Position Lights

[Rikus]

There are planes that is very difficult to see Position Lights and other planes that you can see far far away.

 

Unify this

[twistking]

+1

[Northstar98]

+1

 

But the solution isn't to make the lights into massive, obnoxious orbs that make the aircraft look like a meteor, like the Hornet (at least previously).

[Harker]

+1
 
But the solution isn't to make the lights into massive, obnoxious orbs that make the aircraft look like a meteor, like the Hornet (at least previously).

That. And IMO, the Hornet's nav lights still look bad, both from up close and from a distance. The solution is to increase draw distance of light sources (including AB effect), add correct, intensity and angle based bloom and completely do away with using textures in place of bloom.

[tosmonaute]

Yes Harker the hornet lights looks not great and weak, and btw i have the feeling that the Strobe lights also( for all planes)are not strong enough in the environnement at night time to me.

[twistking]

External aircraft lighting is still terrible. On all aircraft except Hornet ext lights are not visible after only a few hundred (!!!) feet, while Hornet's lights - while having better visibility distance - don't look realistic (but rather... ugly... depending on the distance).

In fair weather lights should be visible for at least 25 miles. Strobes should be seen way further even. Also Nav lights should be somewhat distinguishable (red/green) at "reasonable" distances.

If you use the search function, there are a ton of similar requests going back to the beginning of time and light itself. Please ED, finally tackle this longstanding shortcoming. It's not rocket science!

Ps: Please also add AI option for ext. light usage in ME! Thanks, you are great!

[twistking]

Now it's official that DCS will get raytracing in 2024, this issue gets more and more ridiculous.
Proper visibility for nav lights and beacons is way more important than sophisticatedly computed penumbrae while basic sprite lights don't even come with a performance hit: Flight sims in the 2000s could already render nav lights and beacons to realistic distances. It's just sprites! Raytracing won't help with that, it just need some good old tuning and tweaking.
Tactical night flying is borderline impossible without modern jets' HMCS and buddy tracks.

Aircaft beacon lights and landing lights should be visible at ~50km, nav lights (green/red) should be visible (and distinguishable) several kilometers at least. Brightness settings should be respected, so that dimmed lights are less visible (obviously).

Come on, ED! This also gets more and more important with the PTO coming to WWII (navigation over vast distances) and the (mid) cold war era getting more fleshed out (no datalinked buddy tracks).

Edited January 13 by twistking

[Rikus]

Some planes looks like UFO

[average_pilot]

Honest question. Shouldn't it be standard by now to do it with shaders rather than sprites? I mean, industry wide, not only DCS.

[twistking]

3 hours ago, average_pilot said:

Honest question. Shouldn't it be standard by now to do it with shaders rather than sprites? I mean, industry wide, not only DCS.

You mean as a PP effect that is calculated on a "hardware shader", or do you mean as a material property?
I think it would be possible to do it as a PP effect, but the question is, if the benefits would outweigh the costs (both in processing and developing). Sprites are so common for distant lights, because they are easy, cheap and look "good enough". I would guess that those AAA games that have very beautiful distance lights, still use sprites, but add some PP on top of it, to give that distant haze effect f.e. or make the "bloom" more physically correct or "cinematic".
Are you aware of games that do distance lights without sprites? I think that you'd always need some form of sprite as a base, because you'd want some uniformity in visibility. A pixel-based effect, could flicker in and out of existence if the light source is subpixel.
I'm speculating only, so please correct me if i'm wrong.

Edited March 20 by twistking

[average_pilot]

I don't play anymore save for DCS and from time to time FS. In both cases I find the way lights are rendered very unsatisfactory.

In my mind, without really knowing about it, it seems that a pixel shader that calculates the size of the spot "in the sensor" based on the distance to the camera and the size of the light source with some fast approximation of light diffraction may do a much better job. Incidentally the same approach may apply to the problem of the visibility of far aircraft. AFAIK any modern engine already have dozens of shaders than models some aspect of light behaviour to achieve visually appealing results, so I thought this may be solved the same way.

I'm as well speculating. From time to time I leave this questions somewhere in the hopes that some expert may come across and have time to explain this.

[twistking]

4 hours ago, average_pilot said:

I don't play anymore save for DCS and from time to time FS. In both cases I find the way lights are rendered very unsatisfactory.

In my mind, without really knowing about it, it seems that a pixel shader that calculates the size of the spot "in the sensor" based on the distance to the camera and the size of the light source with some fast approximation of light diffraction may do a much better job. Incidentally the same approach may apply to the problem of the visibility of far aircraft. AFAIK any modern engine already have dozens of shaders than models some aspect of light behaviour to achieve visually appealing results, so I thought this may be solved the same way.

I'm as well speculating. From time to time I leave this questions somewhere in the hopes that some expert may come across and have time to explain this.

I think the calculation of the apparent size of a light source is so simple, that it can just be done in software without any disadvantage. Modern material shaders, are - generally - way more complicated. For the sprite size, you could probably do the math in your head even. It's basically just the result of apparent brightness and distance. More advanced effects would probably be done in a post processing step afterwards. Atmospheric effects f.e.
What we see in DCS is not a limitation of sprites, but just a super lazy and broken implementation.

That said, i honestly don't know if there are more advanced techniques emerging. I could see the simple sprites struggling with atmospheric situations like fog, haze etc.
But then we're already moving into the realms of volumetrics...