resolved New spotting is great / New spotting is overcooked feedback thread

[Ourorborus]

Please make getting rid of these ugly, unrealistic, immersion breaking blobs in the sky highest hot fix priority. At the least make the ability to disable them work.

In VR (G2) they look like massive blurry splotches over the top of any traffic. At longer ranges we can see the dot and dont need our RADAR for BVR. Ay shorter ranges the splodge makes seeing the aircraft look like a blob the size of a small football stadium!!

[KoN]

30 minutes ago, Ourorborus said:

Please make getting rid of these ugly, unrealistic, immersion breaking blobs in the sky highest hot fix priority. At the least make the ability to disable them work.

In VR (G2) they look like massive blurry splotches over the top of any traffic. At longer ranges we can see the dot and dont need our RADAR for BVR. Ay shorter ranges the splodge makes seeing the aircraft look like a blob the size of a small football stadium!!

Im sure there will be a Fix to have dots on or off .

But as seen in this thread and looking at the evidence Not all people see what you see  .

But in VR and using MT.exe they seem large . 

[nuNce]

6 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Well the goal here is to make DCS realistic, not “fun”. Unless fun is realistic. Excessive visibility destroys all realism in air combat. 

This iteration is much closer to real spotting than the previous Flying Dutchman planes we had in 2.8 and we have way bigger problems in the way of realism than spotting. Just on the top of my head:

• RWR lock spikes across the whole map
• AI denying laws of physics
• AI bandits knowing your location at all times, and having perfect SA
• Ground units having radar-like accuracy with autocannons and machine-guns making them better AA than a Shilka

These are the issues that are really holding back the sim when playing in a cold war scenario where your SA tools are very limited and you rely mainly on your Eyeballs Mk1 to understand the battlefield and locate targets. If I have to choose between "Too hard to spot" and "Too easy to spot" I will definitely go with the latter, since the former makes the game worse in every aspect. In the current state, spotting is not easy at all when flying low. I get that there are some users that are experiencing unwanted results, but I'm sure ED will iron those out with future updates, while preserving the ability to spot visually for the rest.

[KoN]

41 minutes ago, nuNce said:

This iteration is much closer to real spotting than the previous Flying Dutchman planes we had in 2.8 and we have way bigger problems in the way of realism than spotting. Just on the top of my head:

• RWR lock spikes across the whole map
• AI denying laws of physics
• AI bandits knowing your location at all times, and having perfect SA
• Ground units having radar-like accuracy with autocannons and machine-guns making them better AA than a Shilka

These are the issues that are really holding back the sim when playing in a cold war scenario where your SA tools are very limited and you rely mainly on your Eyeballs Mk1 to understand the battlefield and locate targets. If I have to choose between "Too hard to spot" and "Too easy to spot" I will definitely go with the latter, since the former makes the game worse in every aspect. In the current state, spotting is not easy at all when flying low. I get that there are some users that are experiencing unwanted results, but I'm sure ED will iron those out with future updates, while preserving the ability to spot visually for the rest.

Oh yes the all seeing eye of DCS . Again i think this will be fixed . But every thing you said tells the truth . 

[nuNce]

1 minute ago, KoN said:

Oh yes the all seeing eye of DCS . Again i think this will be fixed . But every thing you said tells the truth . 

Sometimes launching Fox2s at AI makes me feel like my trigger is hardwired to their flare dispenser.

[chichowalker]

1 hour ago, nuNce said:

This iteration is much closer to real spotting than the previous Flying Dutchman planes we had in 2.8 and we have way bigger problems in the way of realism than spotting. Just on the top of my head:

• RWR lock spikes across the whole map
• AI denying laws of physics
• AI bandits knowing your location at all times, and having perfect SA
• Ground units having radar-like accuracy with autocannons and machine-guns making them better AA than a Shilka

These are the issues that are really holding back the sim when playing in a cold war scenario where your SA tools are very limited and you rely mainly on your Eyeballs Mk1 to understand the battlefield and locate targets. If I have to choose between "Too hard to spot" and "Too easy to spot" I will definitely go with the latter, since the former makes the game worse in every aspect. In the current state, spotting is not easy at all when flying low. I get that there are some users that are experiencing unwanted results, but I'm sure ED will iron those out with future updates, while preserving the ability to spot visually for the rest.

Not only know your location, but also know perfectly the position of all missiles launched against them to defeat them kinematically....AI BVR GOD behaviour should be degraded in order to be more realistic....

