Persian Gulf Night Improvement?...

[ThorBrasil]

First of all I am loving the progress that DCS is following. Thank you for your effort to make DCS better every day.

 

Firstly believe the night of the DCS can be improved. The lighting in the cities is very weak with very low visibility.

 

I know people here do not like comparing DCS with other simulators. But this can not be avoided. For me DCS is the best simulator on the market and this is a fact. The only thing I have not seen an evolution yet is the night. The lighting does not pass the sensation of realism. I mean lighting on the taxi lane, landing and cities.

 

I believe that with small adjustments this will be possible. The city's lighting is orange. Just as it should be in Nevada. But DCS is all white. I think it's LED to save energy. lol!

 

One solution for DCS night is to make the lights render over long distances without loading the scenery objects. This would greatly increase realism and decrease the rendering load.

 

Another point is the landing light, strobocopy of the aircraft. At night you see far away. At DCS you see everything very close. I believe that this can be modified in the future.

 

I'm sorry for anything. I did this topic to help DCS grow. I want the best for our son. I bought the Persian Gulf and the F / A-18C and I'm looking forward to it.

 

Sorry about my English.

 

PERSIAN GULF

 

https://youtu.be/JC5r0oKFcFo?t=53

 

 

 

 

 

https://youtu.be/XMHmYNliQRw?t=34

[rrohde]

+1

[Bloodhound57]

Good post Thor. Good ideas!

[NineLine]

These are WIP shots and I expect continued improvements.

 

Internally when things like this are looked at they use real world shots and examples to compare to, DCS is not to simulate other games, it's to try and simulate the real world, this is why discussion of other games are not relevant.

[Bloodhound57]

The pictures are amazing!

[Emmy]

These are WIP shots and I expect continued improvements.

 

Internally when things like this are looked at they use real world shots and examples to compare to, DCS is not to simulate other games, it's to try and simulate the real world, this is why discussion of other games are not relevant.

 

I'm hoping they can bring (restore?) this sense of how night is on NTTR. Us Hog Drivers miss creeping around in the dark.

 

"City Glow" is something that should, IMO, be looked at. I am a private pilot IRL and I have flown a few hours at night here in Arizona. The glow of Phoenix is CLEARLY visible from Tucson at only a few thousand feet AGL. I have a hunch that Las Vegas should be equally noticeable from nearly every corner of the NTTR (barring terrain.) It is interesting to note, that the Devs went a long ways to make "pre-dawn" very effective. I mean, you almost can't use NVGs looking east after about 0300-0400 because light is starting to creep over the horizon at higher altitudes. It's this type of "light pollution" that really should be caused by the lights of the Las Vegas Strip as well.

 

Food for thought...

[Weta43]

Yes, I fly pretty regularly & the 'light pollution' associated with cities & large towns is something I've noticed is missing, and that would add to the reality of the SIM.

 

That said, the night lighting / city lights are getting way better and more realistic, and I expect the improvements will continue.

[Emmy]

ED had it in NTTR and then (unfortunately) really broke something.

 

They are incrementally closer, but it would be nice to see an "Angels Sing," "Orchestra Crescendo," "Crowd Goes Wild," "OMG!" move back to a useful night time environment in the Nevada desert (on par with what we're being shown with the Gulf map."

[Cake]

Good points. In fact, cities can clearly be seen as lighting up thin cloud layers above them.

 

I think the screenshots show nice work, but I get a feeling things still are far from realistic. The most important lighting is for aircraft and aerodromes. We should be able to see aircraft with normal nav and anti collision lights from 20+ miles out under clear conditions.

 

Also, look at the provided Persian Gulf pics. I’m thinking the runway lights are only visible up close.... Look at the blue taxiway lighting, it has almost vanished at a a fairly short range, where the city lights can be seen at much greater distances. This doesn’t match reality. From these perspectives, the taxiway lights would be much more evident.

[NineLine]

ED had it in NTTR and then (unfortunately) really broke something.

 

They are incrementally closer, but it would be nice to see an "Angels Sing," "Orchestra Crescendo," "Crowd Goes Wild," "OMG!" move back to a useful night time environment in the Nevada desert (on par with what we're being shown with the Gulf map."

 

It has to be incremental. If you throw all this at everyone at once, that's when really bad things happen, it needs to be added, tested, tweaked, tuned, ect. If it were easy we would have it already, DCS is already on the bleeding edge, pushing demands on systems, its better to step carefully, and even then, problems can arise.

[OttoPus]

These are WIP shots and I expect continued improvements.

 

Internally when things like this are looked at they use real world shots and examples to compare to, DCS is not to simulate other games, it's to try and simulate the real world, this is why discussion of other games are not relevant.

 

To be 100% fair, ThorBrasil posted real world videos as examples.

