reported earlier Ext lighting visibility range way too short

[twistking]

The visibility of ext lighting (nav, strobes, formation, landing etc.) is way, way, way too short. I'd guess by a factor of a hundred.
Not only is ext lighting not visible at all after a few thousand feet, before that the perceived brightness is too low also. When flying in close formation, brightness levels are "acceptable" (yet very much on the low side - you can easily have brightness settings at max without worrying about dazzling your wingman), but if you open up the formation to a few hundred feet perceived brightness goes down too quickly.

Aircraft with full ext lights should be easily seen for many miles. Rejoining a flight at night should be easily done visually when the situation allows for ext lights.
A pilot who forgets to dim /switch off his lights sould be easily seen from a great distance.

Those lights are just sprites, so they won't have any performance impact at all. All that need to be done is tweaking the LODs to allow lights and fine tune the sprites brightness and size for a good compromise of readability and realism.
This needs to be done not only for this aircraft but for every module and AI asset.

It's important.
Thanks!

Edited June 12, 2022 by twistking

[Northstar98]

The problem is keeping the lights looking realistic close in and far away.

However, this seems to be a solved-ish problem - looking at the Su-25/Su-25T, the exterior lights change to a larger 'orb' like light, resulting in them being visible from much further away. In close, the lights still need work and the transition might be too close, but it does a better job of representing them. If they combined what the F-16 currently does and what the Su-25/25T does, it would be a solved problem.

Edited June 12, 2022 by Northstar98

[twistking]

i think this problem is solved for years. other games do it quite well since ages. sure, it needs some manual tuning, because the sprites are "fake" lights, but i think you could get away with only solving for sprite brightness and sprite size per distance. bonus points for occlusion (red/green position lights).
if you have it solved for one aircraft you should be able to apply it to every other aircraft taking into account only the brightness of each individual aircrafts lights, but since most aircraft have dimmable lights you would need a default brightness factor anyway...

sure, it will need some testing and fixing, but i don't see any changes to the engine/renderer needed for that.
i always thought that the hornet's weird nav lights where a testbed for that, but it's years now since the hornet released, her light still look funky and all aircraft's light are still barely useful...

[BIGNEWY]

please include a short track replay and screenshots of what you are seeing. 

thanks

[falconzx]

Actually i flew yesterday with my mates in the night using formation lights (Strobe only, preset C) in slightly open formations and it was nice. It's true that if you increase the distance lights tends to suddenly disappear. But we have the same with afterburners.

P.S: Please do not turn the F-16 in a christmas tree like the Hornet was some time ago. 

[twistking]

6 hours ago, BIGNEWY said:

please include a short track replay and screenshots of what you are seeing. 

thanks

i'll take some screenshots with labels turned on next time i'm flying. i don't know what a track could offer in addition to that, since it's definitely not a weird bug on my system, but just "a thing" with how dcs treats aircraft lights since forever (was the same pre dcs 1.4). ... honestly i've been hoping that this was already on an internal to-do list somewhere within ED...

as i said... i'll add screenshots later, but in the meantime just try to remember at what distance you can easily spot an aircraft (with lights on) at night in dcs. In reality that should be around 40NM (you could debate that as it depends on so many things, but i think 30NM would be very conservative estimate in good weather). In dcs it's... i don't know maybe 0.5NM before lights cannot be seen anymore?!

Or in other words - an aircraft with lights on at night should be well visible beyond what's considered BVR in daylight. It's not even close in dcs... again real life spotting distance can be easily debated, but i still think that my estimate of a factor of 100 (x less range than in rl) still sounds about right (and this is a problem!).

Edited June 13, 2022 by twistking

[NineLine]

This is already reported a while back, thanks