[NO LONGER PASSES IC] Improved Contact Dot Spotting (Updated v1.1)

[MIghtymoo]

14 hours ago, Sardines said:

I don't think spotting is fine until we can get resolution parity. It cannot be intended that the optimal way to spot targets at a distance is to reduce your resolution below native. This mod has shown that we CAN get resolution parity, and I think it's worth acknowledging that maybe at least that aspect of this mod should be the default behavior.

It seems like a clear improvement to spotting; even if the team says spotting isn't broken doesn't mean it can't be improved.

Great summary and this thread should tell ED to put some more effort into fixing  well-known and undesirable issues in the core engine (*** insert long list here, including spotting ***)

I am an avid DCS player and have a lot of aircraft, maps and campaigns. And according to my wife, I spend far to much time and money on DCS . But I (mostly) love it!

In my humble opinion, too much time is spent on eye candy and more should be diverted to make the overall game experience better.

I think the engagement seen in this thread support that impression.

When I made a serious and neutral post to bring this topic up some time back, my whole post was deleted without warning or notice…

Please ED, divert some more attention to fixing the well know core issues (including spotting) and you will get an even larger crowd of fans and loyal couch pilots

Edited April 18, 2023 by MIghtymoo

[FusRoPotato]

This should have been a standard improvement long ago. There should never have been a bias for resolution nor any ability to see aircraft more than 40 nm away. This also shouldn't have been sat on and ignored for so long because of its importance. 

Now we have a shader mod that can be edited, and thanks to MT bugs, we can now see where everyone is, anywhere they are, anytime they are, and at any range. We can now even see when a phoenix is coming at us from 65 nm away the instant it's launched, and without smoke!!! Just mash a few numbers into the file and you have yourself a full fledged ESP.

Bignewy and Nineline, I don't think you should notify the team about this. I think you should roll it up and beat them over the head with it.

Edited April 18, 2023 by FusRoPotato

[PeevishMonkey]

8 часов назад, ClydeBigBird сказал:

Chuck Yeager claimed to be able to see enemy aircraft that were 50 miles away

Please, don't call the spirit of Chuck Yeager here... 

There are a lot of documents about range of visibility for different types of WWII's airplanes.

Typical distasnce for detecting fighter (Me, Fw, Yak, La - it doesn't matter, they had the same dimensions - is about 35 ft) is 3-4 nautical miles.

For bombers - 6 nm and it's reasonable besause they had twice bigger size.

It could be 30% bigger if is a group of airplanes but it's very peculiarities of human vision. I'm afraid there is no way to build-in it in game.

[BuxtonHouse]

When my screen was in for repair, I had a small 1080p I lent from a friend and it was sooo easy to spot targets, really really nice so yeah this mod implemented would be great.

[FusRoPotato]

32 minutes ago, PeevishMonkey said:

Please, don't call the spirit of Chuck Yeager here... 

There are a lot of documents about range of visibility for different types of WWII's airplanes.

Typical distasnce for detecting fighter (Me, Fw, Yak, La - it doesn't matter, they had the same dimensions - is about 35 ft) is 3-4 nautical miles.

For bombers - 6 nm and it's reasonable besause they had twice bigger size.

It could be 30% bigger if is a group of airplanes but it's very peculiarities of human vision. I'm afraid there is no way to build-in it in game.

I can see the ISS fly overhead at night so kjabsdfkjbaskdjuvhouh, load of bs.

Typical distance to spot a fighter jet with 20/20 vision is about 30 nm and I can bold harder than you so don't even.

Edited April 18, 2023 by FusRoPotato

[PeevishMonkey]

Только что, FusRoPotato сказал:

I can see the ISS fly overhead at night

Do you really want to say, that is the same like see an airplane in the sky? Try to see ISS at day.

[Mars Exulte]

43 minutes ago, PeevishMonkey said:

Please, don't call the spirit of Chuck Yeager here... 

There are a lot of documents about range of visibility for different types of WWII's airplanes.

Typical distasnce for detecting fighter (Me, Fw, Yak, La - it doesn't matter, they had the same dimensions - is about 35 ft) is 3-4 nautical miles.

For bombers - 6 nm and it's reasonable besause they had twice bigger size.

It could be 30% bigger if is a group of airplanes but it's very peculiarities of human vision. I'm afraid there is no way to build-in it in game.

 Except those numbers aren't at all accurate. They're definitely visible from greater distances than that. WWII Brits reported watching the German flights assembling prior to them crossing the channel, and that's a lot more than ''6 miles +30%'' If you're going to pull something out of your arse at least say so.

[PeevishMonkey]

8 минут назад, Mars Exulte сказал:

WWII Brits reported watching

There are words but there is a statistics.

[El Chapo]

29 minutes ago, FusRoPotato said:

I can see the ISS fly overhead at night so kjabsdfkjbaskdjuvhouh, load of bs.

Typical distance to spot a fighter jet with 20/20 vision is about 30 nm and I can bold harder than you so don't even.

 

In butterfly BFM set-up, you generally turn in at 4,5 Nm because further away than that you are likely to loose sight of the other fighter and not find it again soon enough. 

Sonit gives you a pretty accurate idea of what a typical spotting distance is in a situation where you know where to search for the other guy. 

From RL my experience, I'd say that spotting a fighter above 5 Nm is uncommon, and a tanker above 15 Nm is also uncommon. 