 

He only mentioned that other flight simulations (not fps games) already reached realistic viewing results in this subject (aka = the tech to reach it exists, it can be done)

 

I think this thead should be moved in the wishlist :smilewink:

[David OC]

To be 100% fair, ThorBrasil posted real world videos as examples.

 

He only mentioned that other flight simulations (not fps games) already reached realistic viewing results in this subject (aka = the tech to reach it exists, it can be done)

 

I think this thead should be moved in the wishlist :smilewink:

 

 

ED's Newly built future tech here with DS and needs more testing and tweaking in ED's "own graphics rending engine" and simulation.

 

Those screenshots shows it's starting to very much get there from my point of view for the first shots anyway, the cup is half full. Most of 2.5 is starting to move quickly past those other sims in many places I believe, those engines have been around for a much longer then edge and had a lot more time to mature, I'm quite sure you will see that they wont be able to follow soon going forward without major rework and there not exactly doing any type of combat graphics "cool explosions etc" or combat simulations.

 

ED is also working on other parts of the sim to that can also affect this and other things possibly?

 

It has to be incremental. If you throw all this at everyone at once, that's when really bad things happen, it needs to be added, tested, tweaked, tuned, ect. If it were easy we would have it already, DCS is already on the bleeding edge, pushing demands on systems, its better to step carefully, and even then, problems can arise.

 

The question about effective use of multicore is of course a pretty legitimate and a hot one.

C++ code base of DCS is >1.5M lines of non-trivial and sometimes very complex code, which was mosty architectured in the single-CPU era.

The size of the team can be easily estimated using the about box of the game.

 

We are definitely moving to multicore, obviously it's the present and the future (if there's a future for PC's at all).

But DCS is our bread and butter and we just can't throw it away.

 

So the things are definitely moving, but not as fast as everyone, including us, wants.

 

what is being refactored/rewritten does use multi-threading where possible.

 

atm the major parts which do it are:

resource loading and other I/O (logging, input, ffb ...), integrity checking, sound

 

w/o rewriting the engine, splitting simulation into a separate thread from the graphics will benefit it most - which will be, in fact, the mentioned client-server approach, just inside the app.

 

Quote

 

Wags: For the past several months, we have also been working on Vulkan API integration into DCS World, which we expect to result in a substantial performance boost.

 

End Quote Article

 

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[Torso]

A lot of constructive comments posted. I agree with most. I definitely feel some color tweaking needs to be done and boosting the variety of colors used in the cities. Adding some greens, blues, yellows, purples, reds, oranges..etc. A viewing of pics or vids in Thors post and others shows that there are a lot of other colors vs just white and off-white at play in night lighting. A more orange hue seems to be the most prominent color in urban/developed areas and major roadways. But quite a few others colors as well on buildings and grounds surrounding them and other various areas of the ground. I hope the ED team does some experimenting with the color pallet and gets it a bit closer to real life via ref materials and is not a perf issue(is it more taxing to use 9 different light colors vs only 3 or 4 colors?). Would be cool if they can do it for sure and add to the richness and depth of the environment.

 

I also am curious if the buildings will have any strobes/beacons on them. Not just static but flashing where applicable. I also hope the draw distances are decent. A 20k+ overhead shot showing what is visible would be nice.

 

Anyways, I think ED has made a huge leap forward with this effort and I have renewed hope that they could in time have an absolute stellar night time environment. I had lost hope until I saw these new pics. I hope they look at some of the feedback and suggestions for improvements and consider them while at the same time seeing the universal positive reaction to what has been achieved so far. I now am starting to get excited for carrier night ops with the Hornet again. Hopefully by the time it is available things have evolved even further to make that experience a truly butt clenching moment as it should be. Really good work so far, keep going!

[Pikey]

The issue as far as I can describe is the penetration effect of a light, with no "glow" or area effect. Lights can be seen from very long distances and they also reflect around themselves. Thus a city, would have that area glow as described above, which is absent from the current and also pictures of the next iteration.

 

What we see in DCS currently is a light that falls into one of two categories. It's either of a newer type like the cockpit torches, that don't give any penetration or glow and look way too dark, OR they are this very intense beam, like the parachute flares that have an exact cutoff in a very torch beam like way. Light>dark, nothing in between.

 

There's no "addition" of multiple lights. Point lights give a simple glow around them and stop. If, for example you put ten of this type of lighting together, you would not increase the ambient lighting, you just get ten of the little glows. So something like a city, with hundreds of thousands of little lights, in real life echo their luminescence for many miles around. At the smaller scale neither the cockpit lighting gives than ambience effect, or an entire city, so you end up with just a small spot that doesn't actually illuminate more than just it's own territory.

 

Difficult to explain but that's about the gist of it.

[Pikey]

Bandar Abbas in game, top, RL bottom.

