a window or camera that views the game.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view_in_video_games

 

The wide FOV is generally 60-80 degrees in order to give the player a sense of peripheral vision but the result is that everything is shrunk down to fit the screen. In a flight sim, depending on the size of your monitor that makes everything unrealistically small. If you "zoom in" to a small FOV that probably means everything you see is now actually life sized, once again depending on your screen size, but now your peripheral vision is gone. So that's why flight sims have a variable FOV. In real life you have both peripheral vision and acuity, but this isn't real, it's a computer screen. So the only way to have both is to vary the zoom level. Then there's the issue of resolution. Look at how you need to zoom in just to read your cockpit instruments, I doubt you need to do that in real life driving your car. The variable FOV feature is perhaps unfamiliar to players from other "game" games which don't have this feature. They don't have it because they're not "sims". Call of Duty doesn't ask the player to engage targets 500m away like real soldiers do. Since sims attempt to duplicate real tasks like seeing distant aircraft they need to give the player that ability.

Hope this explains it for you.

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Every 3D game has a "Field of View". Your PC screen is a window or camera that views the game.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view_in_video_games

 

The wide FOV is generally 60-80 degrees in order to give the player a sense of peripheral vision but the result is that everything is shrunk down to fit the screen. In a flight sim, depending on the size of your monitor that makes everything unrealistically small. If you "zoom in" to a small FOV that probably means everything you see is now actually life sized, once again depending on your screen size, but now your peripheral vision is gone. So that's why flight sims have a variable FOV. In real life you have both peripheral vision and acuity, but this isn't real, it's a computer screen. So the only way to have both is to vary the zoom level. Then there's the issue of resolution. Look at how you need to zoom in just to read your cockpit instruments, I doubt you need to do that in real life driving your car. The variable FOV feature is perhaps unfamiliar to players from other "game" games which don't have this feature. They don't have it because they're not "sims". Call of Duty doesn't ask the player to engage targets 500m away like real soldiers do. Since sims attempt to duplicate real tasks like seeing distant aircraft they need to give the player that ability.

Hope this explains it for you.

This!

 

Here's some information of FOV too

 

Also spotting and able to see / track an aircraft are two different things.

 

Currently i dont have any problems to track enemy plane, when using full ZOOM IN.

The problem is there, that i can't dogfight all the time using full zoom (wich simulates the real vision without the full peripheral vision, of course...) because then i have difficulties to know the current orientation of my plane.

 

And when i ZOOM OUT, there is risk that i lost the enemy etc. to the ground clutter...

It's good to hear that ED improved the dot visibility. (haven't tested yet)

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I live 10km from an airport and have no trouble spotting aircraft takeoff and land. True, they are mostly big commercial airlines, but there were a lot of Mig-21s there before they moved to another base couple of years ago. I had no trouble seeing them either. I would just look and saw them easily, no zoom or anything :). That's what I want in DCS. Not to see them fade away when they're just a kilometer or two away.

 

The new model visibility is a step in the right direction, just needs to be tweaked a bit. And have separated settings for land and air units.

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With a 4K screen I can see ground targets (ones with good contrast) from 13,000' even far away at a slant angle. 4K is going to become very popular in these games just as soon as graphics cards are more capable, which will be within 6 months or so.

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With a 4K screen I can see ground targets (ones with good contrast) from 13,000' even far away at a slant angle. 4K is going to become very popular in these games just as soon as graphics cards are more capable, which will be within 6 months or so.

 

Do you mean the 28" in your signature? Is that enough as size?

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Do you mean the 28" in your signature? Is that enough as size?

Oh yes absolutely. You don't need a 50" TV to see the difference between 1080p and 2160p. It's quite apparent at this size. In fact I need just a minimal 2x antialiasing to hide jaggies, which means pixels are still perceptible. But the overall effect is really nice. You can read all the tiny letters on the cockpit instruments even when zoomed out.

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Oh yes absolutely. You don't need a 50" TV to see the difference between 1080p and 2160p. It's quite apparent at this size. In fact I need just a minimal 2x antialiasing to hide jaggies, which means pixels are still perceptible. But the overall effect is really nice. You can read all the tiny letters on the cockpit instruments even when zoomed out.

 

let me ask you, what is your average fps?

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let me ask you, what is your average fps?

I get a constant 60fps in DCS but see my specs below.... :music_whistling:

 

4K is nearly out of reach for current graphics cards. Within 6 months there will be the new lineup which should handle it much better.

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Of all the topics in DCS, target visibility is probably the one I am most passionate about and interested in. Here are my thoughts on the visibility system and what I think could be improved.

 

For reference, I play on 27" 1440p display for DCS.

 

I was very surprised, given ED's apparent disdain for seeing anything out the window, that they dramatically increased the values in the visibility options. Regardless of any perceived realism, I love what this has done for combat, as it is a great equalizer when you can actually see the planes are threatening you and can plan your moves accordingly. Being able to observe the battle from a distance and plan is something that you could never do before. Not like this.

 

That being said, and I'm saying this as somebody who is very happy with the current values and would rather everything be as visible as possible, in terms of realism I think the new large setting is a bit too big.

 

Back when I experimenting with the values, on a 1440p display, I found a minsize of anything more than ~8 (keep in mind this is at 1440p) starts to look strange, but mostly because it starts to expose the weaknesses in the current rendering method ED is using. At medium distances, the imposter system works incredibly well, and is everything I could have hoped for. However, at longer range distances, it starts to fall apart as the imposter is required to maintain a constant size.

