4k Resolution Contact Scaling

[Bosun]

I've been experimenting lately, after being frustrated at online scenarios where I cannot see other contacts, with playing at various resolutions. 

I was aware that lowering the resolution resulted in better spotting - but the difference is actually quite staggering.  At 1080p, I could be competitive and aware.  At 2k, I start to loose that edge.   At 4k, I may as well have a blindfold on.  In fact, I actually got behind someone by accident and didn't realize it until they popped above the horizon line once.  It was the only kill I got that night.

I'd love to see ED take in to consideration the scaling of physical pixels, with the LOD and pixelspace those LODs take up.  I've got a 4090, with a 32inch monitor, and I still have to play the game at 1080p.  While it looks beautiful at 4k in single player, in multi-player, it's just too severe a handicap to be worth it. The challenge of spotting in an online world is still limited by field of view, level of detail, and adaptive focus/dynamic range that the human eye has, and until we reach a much higher fidelity in those aspects, I think contact scaling is still necessary, even for high-resolution rigs.

In short - I think that the same physical size of a contact pixel at 1080p, should be replicated at 4k by however many pixels that ends up being, so that we're all seeing the same way, with the contacts taking up the same amount of physical screen space at a distance, as much as technology can allow. 

I'd love to see contact scaling for higher resolutions be an option that is enabled on the System screen for high resolution systems.  I want to play the pretty game, while also being able to play multiplayer.  

 

[SharpeXB]

Yeah I would hate having to reduce resolution just to see far off dots. Me personally I’d rather die than see an ugly game so I keep my resolution at 4K. I think it’s possible that showing distant contacts as a single pixel is still too large. 

Look at the 1080p example here where these fighters are easily visible in the wide FOV at 30 miles which is quite unrealistic, yet they're just a single pixel each.

Edited March 27, 2023 by SharpeXB

[Bosun]

I don't see that as terribly unrealistic, per se.  I think the human eye is highly capable of detecting things at long ranges, and you would naturally have a wider field of view the entire time you were looking, than the computer screen can represent.  

My only issue is the difference in advantage you get from playing at low resolutions.  

You could make it more difficult to see things in 1080 - or make it easier to seem them 4k - but one of those should happen, as it's quite silly to have a game that touts a beautiful experience, only to negate the incentive to experience it by having the advantages be so favorable to lower-end graphics settings for spotting.  

[SharpeXB]

31 minutes ago, Bosun said:

I don't see that as terribly unrealistic, per se.

The human eye can’t see a fighter sized target at 30 miles. Nor as easily as you can see it here either. The aspect is of course a factor and here the bandits are head on, in reality they’d just be an invisible dot. There are studies on this of course, the range is much much shorter than people seem to be used to in these games.

Edited March 27, 2023 by SharpeXB

[Bosun]

4 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

The human eye can’t see a fighter sized target at 30 miles.

oh I missed the 30 mile reference in your first response. Very true.

[Mars Exulte]

I... I have an idea. More of a notion, really. A tingle in one of my brain folds.

We all agree spotting is hit and miss in this game. Reasons vary widely, I'll not list them all here as we mostly all know them and have hashed it out a million times. Some of it is even just due to slapdash devwork, ie missing LoDs that make them literally disappear.

So, my idea is dynamic LODs... but with a twist.

 So, the smart scaling we had before was... suboptimal. It applied to all units at all times and resulted in skyscraper sized tanks and all kinds of bizarre crap that's unwanted. Kind of like labels, it technically solves ''the issue'' but creates new, often worse, ones as well.

 How about this, the scaling is only applied to airborne units like planes and helos, and only within the troublesome range where stuff should be visible but often isn't. No giant planes on the tarmac, no huge bombs, no titanic tanks. Distant objects are still specs, etc. Wouldn't apply to VR.

[Why485]

This is how dots work in the current system. At low resolutions, you can ironically see targets before your radar sees them. At high resolutions, those dots may as well not be there because they're so small. It's a flawed system that benefits people in an unequal way and is most effective in boosting visibility at the ranges that shouldn't have it.

