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Maybe I'm going blind


alphagamer4

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In this Growling Sidewinder video, he has trouble seeing the enemy planes or his own flight's aircraft during Round 1.

 

The aircraft are so hard to see that Growling is forced to ask his partner to pop off flares repeatedly so that he can 1) find him and the enemy aircraft to begin with; and 2) be able to tell friendly aircraft from enemy aircraft.

 

I have heard some say that it's not a matter of seeing microscopic dots in the sky but having the sense to know where aircraft are in the first place. Well, Growling is an experienced DCS gamer for at least 2-3 years. If he has trouble "sensing" where aircraft are or should be, then what hope do we mere gaming mortals have.

 

Please ED, keep thinking of ways to make spotting aircraft more "user-friendly" before some gamers consider buying wallhacks to help keep track of aircraft (I am NOT condoning cheating but believe it is inevitable if gamers have trouble seeing microscopic dots to begin with). Thanks.

 

 


Edited by alphagamer4

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It's worth keeping in mind there's a lot of additional factors in DCS that aren't present in most ''dogfighting'' games (ie WWII) or real life. 

 

For one, the average ''dogfight'' in DCS is taking place at 400-600kts as opposed to 200-300kmh. As a result, the ''circle'' combat is taking place in is likely to be several miles across as opposed to a few hundred meters, with contacts going from ''obvious plane'' to ''speck in the distance'' within a few seconds if heading opposite directions.

 

Also, players in game tend to immediately separate in attempts to ''get the kill'' whereas in real life they... like... stay together and work as a team. As a result, ingame people almost instantly lose track of who is who and where, and you see things like flares or navlights used to IFF each other.

 

The two above factors are by definition going to aggravate spotting. Add in the game vs real life differences of FoV and relative apparent size and it further aggravates things. Regardless, it is not some ''superhuman'' feat, and common sense and organisation go a long way toward negating some of the issues in the first place.

 

It's also worth keeping in mind GS (based on his videos) mostly does 1v1s, group combat is a very different bag.

 

You're always going to have competency issues and people who can't tell what's going on around them, though. Personal experience and practice are the main thing to help with that.


Edited by zhukov032186
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Де вороги, знайдуться козаки їх перемогти.

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Another one with eagle eyes is Hellreign 82.

His video's are short (+/- 15 min) and he added text comments, below what he thinks, in game (in red or blue) short little comments on the enemy.

They are nice to watch and are funny and a lot of the time i wonder... how in the world does he see things that i don't see (if it was for the added comment, i would not have noticed).

 

Hellreign82 tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjcqcqvZg4jIRltAA01a7cA

 

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1 hour ago, Lange_666 said:

... how in the world does he see things that i don't see (if it was for the added comment, i would not have noticed).

 

 


keep on mind that YT compression leaves the video less detailed than what the author really saw at the moment of recording.

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I believe I have seen some modifications to the labels file in some servers/missions that do exactly what the OP wants. Creates a small dot at a certain range (as opposed to a larger carrot or font)  and then the dot disappears again at a closer range when the aircraft is in a bit closer. (I think this was primarily done for VR users who were finding it harder).

 

From what I saw this didn't look like your normal labels, but basically a pixel (or a few) but small on the screen but still distinctly visible - as opposed to a large label. 

 

I believe it was possible to choose the range as to when it comes effective and when it disappears again too, but not really sure. I'm going by memory as I don't have the links on me as to how it was done but IIRC, it was changing the font, as well as reducing the font size and setting the label to be a dot. I'm not sure if the position was also changed to make it closer to the aircraft (or missile) itself.  (I also believe that the mod had the same color for everything so you couldn't identify friend or foe based on color - making it a little more 'realistic' and only giving an visual cue as to an object in the sky). 

 

Not the perfect option, but saves the necessity for wallhacks and similar.

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4 hours ago, Rudel_chw said:


keep on mind that YT compression leaves the video less detailed than what the author really saw at the moment of recording.

Yeah, Youtube sucks for clarity, but we gots to make room for 9,000 reuploads of ''the cat that meows no'' @@

Де вороги, знайдуться козаки їх перемогти.

