LANTIRN Anti-Aliasing Discussion

[DSplayer]

I already started a discussion about this topic on the HB Discord but I decided to post it here as well so others can also see it better and potentially add to the discussion.

Link to Discord discussion thread on the HB Discord: https://discord.com/channels/1071433028045377637/1108578943168159785

Our current DCS F-14 LANTIRN pod has a pretty blocky imagery and during the development of the RAZBAM F-15E's LANTIRN pod they had something occur with the blocky naturesimilar but they recently posted how they changed/fixed their pod's anti-aliasing so it isn't blocky (while retaining the same resolution if I remember correctly). I was wondering if our current F-14 LANTIRN's blockiness is correct or not since it seems a bit too blocky.

 

What was pointed out to me by Naquaii on Discord was that what I have gathered with my limited research is not really concrete evidence to prove that our current blocky EXP mode isn't incorrect and that the current implementation of the LANTIRN was coded from the information they had to the best of their knowledge.

 

RAZBAM's LANTIRN change:

Spoiler

 

RAZBAM Discord message regarding their implementation of the EXP mode quality on the F-15E's LANTIRN:
https://discord.com/channels/536389125276827660/544231925263630336/1106486611757252659

Spoiler

Images from the 2004 Fighter Fling video: https://imgur.com/a/N1eSN 

Fighter Flint 1995 with developmental LANTIRN footage: 

 

[Q3ark]

Dude the targeting pod on the tomcat is a much earlier version that what the eagle has, the sensor is a much lower resolution. You can’t compare the two.

It also uses digital zoom when you zoom in to the highest level so it’s not using lenses but just blowing up the digital feed on the screen, rather like those crappy digital cameras that came out in the early 2000’s.

It’s all part of the charm of using old kit. 

[Super Grover]

Oh, pixel counting - my favourite job! (Actually, I'm almost crying thinking about those hours spent measuring all elements of the LANTIRN display from the available videos.)

So, this is tricky stuff because we have almost no footage of how it looked in the cockpit, and everything comes from the videos like the one above. I don't know how they got those recordings, but it seems like recording through a VHS camera footage played from another VHS device. I mean, the quality appears to be much worse than the original feed, everything much more blurry, not to mention the stretching from the aspect ratio difference. So definitely, nothing is blocky (even the symbology) because we're watching it through grease-covered glasses . It's so bad that I struggled with deciding if some symbols were single-pixel or double-pixel width.

Finally, the shots from the EXP view are pretty rare. I guess the crews didn't enjoy the digital zoom (TBH, I never use it when I fly). But the Fighter Fling 1995 video has some, and I took a screenshot:

It is blocky - the smallest squares are double the size of the font pixels. Ofc it's also very blurred - so much so that reading the text is difficult.

[Super Grover]

After posting, I realised the picture is a bit small. So I used zoom-enhance (I mean Gigapixel AI) and magnified it 3x with the default settings, so it should be easier to view on smaller screens.

[draconus]

1 hour ago, DSplayer said:

What was pointed out to me by Naquaii on Discord was that what I have gathered with my limited research is not really concrete evidence to prove that our current blocky EXP mode isn't incorrect and that the current implementation of the LANTIRN was coded from the information they had to the best of their knowledge.

That's right. You have old recordings from analog tapes, quality is lost forever.