[nuNce]

1 hour ago, nuNce said:

This iteration is much closer to real spotting than the previous Flying Dutchman planes we had in 2.8 and we have way bigger problems in the way of realism than spotting. Just on the top of my head:

• RWR lock spikes across the whole map
• AI denying laws of physics
• AI bandits knowing your location at all times, and having perfect SA
• Ground units having radar-like accuracy with autocannons and machine-guns making them better AA than a Shilka

These are the issues that are really holding back the sim when playing in a cold war scenario where your SA tools are very limited and you rely mainly on your Eyeballs Mk1 to understand the battlefield and locate targets. If I have to choose between "Too hard to spot" and "Too easy to spot" I will definitely go with the latter, since the former makes the game worse in every aspect. In the current state, spotting is not easy at all when flying low. I get that there are some users that are experiencing unwanted results, but I'm sure ED will iron those out with future updates, while preserving the ability to spot visually for the rest.

Just a note, my intention wasn't to bash ED, as I finally feel that work is being done to address long standing issues and feels like a really positive sign from them.

It was just to point out that "realism" has many angles and is not just graphics and systems.

[Burt]

11 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Well the goal here is to make DCS realistic, not “fun”. Unless fun is realistic. Excessive visibility destroys all realism in air combat. 

I agree. Disable all labels/dots keep it realistic is how it should be. 

[James DeSouza]

On 10/24/2023 at 7:37 AM, nuNce said:

GOD NO! We finally have decent spotting and can have real fun in dogfights being able to finally have a quick glance at your instruments without losing track of the enemy. Don't event start complaining about "My god, dots are too big", they are PERFECT right now!

You're supposed to have a good chance of losing track of things when you go heads down, it's legitimately the entire reason HUDs were invented.

[James DeSouza]

11 hours ago, KoN said:

Im sure there will be a Fix to have dots on or off .

But as seen in this thread and looking at the evidence Not all people see what you see  .

But in VR and using MT.exe they seem large . 

No, they are just massive in general.  Look at

13 hours ago, PeevishMonkey said:

seems true 

FOV 120 deg:

 

FOV 61 deg:

 null

This for instance.  From 1.8km to 10km you're looking at a dot of functionally similar size.  You should barely be able to see anything at 10km.  A 20/20 eye has a rough minimum visual resolution of ~40 arc seconds, which equated to roughly 0.01 of a degree (and this is in idealized perfect contrast, in reality it'll be lower).  At 10km this means you're limited to a minimum visual clarity of 2m objects.  2m sounds like a lot but it really isn't, an F-15 which is goddamn titanic is 6x20x13 (and because it's not a solid block in reality it's harder to spot than that might seem), a 109 is 3x9x10, a ju 88 is 5x15x20.  Running the minimum of what your eye is capable of in perfect situations.

It's why actual fighter pilots make such a big deal of radar even up close, it's why they make such a big deal of planform vs blade, etc.

 

You should not be able to see as clearly as is in these pictures.

 

 

[SharpeXB]

25 minutes ago, James DeSouza said:

You're supposed to have a good chance of losing track of things when you go heads down, it's legitimately the entire reason HUDs were invented.

Yeah when they say “lose sight, lose the fight” that means you should actually be able to lose sight. Like this. 

15 minutes ago, James DeSouza said:

This for instance.  From 1.8km to 10km you're looking at a dot of functionally similar size.

Agree, these look too pronounced at such ranges. 

[KoN]

I've just flown VR no more than 10 minutes  ago and well they looked half decent but this is in single thread DCS not MT as I have stutters and ghost effects in MT . 

And on a DisplayPort cable that's connects to the headset  @ near 4k resolution . Cant say this enough its a step in the right direction.

Your get your turn off - on button I'm sure . And this Dot method is only in open beta . 

[PeevishMonkey]

As for

В 23.10.2023 в 12:23, PeevishMonkey сказал:

statistical data for detection ranges of WWII aircraft

Instructions for air combat of fighter aircraft (IVBIA-45, USSR)

§ 27. The main ways to detect the enemy:

— visual observation: the single aircraft is detected as a point at a range of 3-5 km; ... at a distance of 1 km the aircraft appears as a distinct silhouette...
— visibility of anti-aircraft artillery shell explosions is 10-15 km.

[nuNce]

3 hours ago, PeevishMonkey said:

As for

Instructions for air combat of fighter aircraft (IVBIA-45, USSR)

§ 27. The main ways to detect the enemy:

— visual observation: the single aircraft is detected as a point at a range of 3-5 km; ... at a distance of 1 km the aircraft appears as a distinct silhouette...
— visibility of anti-aircraft artillery shell explosions is 10-15 km.