[Red_Pilot]

A very good attempt at improvement. But I don't like the general opinion that if 1080 has some advantage, it means that with 1080 you have good visibility of contacts. This is an erroneous opinion. At medium and often close distances, this is terrible. In fact, improvement is needed for everyone. It's sad that ED denies this problem

[rurounijones]

@Why485Could you clarify if you mean "Nautical Miles" or not when you say "miles" in your post? Just to remove ambiguity.

Edited April 18, 2023 by rurounijones

[FusRoPotato]

2 hours ago, El Chapo said:

In butterfly BFM set-up, you generally turn in at 4,5 Nm because further away than that you are likely to loose sight of the other fighter and not find it again soon enough. 

Sonit gives you a pretty accurate idea of what a typical spotting distance is in a situation where you know where to search for the other guy. 

From RL my experience, I'd say that spotting a fighter above 5 Nm is uncommon, and a tanker above 15 Nm is also uncommon. 

If you've never seen a tanker sized aircraft beyond 15 nm, you gonna need some majorly thick glasses bruh. I'd say you shouldn't even be qualified to fly if you can't spot one 60 out, having a general idea where it should be.

Edited April 18, 2023 by FusRoPotato

[Quaggles]

32 minutes ago, rurounijones said:

@Why485Could you clarify if you mean "Nautical Miles" or not when you say "miles" in your post? Just to remove ambiguity.

 

The shader sets a "distanceFactor" starting with a value of 0 at 32km which linearly increases to 1 at 12km, so it looks like nautical miles in the post.

null

[Lekaa]

I have resolution at 3840x1600

LG38 monitor. I have always struggled to see contacts, even at 5 miles 

I will test this mod and see if there is different

 

Side note, friends who play on VR first rift can se contacts 30 miles away and i struggle to see a contact 5 miles away.

Even when i lock them in the hornet Gun i see a small small dot that is very hard to see without the lock

Edited April 18, 2023 by Lekaa

[El Chapo]

7 minutes ago, FusRoPotato said:

If you've never seen a tanker sized aircraft beyond 15 nm, you gonna need some majorly thick glasses bruh. I'd say you shouldn't even be qualified to fly if you can't spot one 60 out, having a general idea where it should be.

 

Appart from proving that you've never been in that situation before, and that you have close to zero knowledge of the human eye biological principles and its behaviour in aeronautical environment, I find your reply pretty pointless. 

[BIGNEWY]

Folks treat each other with respect. 

Nineline has added a poll and we are looking at feedback. The IC issue is being worked on also. 

thanks

[Hez]

Yeah this feels like quite a significant improvement for me (I run high resolution) - nice to see some interest for possible changes in this area really. I'll certainly be running this as long as able.

[iRocco]

19 hours ago, NineLine said:

I'll check out the mod, we can put it forth to the team even as an option if everyone things it is worthwhile. 

Thanks!

PS I added a poll on here, if you have tried it, please vote. Thanks. 

How can it not be worthwhile? Spotting is absolutely broken...

[Biggus]

Definite improvement.  It's hard to quantify.  I'm going to spend a few more days playing with it, but so far I'm quite impressed.  Well done @Why485, it's a great little mod.

[WipeUout]

Tried the mod with my 8kX at native 4k resolution using the "spotting-test2.miz" file.

Without the mod I can spot the 32nm plane.

With the mod I can't spot further than the 8nm plane.

[MysteriousHonza]

Spotting, especially close in, up to like 10nm should be seriously improved. Huge ammount of people have problems spotting enemy thats below 10nm even tho they are told precisely where to look. Thats how bad spotting in dcs is. Its only.worse on higher res but all resolutions should be same and improved too.

[TAIPAN_]

8 hours ago, Callsign JoNay said:

Really? We had a Viper pilot in my wing who told me that 2-10 miles is usually the max range for spotting another Viper, depending on aspect, lighting, etc. 18 miles is "way too short"? I mean, AMRAAMs are usually deployed between 10-30 nm, and they are BVR missiles. Can you share your sources?

I think he may mean 6 miles where the mod has the dot opaque? After 6 miles it gets exponentially more transparent - this makes viewing it really dependent on the background. Against the ground textures and trees maybe not, against pure blue sky or pure white cloud maybe yes. By 18 miles it is completely transparent.

I'd be curious where ED got their distance info from when originally designing it on older graphics/monitors 20 years ago (1080p or 800p etc). Maybe there was some source, though it does feel that something in between would be better.

[ClydeBigBird]

6 hours ago, PeevishMonkey said:

Please, don't call the spirit of Chuck Yeager here... 

There are a lot of documents about range of visibility for different types of WWII's airplanes.

Typical distasnce for detecting fighter (Me, Fw, Yak, La - it doesn't matter, they had the same dimensions - is about 35 ft) is 3-4 nautical miles.

For bombers - 6 nm and it's reasonable besause they had twice bigger size.

It could be 30% bigger if is a group of airplanes but it's very peculiarities of human vision. I'm afraid there is no way to build-in it in game.

While Yeager's claim might be hyperbolic, I think your numbers are too conservative.  If I can make out the shape of commercial airliners that are cruising at 6+ miles off the ground, I don't think it's inconceivable that a fighter pilot could detect the presence (noticing that there is an airplane but without identifying it's shape) at much longer distances.

[dlder]

just to add my 2c: I've always been playing at native resolution (3440x1440) and the highest graphical setting. I NEED to use barebones labels and or finding targets is impossible!

Not all pixels are the same; clearly. PPI of displays just changes things and having a higher density / smaller pixels is visually better. But not in DCS, where you get punished for going beyond 19", 1280x1024 it seems.

That may not have been a problem in 2008, but it is now!

[TaxDollarsAtWork]

Hope this starts a drive for ED to look at smart scaling?