 

There are two changes I would like to see to the system if possible.

 

1. Scale the imposter minsize with resolution.

 

This is the biggest problem with the system. Because the size of the imposter is based purely on the number of pixels the object takes up, this causes variable results at different resolutions. The lower the resolution, the larger the apparent size of the imposters on an equal size screen.

 

While you can never account for the size of a monitor, you can at least account for the changes in resolution. Choose a baseline for your values, then scale from there. For example, if 6.0 becomes the agreed upon standard minsize for 1080p, then when running at 1440p, the minsize should automatically be adjusted to 8.0.

 

2. Distance must be taken into account when drawing the imposter.

 

With the current settings, once an object reaches minsize, it has the same level of visibility no matter how far it is. This is why you can see F-15s taking off from an airfield 50km away, or a SAM site from an equally huge distance. This is also why it can be hard to judge the distance of something once it gets sufficiently far away.

 

Again, while I love having this level of information while flying, it's not exactly realistic. The imposters need to either scale down past a certain distance, below their minsize, or something else has to be done. Either way, distance needs to be taken into account for the visibility of the model in some way.

 

Currently there is already a setting for this, the alphaExp value. Interestingly enough, ED set this to 0 in the latest patch, which means that imposters have the same level of transparency regardless of distance. This is why you see dark dots at a distance for ground targets. Conversely, a value of 1.0 means that imposters fade to completely transparent with distance. Although, I'm not sure at what distance the imposter becomes fully transparent.

 

This is one way to make sure that stuff at distances further than is realistic are not easy to see. Ground objects, as they are always against the irregular background of the terrain, are especially susceptible to this value. It's the difference between seeing clusters of black dots 50km away, and seeing nothing at all.

 

9FgRBpA.jpg

 

That planes get realistically difficult to see at a distance with a high alphaExp value, but ground objects seemingly turn invisible at practically all distances is an argument for creating separate imposter values for ground versus air targets.

 

I'm not super fond of the idea of just setting alphaExp to 1.0 and calling it day, because some things can become very difficult to see, to the point where you may as well turn the imposter system off, but it is one approach. Personally, I would prefer if the imposters themselves started to scale down past a certain distance.


Edited by Why485
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This whole Model Enlargment feature was a bad idea to begin with. There's no way to implement it that isn't going to look really awful if the player can even perceive it. Maybe if the imposter was kept to a size of a single pixel it might be unobtrusive but even that might be too much.

Maybe it's enough to say this was tried and then forget it and move on.

It's going to be ridiculous to see this great new DX11 game engine and fantastic maps like NTTR and such and then see them saddled with a graphics feature lifted from games of 20 years ago. The future is higher resolution displays. Both in monitors and VR devices. Model scaling isn't going to be needed with those. So ED should be making EDGE for the future and not the past.

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This whole Model Enlargment feature was a bad idea to begin with. There's no way to implement it that isn't going to look really awful if the player can even perceive it. Maybe if the imposter was kept to a size of a single pixel it might be unobtrusive but even that might be too much.

Maybe it's enough to say this was tried and then forget it and move on.

It's going to be ridiculous to see this great new DX11 game engine and fantastic maps like NTTR and such and then see them saddled with a graphics feature lifted from games of 20 years ago. The future is higher resolution displays. Both in monitors and VR devices. Model scaling isn't going to be needed with those. So ED should be making EDGE for the future and not the past.

 

I couldn't disagree more. I think it's a great step in the right direction, especially considering DCS has had, for a very long time, unrealistically difficult to see air targets.


Edited by Why485
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This whole Model Enlargment feature was a bad idea to begin with. There's no way to implement it that isn't going to look really awful if the player can even perceive it. Maybe if the imposter was kept to a size of a single pixel it might be unobtrusive but even that might be too much.

Maybe it's enough to say this was tried and then forget it and move on.

It's going to be ridiculous to see this great new DX11 game engine and fantastic maps like NTTR and such and then see them saddled with a graphics feature lifted from games of 20 years ago. The future is higher resolution displays. Both in monitors and VR devices. Model scaling isn't going to be needed with those. So ED should be making EDGE for the future and not the past.

I strongly disagree... Having this feature doesn't mean the engine isn't geared toward the future.

At some point you have to take the present into account.

With such mindset, a developer would expect to be paid only with future money and followed by future players (translate: non-existent at the moment). Try release a sim like DCS in 1990, "it's the future guys, it will be awesome!"

 

Maybe the feature needs tweaking and is not yet perfect, if you don't like it because you have super high resolution hardware from the future then don't use it, and let use benefit from it with our puny systems from the past :P

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Maybe the feature needs tweaking and is not yet perfect, if you don't like it because you have super high resolution hardware from the future then don't use it, and let use benefit from it with our puny systems from the past :P

4K displays only sound exotic now. In a year or so they'll flood into the market just like 1080p monitors did a few years ago. Everyone will have one, they'll be as widespread as 1080p and probably more so in flight sims. VR devices will take more time and may not appeal to everyone but they will go very high res too.

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I strongly disagree... Having this feature doesn't mean the engine isn't geared toward the future.

 

Totally agree!!

 

Obviously ED is experimenting with this, after all it is still an Open Beta and they are making adjustments.

 

Personally I have all the faith in ED, I mean seriously this is an option that can be used or turned off for goodness sake! It is very obvious this engine is geared for the future, DX11, OR Support, etc...

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