Which means that 10km for a modern fighter which is twice the size of a WWII aircraft is more than fair.

[PeevishMonkey]

What 

54 минуты назад, nuNce сказал:

a modern fighter which is twice the size of a WWII aircraft

do you mean? F-16 vs P-47?

 

[nuNce]

31 minutes ago, PeevishMonkey said:

What 

do you mean? F-16 vs P-47?

 

In that case you are looking at 1.5 times the length. In the case of larger jets like the F-15 or F-14 you get the value I'm talking about.

[SharpeXB]

5 hours ago, PeevishMonkey said:

As for

Instructions for air combat of fighter aircraft (IVBIA-45, USSR)

§ 27. The main ways to detect the enemy:

— visual observation: the single aircraft is detected as a point at a range of 3-5 km; ... at a distance of 1 km the aircraft appears as a distinct silhouette...
— visibility of anti-aircraft artillery shell explosions is 10-15 km.

So for WWII about 3 miles. Average range, not possible range. That’s actually about what I get on a 4K screen in 2.9. I could see them in 2.8 as well but it was just a little more difficult. Perhaps the 2.9 dots should be a little smaller but this seems to pass the believability test. 

[Why485]

18 hours ago, PeevishMonkey said:

As for

Instructions for air combat of fighter aircraft (IVBIA-45, USSR)

§ 27. The main ways to detect the enemy:

— visual observation: the single aircraft is detected as a point at a range of 3-5 km; ... at a distance of 1 km the aircraft appears as a distinct silhouette...
— visibility of anti-aircraft artillery shell explosions is 10-15 km.

To add more numbers to this, this is a graph from "Promise and Reality: Beyond Visual Range (BVR) Air to Air Combat" by (then)Lt Col Patrick Higby.

"Visual range depends on various factors: visual acuity, visual enhancements (e.g. binoculars or long-range imaging devices), visual inhibitors (e.g. clouds or dirt on the canopy), light conditions, target aspect, and target size. Colonel James Burton selected five nautical miles—in daylight—as his BVR limit for evaluating air-to-air missiles. Alternatively, the Gulf War Air Power Survey (GWAPS) BVR criteria depended upon whether the target was visually identified. Table 1 is adapted from Stevenson and shows the average distance (in nautical miles) at which different aircraft are visible during daytime, based on airframe size. Factors such as engine smoke for the F-4 are not included. The dotted line shows Burton’s five nautical mile criteria."

This matches the observations reported by other papers, and is the most succinct presentation between all the papers I've seen so I like using this graph. The actual WVR distance varies depending on the fighter, aspect, and many other conditions, but this is where the 5 mile rule of thumb comes from. It's a decent average. The size of the target is something ED is already taking into account, so I think they're already working towards this goal, though perhaps a bit too forgiving at the moment. I don't doubt WWII aircraft, being smaller, would be harder to see, especially if they were camouflaged and not polished aluminum like many late war props and Korean era jets.

"BVR spotting" is a thing that can happen, with anecdotal claims from Chuck Yeager (who had 20/10 vision) of being able to spot enemy aircraft from over 20 miles away, but from my own experience and from what I've read these tend to be exceptional circumstances created by specific lighting conditions which can cause either a silhouette or glint. For the purposes of DCS, for the purposes of getting a good baseline first, I'd rather not deal with these circumstances and not boost aircraft visibility at these distances.

As I've said many times before, I'm much more interested in ensuring that WVR means within visual range, and the discussions around strawmen built up to fight an imaginary desired "arcade spotting" 30 miles away are red herrings that should be dismissed from the conversation.

Edited October 27, 2023 by Why485

[TheFreshPrince]

That's a good post. The colour of the aircraft, aspect and the lighting are very important points. There's a reason why modern fighter jets are mostly grey with an unreflective paint and with a flat shape, they are very hard to spot (except in high aspect). What you cannot do is show all of the them as the same black dot. 

I took this picture of an airliner a few days ago because I thought of this thread, an E190AR according to flightradar at 35k ft. It was a bit offset so in total probably like 15km away (~9 miles). Despite being high aspect against a monotone background, the wings were invisible. The only reason why it was visible at all was the brightly illuminated, white and highly reflective fuselage. If this had been a military plane, I probably could have barely seen it. Also, this thing is more than 2x longer, 3x wider and 2x higher than the F-16, so a much higher volume in total. 

In DCS this would be a huge black dot right now. 