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4 hours ago, Dangerzone said:

I believe I have seen some modifications to the labels file in some servers/missions that do exactly what the OP wants. Creates a small dot at a certain range (as opposed to a larger carrot or font)  and then the dot disappears again at a closer range when the aircraft is in a bit closer. (I think this was primarily done for VR users who were finding it harder).

 

From what I saw this didn't look like your normal labels, but basically a pixel (or a few) but small on the screen but still distinctly visible - as opposed to a large label. 

 

I believe it was possible to choose the range as to when it comes effective and when it disappears again too, but not really sure. I'm going by memory as I don't have the links on me as to how it was done but IIRC, it was changing the font, as well as reducing the font size and setting the label to be a dot. I'm not sure if the position was also changed to make it closer to the aircraft (or missile) itself.  (I also believe that the mod had the same color for everything so you couldn't identify friend or foe based on color - making it a little more 'realistic' and only giving an visual cue as to an object in the sky). 

 

Not the perfect option, but saves the necessity for wallhacks and similar.

 

Yep, this is perfectly doable by editing the Labels.lua file in /Config/View. I've used it forever to make up for my awful eye sight and the usual DCS-isms that Zhukov mentioned.

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FWIW, I think GS totally lost SA at the beginning in that round. When he did finally pick out where the fight was he was something like ~15 mi away. He lost SA and ended up leaving the fight area.

 

Beyond that - hard to tell if he could have picked out the other aircraft visually. Youtube compression makes a mess of things.

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Are you running the latest beta? Recent changes have actually made aircraft visibility extremely easy, too easy in fact. Well, that's what some think - personally I think it's a touch overpowered. 

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14 hours ago, TLTeo said:

 

Yep, this is perfectly doable by editing the Labels.lua file in /Config/View. I've used it forever to make up for my awful eye sight and the usual DCS-isms that Zhukov mentioned.

 

Could you point me in the direction of a tutorial on how to do this? I don't want to play DCS scanning for microscopic dots. Thanks.

1 hour ago, GunSlingerAUS said:

Are you running the latest beta? Recent changes have actually made aircraft visibility extremely easy, too easy in fact. Well, that's what some think - personally I think it's a touch overpowered. 

 

I'm not. I prefer to play on stable builds. Can't wait for these aircraft visibility changes to be released on a stable build. Thanks for giving me hope!

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Stable and Beta are on the same release atm, there should be no difference.

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Spotting aircraft is the most difficult thing to do IRL as well. 

You should know some math to be able to look at the right place in the sky: altitude difference / range gives you a vertical angle, and bearing gives you the horizontal angle. 

Then you have to know your cockpit to know where is 5°, 10°, etc... up or down, and left or right.

Some manuals give you this kind of description of the cockpit. 

 

Knowing when you are an easy spot or not is part of your tactics choice as well. 

If the sky is cloudless, being slightly below the bandit will place him above the horizon, and it will be easier to spot. 

If the sky is overcast, being much higher will give you an easy spot, like a fly on the milk... 

Coming with the sun in your back will make you almost invisible, even to IR seekers. 

Flying with contrails will remove all surprise. 

Etc...

 

But I quite agree with some comments: planes have become somewhat easy to spot, sometimes far above 10Nm, which is impossible IRL. 

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On 1/16/2021 at 8:36 AM, Lange_666 said:

Another one with eagle eyes is Hellreign 82.

His video's are short (+/- 15 min) and he added text comments, below what he thinks, in game (in red or blue) short little comments on the enemy.

They are nice to watch and are funny and a lot of the time i wonder... how in the world does he see things that i don't see (if it was for the added comment, i would not have noticed).

 

Hellreign82 tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjcqcqvZg4jIRltAA01a7cA

 

 

I wonder how he sees the things when I can't even see like more than half of the subtitles rdlaugh.png

 

On 1/16/2021 at 2:56 PM, zhukov032186 said:

Yeah, Youtube sucks for clarity, but we gots to make room for 9,000 reuploads of ''the cat that meows no'' @@

 

Well, they used "teh röyna" as an illicit excuse to ramp up the compression a lot last year without any actual evidence of a higher usage. Nice economy move they did there and noone is even complaining even though the image quality leaves very much to be desired.