There are many, many solutions to spotting in general. It is a very well understood problem with very well understood solutions. Almost every simulator, even professional industry ones, addresses this in some way. Where I used to work, one of the questions we would sometimes get about our image generator was if it had some form of smart scaling.

I hope some day Eagle Dynamics is willing to open conversation about this again, because it has been, and remains one of my biggest problems with DCS.

Edited April 4, 2023 by Why485

[Bosun]

That's exactly the kind of picture I was looking for - just a really good comparison gif.  

 

[Nyaruko]

Dot labels should be the solution, But not perfect. They should design a more dynamic label that is enabled at 1 pixel and disabled when entities are actually rendered.

[SharpeXB]

3 minutes ago, Nyaruko said:

Dot labels should be the solution, But not perfect. They should design a more dynamic label that is enabled at 1 pixel and disabled when entities are actually rendered.

Well labels in any form aren’t realistic and rendering something at a fixed 1 pixel is what causes this 1080p exploit in the first place. 
No labels and no pixel dots at all would be better. 

[Dodge]

There was a message on the DCS Discord server (dcs-wwii-chat channel) with some reference this being worked on, as well as LOD...

null

[SharpeXB]

It’s worrying that ground and air targets would get different treatment. That doesn’t make sense realistically. 

[Why485]

20 hours ago, Dodge said:

There was a message on the DCS Discord server (dcs-wwii-chat channel) with some reference this being worked on, as well as LOD...

We've been hearing "we're working on the LOD system" for years, so there's no way to know if whatever they're doing will be released within the next couple years or at all.

It seems unlikely to me that LOD work has anything to do with spotting in the first place, and is more likely to be related to performance considering DCS has rather notorious inconsistencies (e.g. Tu-95 using LOMAC era lines for its lowest detail model) and extreme triangle counts (e.g. ~400k for the lowest detail Mirage) in LOD models. For all we know it could just mean that they're going to start enforcing more uniform standards across first party and third party models.

Without more specifics (which were not given) there is no reason to believe that whatever this LOD work entails will even affect spotting, and IMO it's more than likely to be completely unrelated. There's no way way know.

What does make me nervous is that they're still talking about the dots.fx at all. Unless they dramatically rewrote the dots to some new system, this feels like an underwhelming half-measure and hopefully temporary until a better solution. Might these dots.fx changes be an improvement? Maybe! I'd certainly welcome any improvement given the circumstances. However, considering ED have far more flexibility in how they can tackle this problem than dots, I would be a bit disappointed if that's what they settled on.

Edited June 1, 2023 by Why485

[Dodge]

dcs-wii-chat channel in the ED discord (from yesterday)

null

[Larzei]

Is there any update on this issue now? DCS is in a really good state these days and better than ever, but I just really need the targets and obects to be a little bigger on my 2K resolution monitor. That's the only thing bothering me atm. Tried 1080 but it just dosnt work on a 42'' 2k monitor. 

 

 

[SharpeXB]

24 minutes ago, Larzei said:

Is there any update on this issue now? DCS is in a really good state these days and better than ever, but I just really need the targets and obects to be a little bigger on my 2K resolution monitor. That's the only thing bothering me atm. Tried 1080 but it just dosnt work on a 42'' 2k monitor. 

In the 2.9 Open Beta this has been updated

• Improved “spotting dots” added (WIP):
  • Increased dot size at high resolutions
  • Zoom is not affecting dots size

But this appears to be nothing more than the “dot label” feature forced on. It’s a WIP…

Edited November 2, 2023 by SharpeXB

[draconus]

On 11/2/2023 at 4:14 PM, SharpeXB said:

But this appears to be nothing more than the “dot label” feature forced on. It’s a WIP…

At least it was fine for FullHD and VR. Now it's wrong for everybody

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, draconus said:

At least it was fine for FullHD and VR. Now it's wrong for everybody

2.8 was too big in 1080p you could see distant aircraft for miles and didn’t even need radar. The whole idea of adding these dots is just wrong to begin with. What 2.9 did was make higher resolutions like 4K and VR as egregious as 1080p was. 

 

[draconus]

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

The whole idea of adding these dots is just wrong to begin with.

Agree