[Tippis]

On 10/25/2023 at 4:33 AM, SharpeXB said:

Well the goal here is to make DCS realistic, not “fun”.

This change makes DCS vastly more realistic. And more balanced. And more fun. So triple-win.

It will obviously remove a ton of advantages that people have been used to and argued to keep, but that's just how it goes.

[SharpeXB]

1 minute ago, Tippis said:

This change makes DCS vastly more realistic. And more balanced. And more fun. So triple-win.

It will obviously remove a ton of advantages that people have been used to and argued to keep, but that's just how it goes.

I sorta consider it “believable” and won’t try to evaluate “realistic”. As noted above the average range for seeing a fighter was about 5 miles. That was already true for 2.8 (in 4K) In 2.9 it’s just a little easier. How much easier would be realistic is debatable but within the real of believable here. 
What was certainly wrong with 2.8 was lower resolutions creating bigger dots. And VR still seems to suffer from these being too large. But this seems like a step in the right direction. 

[TheCoyoteHunter]

I'm on 1080p, in my opinion the dots are a step in the right direction.

I wouldn't mind if they were slightly smaller, like 50 to 75% of what they are now.

Thats my 2 bits on it anyway.

[Tippis]

20 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

I sorta consider it “believable” and won’t try to evaluate “realistic”.

Trust me. It's vastly more realistic. Why? Because it's adjustable and capable of compensating for hardware and setting differences. This means it is an actual simulation of spotting rather than the backwards nonsense DCS was saddled with before. It's really that simple: we now have simulation where we previously had none. This benefits everyone (well… except for the ones who want to keep their old advantages, but no-one cares about those people).

20 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

As noted above the average range for seeing a fighter was about 5 miles. That was already true for 2.8 (in 4K) In 2.9 it’s just a little easier. How much easier would be realistic is debatable but within the real of believable here. 

The problem was that, in 4K it was possible out to ten times that distance. You even showed this yourself in some of the past threads on the topic. It is almost functionally impossible for any spotting change in DCS to not be an improvement in terms of realism because of how poorly the old system worked.

20 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

What was certainly wrong with 2.8 was lower resolutions creating bigger dots.

Not really, no, since the dots didn't exist back then. People kept suggesting that this kind of solution wasn't needed. What you're talking about is how there was no good way to deal with sub-pixel model rendering, and especially not in a way that scaled equally across all kinds of display setups. With this new functionality, that is suddenly possible, and for the most part, it should mean that higher-resolution displays will end up showing the same sized blobs as the lower-resolution ones, and low-resolution displays will not see planes very far… nor will high-resolution displays. That was what even more certainly was wrong in earlier versions.

 

e: In a sense, it's a bit like how we now have a multi-layered system of shadows to deal with different edge cases, which when combined, create a reasonably smooth and sensible (and continuous) experience. Where a purely mathematical modelling breaks down, another layer based on different principles take over and continue to offer a sufficient substitute. What we had in terms of spotting in DCS was a very naïve and simplistic geometrical model of how to render 3D meshes to scale (and to lower detail over range to help performance). That is something very different from an actual simulation of perception, and to do that, we need a transitional mode that handles and covers up the ranges where spotting moves from difficult to actually impossible. That's where the new dots come in and offers a method to smoothly (and equitably) deal with the transition.

Edited October 26, 2023 by Tippis

[SharpeXB]

11 minutes ago, Tippis said:

The problem was that, in 4K it was possible out to ten times that distance.

No, it was the reverse. Lower resolutions created bigger dots that could be seen for crazy distances. 4K was essentially a disadvantage, personally I thought it seemed ok. 2.9 is ok too for me. 

14 minutes ago, Tippis said:

Not really, no, since the dots didn't exist back then.

Oh there were certainly dots used in 2.8. Check the history on it. 

[Tippis]

31 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

No, it was the reverse.

Nope. Lower resolutions created bigger splotches out to the edge of VWR, because there was a limit to how small they could be. Higher resolutions, by virtue of the same problem, got smaller splotches at the same range, which got lost in the background noise, but on the other hand had pixel planes show up at insane distances because, at that higher resolution, they had not yet hit the limit for how small they could be. You demonstrated this yourself in old posts arguing that there was no problem.

The fact that you could see them that far was the problem. The fact that you could and others couldn't was why you thought it wasn't one.

31 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Oh there were certainly dots used in 2.8

Not the type we have now, no. It is quite literally a 2.9 headline feature.

Again, you're confusing the “smallest drawable airplane splodge” with the massive improvement the spotting dots (re)introduce.

Edited October 26, 2023 by Tippis