 

As for the labels: As long as they're literally half-plotted and shine nicely through the canopy frame making them act like an xray scanner, they aren't even worth mentioning. ED really has to finally address this and up their game here - and I dare to say it's not much to do as it's great already that we can customize them rather well. There's the 3dmigoto mod that partially "fixes" this, but well, only partially. Plus it's incompatible with literally any other graphics mod. So either I can have proper dot labels or can see landscape details from more than 5 miles (let alone any type of unit) because of the extremely foggy haze in VR. And it's especially hard to see things with a low res HMD such as my CV1 which literally makes having labels on mandatory - which directly makes 99% of the MP servers unusable, even if the frame rates were remotely halfway decent.

dcsdashie-hb-ed.jpg

 

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7 minutes ago, Eldur said:

 As for the labels: As long as they're literally half-plotted and shine nicely through the canopy frame making them act like an xray scanner, they aren't even worth mentioning. ED really has to finally address this and up their game here - and I dare to say it's not much to do as it's great already that we can customize them rather well. There's the 3dmigoto mod that partially "fixes" this, but well, only partially.

The funny thing is that, with the white-dot/black-dot issues that they've been dealing with ever since the new (night) lighting changes went in (which made units show up four galaxies away), they seem to have cracked the issue with having some kind of dot-label-alike… thing… that doesn't show through the cockpit. It's just not applied to the thing it should be applied to, so rather than solve a very old outstanding issue, it creates a new one because those dots show up in exactly the wrong place. 😄

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14 hours ago, TLTeo said:

This is the version I use, you can tweak from there (e.g. change the range at which the dots show up).

Labels.lua 7.04 kB · 2 downloads

 

Thank you!

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Airframes: A10C | A10CII | F/A-18C | F-14A/B | F-16C | F-5E | F-86F | JF-17 | M-2000C | AV-8B | MiG-15Bis | MiG-15Bis | Ka-50 Black Shark 2 helicopter | FC3. (All  purchased on STEAM)

Modules: Supercarrier | WW2 Assets Pack | Raven One | Serpent's Head 2 | The Ultimate Argument | The Georgian War | Aggressors BFM | M-2000C Red Flag | F-15C Red Flag | Aggressors ACM | The Enemy Within 3.0 | A-10C Red Flag | The Museum Relic Campaign. (All purchased on STEAM)

Maps: Persian Gulf | Nevada NTTR. (All purchased on STEAM)

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16 hours ago, Lange_666 said:

Stable and Beta are on the same release atm, there should be no difference.

 

Then I'm going blind. I'm still having trouble spotting aircraft out in the wild blue yonder....

PC Setup: i7-8700K CPU @5 GHz | 32GB DDR4 RAM 3200 MHz | EVGA RTX 3080 GPU | LG 27GL83A-B 27" Ultragear QHD IPS 1ms 144Hz NVIDIA G-SYNC Compatible Gaming Monitor | VKB Gunfighter Mk.III ‘Space Combat Edition’ Premium Grip | TrackIR5 system | Virpil VPC MongoosT-50CM3 Throttle.

Airframes: A10C | A10CII | F/A-18C | F-14A/B | F-16C | F-5E | F-86F | JF-17 | M-2000C | AV-8B | MiG-15Bis | MiG-15Bis | Ka-50 Black Shark 2 helicopter | FC3. (All  purchased on STEAM)

Modules: Supercarrier | WW2 Assets Pack | Raven One | Serpent's Head 2 | The Ultimate Argument | The Georgian War | Aggressors BFM | M-2000C Red Flag | F-15C Red Flag | Aggressors ACM | The Enemy Within 3.0 | A-10C Red Flag | The Museum Relic Campaign. (All purchased on STEAM)

Maps: Persian Gulf | Nevada NTTR. (All purchased on STEAM)

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