Key points (different shots, top is moonlit strongly and more white reflecting so a bit "apples and oranges ... but)

Ambient pollution of light seen at the bottom better, less "single point definitions"

Unlit spots blacker, but have the pollution glow

Sea, very much darker.

Roads have more organised lines of light IRL

The pollution glow effect is seen recreated with the old 1.2 tiles that were plain textured, but somehow the real lighting needs to converge on that effect if it's to be truly a close representation.

 

Having said that, the current WIP shots look really good.

[Pikey]

Also, needs, mentioned seperately, but orange sodium lighting is absent in the night shots, versus newer LED lighting looks completely different

[David OC]

Also, this is a combat sim, if I hit the power stations the lights should go out. That would be cool to see :D. Perhaps also have an option to have them off/on or with a trigger in the editor also. There's already a off/on switch for night/day so...

 

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[NineLine]

To be 100% fair, ThorBrasil posted real world videos as examples.

 

He only mentioned that other flight simulations (not fps games) already reached realistic viewing results in this subject (aka = the tech to reach it exists, it can be done)

 

I think this thead should be moved in the wishlist :smilewink:

 

To also be 100% fair, he had his first post removed by another moderator, I assume for the very reason of mentioning other simulations.

[aceviper]

Having flown over the gulf a couple of years ago at night going on holiday...the screenshots in the first post look realistic to my eyes.

I was amazed at the lack of light pollution...being an amateur astronomer.

The dry desert air with lack of moisture being the main reason.

[Torso]

Bandar Abbas in game, top, RL bottom.

Key points (different shots, top is moonlit strongly and more white reflecting so a bit "apples and oranges ... but)

 

Roads have more organised lines of light IRL

 

Yep, they need to use the currently employed terrain 'glow' tweak we got in last update on just the major/minor roads and they would achieve the desired effect nicely in combo with this new work. The effect does have a use within this overhaul if used appropriately certainly.

[OttoPus]

To also be 100% fair, he had his first post removed by another moderator, I assume for the very reason of mentioning other simulations.

 

Well, there are no signs of this activity so I couldn't know.

[dali]

it makes no sense in comparing RL with camera shots. For starters, eye works the same for everybody (more or less), whilst the quality of camera sensors varies dramatically. On top of that, the perception of light, especially during night is not the same for eye and camera lens and sensors. I wouldn't bet all my money on RL shots, rather on observation. Few years ago I had difficulties proving that bullets don't wiggle, that they appear so only on camera shots due to shaking and aperture settings of the camera. There were many who didn't believe me, although I shot considerable amount of 12.7mm rounds from the guns mounted on the aircraft :)

[Emmy]

It has to be incremental. If you throw all this at everyone at once, that's when really bad things happen, it needs to be added, tested, tweaked, tuned, ect. If it were easy we would have it already, DCS is already on the bleeding edge, pushing demands on systems, its better to step carefully, and even then, problems can arise.

 

I fully admit I know less than nothing about writing computer code, so all I can ask are "ignorant*" questions but, if something already works and then it doesn't, what prohibits the concept of "Just Put It Back Where It Was?" We, in fact, had "Moon Glow" and acceptable night vision in NTTR once upon a time...

 

That's actually one of the first rules of flying: "If you change something and don't like the result, put that <knob, switch, dial, etc.> back to where it was before you moved it"

 

(*ignorance with a lower case "I" as in "Lacking Knowledge or Understanding")

[Emmy]

it makes no sense in comparing RL with camera shots. For starters, eye works the same for everybody (more or less), whilst the quality of camera sensors varies dramatically. On top of that, the perception of light, especially during night is not the same for eye and camera lens and sensors. I wouldn't bet all my money on RL shots, rather on observation. Few years ago I had difficulties proving that bullets don't wiggle, that they appear so only on camera shots due to shaking and aperture settings of the camera. There were many who didn't believe me, although I shot considerable amount of 12.7mm rounds from the guns mounted on the aircraft :)

 

If our eyes all work the same, then shouldn't there be a universal standard for how something looks in the sim? I mean, how the sim renders / presents something is how we all "see" it, right?

[ThorBrasil]

I do not understand why you can not talk about another simulator. I come to think that ED does not believe in your product and therefore puts that ban on here. It's not another simulator that will make me stop supporting ED. The comparison serves to be able to improve and become more and more the best in the market. I'm passionate about the Simulator with the name X but I will not change the DCS for X. The important thing is the idea I bring here to improve DCS every day. The ED says we have to talk about where we can improve the DCS so that it gets better every day. But if I come here to do that. I'll have the topic deleted or even banned. This is very sad. I buy virtually all modules and that's how I'm treated.

 

I hope you understand. I did not come here to fight but to give a suggestion to make the DCS better.

My intention was never to denigrate the image of DCS, but to make it better every day.