[REPORTED] Landing Lights Visibility

[MBot]

The visibility of landing lights, navigation lights, strobe lights and rotating beacons has been a long standing issue of DCS. This wish is related to solving the landing lights visibility.

 

Almost everywhere in aviation it is a standard operating procedure to turn on your landing lights around an airport, even during the day, in an effort to make yourself visible to other traffic. Anyone that has been plane spotting at an airport can testify that you can see the landing lights of airliners lining up on the ILS for many miles.

 

In DCS, landing lights are not visible for noticeable distance, neither at day or night (the lamps, not the light up area on the ground). Interestingly DCS already has the necessary technology to support this with the afterburner. The same effect could be applied to landing lights, with the visible hemisphere changed from rear to front, and slight adjustment of light color (more white, less orange).

 

The screenshots below show an afterburner from behind, the same effect would work equally well for landing lights:

 

 

2 NM.

 

 

 

3 NM.

 

 

 

4 NM.

 

 

 

2 NM.

 

 

 

3 NM.

 

 

 

4 NM.

[grunf]

+1

[Capn kamikaze]

Definitely needs sorting, did some tests with fog on the Georgia map, and even with a fair bit of fog you should still see some glow further out than we are.

[dooom]

I'm having a hard time understanding what you are trying to demonstrate... sorry for looking silly but thought I'd ask for clarification.

[Capn kamikaze]

The brightness of the lights is incredibly low, it's like they have all gone over to energy saving bulbs.

[MBot]

I'm having a hard time understanding what you are trying to demonstrate... sorry for looking silly but thought I'd ask for clarification.

 

This light spot is the afterburner of a departing aircraft at 2 NM. The same graphical effect would work equally well for the landing light of an approaching aircraft. Currently, the lamps of landing lights are not visible beyond a couple hundred feet.

 

[Justin Case]

I totally agree, this would make night rejoins enjoyable as well.

[Knock-Knock]

+1

 

Nav light, anti-collision lights, all the lights basically, all LOD out at very close distance. So actually turning them off before entering the combat zone, has no purpose.

Those things shouldnt LOD out for like 10-15 miles, if not more.

[Worrazen]

The whole technical design behind the behavior DCS uses because it's a simulator has to be designed for reality/simulation in mind, and only then ontop of that certain things would be applied that would lower the quality in exchange for smooth operation.

 

This is , where they treat the software product as a children entertainment toy and then add to it a little bit "for older ones". DCS should be completely divorced from that idea and that would automatically give the customer the feeling of more respect, the idea of making things correctly to begin with, the base design being the maximum, and then when the user isn't lucky enough to be able to afford the greatest hardware wants to adjust lower settings down, then the game would strip things away from the base standard and use various shortcuts or disabling some parts of code or using another path, and I think that would be a lot easier to manage in development and all the way around, because you could just set everything to "max", and max being the standard/normal, if you're lower than the standard your issues have to be treated differently because you're using the codepath of doing things that weren't intended for simulation accuracy.

 

I think it would help in bug solving and testing too ofcourse, all around.

 

Like having high-quality textres but not calling them high-quality or "HD", you simply aim for a high level of quality from the get go treat it as base standard and that would be equal to the maximum. That's a small-scale example. Ofcourse in the GUI it wouldn't be like that, you'd still have "Low,Medium,Max" or whatever.

 

In other words, the standards and the whole mindset and approach to DCS should be separate from the rest of the gaming industry which dominates the PC software space.

 

 

This is not some arrogance against the lower end users, but this is actually the way to propell for quality at the high standard, and it would pull everyone up to strive for that, the developers would focus and make sure the standard level works right as it should before adding scalability features to lower that standard.

 

But not only on the developer level, the community should also be helpful to eachother with that idea in mind, to

 

I could, but I simply don't want to (because I'm not even skilled enough yet) buy a top line joystick, but to be honest I can't afford it, but I'm not blaming anyone else, I'm not blaming the game being too complex and requiring expensive prerequisites.

 

And yes this big talk just to get to the point, that stuff like LODs as well, should be done right first how the current ED capabilities and the status of the industry is going, which means it's not going to be raytracing, it's still going to be rasterization, but the high standard in the current atmostphere is picked, the whole thing is built around it, yes you design it with being able to be scalable, but you don't give it priority, and you don't give it equal time either, because this is about simulation and reality, some things are criticial, and some serious thought needs to be made into how lower is acceptable, and I'd say not a whole lot, the more of the scenery is implemented into gameplay the less you can touch, the static scenery ofcourse can basically go invisible but the units need to stay full, but then what if the unit is hidden under trees and you set a low tree view radius, you'd see the unit ofcourse and the fair gameplay will be broken, you can't make afterburners disappear on lower end PC and that player would have a huge disadvantage in gameplay, so that effect would have to be replaced with some ugly looking dot or something, and then this is the area where simulators shouldn't go to, so much effort and time on supporting the lower ends isn't worth it as the PC industry is moving so fast.

 

At least that's how I feel about it.

 

So I support this thread, but with a message that ED shouldn't spend doing a quick fix, and rather just take it into consideration for a proper long-term solution down the line.

 

 

I just hope people don't misunderstand "lower" and "higher" it's about code it's not about living people.

Edited November 14, 2017 by Worrazen

[MikeMikeJuliet]

I absolutely agree.

 

And to add: afterburners in daylight... are *not* visible from miles away. In fact, depending on the lighting during daylight hours it might be that you barely see it at all unless you are in very close proximity. And on the other hand, afterburners during night time should shine from way over a hundred miles if the weather is clear.

 

This, in addition to the fact that missiles are visible from the same distance as aircraft are the two most glaring flaws in DCS visuals.

 

Regards,

MikeMikeJuliet

[L-39beeratros]

I touched this topic in my post in L-39 thread (and others' posts after this), and I cannot agree more: lights are basically the biggest visual issue for me in DCS right now and I really want to hear that the new DCS version will fix this :)

[Justin Case]

The topic title says [REPORTED]!!

:thumbup::D

[MikeMikeJuliet]

Grand! Progress.

[Lixma 06]

Weirdly, lights get brighter the further away they are.

 

Try flying low-level down a highway in Vegas at night. The streetlights get progressively smaller & dimmer the closer you are.