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

[Tippis]

You really need to stop using jpeg since it heavily distorts the visibility of pixel-level details.

[MAXsenna]

You really need to stop using jpeg since it heavily distorts the visibility of pixel-level details.

It changed from png to jpeg by default in 2.9 I think. At least it did for me.

Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, MAXsenna said:

It changed from png to jpeg by default in 2.9 I think. At least it did for me.

Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk
 

You can select from several formats in the options. Truth is the spotting issues are pretty difficult to convey with static compressed screenshots but it’s all we have that we can show. And it’s important to post examples even if they aren’t perfect. The other file formats like .bmp aren’t much better than .jpg and they’re too large to upload here. Some of the dots which appear gigantic on live gameplay and which are also much easier to see because they’re moving are just about invisible on a still screenshot. 

[Tippis]

31 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

You can select from several formats in the options. Truth is the spotting issues are pretty difficult to convey with static compressed screenshots but it’s all we have that we can show.

And that is exactly why you shouldn't use jpeg as your format. It almost makes it seem like you're running with dot labels on. PNG is the way.

[PeevishMonkey]

Before the "dot battle 2.8 vs 2.9" I'm interested in - was in 2.8 difference in distance of visibility depending of size of aircraft?

[MAXsenna]

5 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

You can select from several formats in the options.

Which is why I wrote that it changed automatically, (like many other settings were reset), from png to jpeg for me after the 2.9 update. Maybe it even did for you?  

5 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

The other file formats like .bmp aren’t much better than .jpg and they’re too large to upload here.

Well, go ahead and choose png then ane and just drag and drop them here. I've never had issues with the size of screenshots. 

NB! Anyone else but me, that have noticed pasting screenshots in the forum now defaults to "plain text" like before, so we don't get the "null" anymore? And editing post with pictures is also like before. Didn't notice this in the newsletter or changelog. Did it pass me by? @BIGNEWY @NineLine

[Why485]

1 hour ago, PeevishMonkey said:

was in 2.8 difference in distance of visibility depending of size of aircraft?

No, a one pixel dot was drawn on every dynamic object in the world as long as the object was being rendered, which depending on the model's max render distance and your FOV could be as far as 40 miles away. That was the entire system. It was very simple.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Why485

[SharpeXB]

27 minutes ago, MAXsenna said:

I've never had issues with the size of screenshots

You can run out of your allotted size here and then have to go clean things out. The format of the screenshots doesn’t really have much to do with the topic anyways. Seeing aircraft at 20-30 miles is bogus no matter how you screen grab it, frankly it looks much more pronounced on the live game than it does here. And even the poor jpgs show how easily seen other aircraft are without the dots, just imagine how much better those look live. 

[Tippis]

7 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

You can run out of your allotted size here and then have to go clean things out. The format of the screenshots doesn’t really have much to do with the topic anyways.

It sort of does when you're tying to point out problems on a per-pixel detail level and the format you choose inherently creates noise on that level and therefore might show flaws that don't exist, or fail to properly represent other flaws that do.

 

9 hours ago, PeevishMonkey said:

Before the "dot battle 2.8 vs 2.9" I'm interested in - was in 2.8 difference in distance of visibility depending of size of aircraft?

In addition to what Why485 said, the difference was also a combination of the render distance (which basically set a hard cap on the drawing), the FoV (sort of set a variable cap on how small an object could be represented) but also the screen resolution. It was in large part the interplay between the two latter, and especially the engine's over-eagerness to start drawing dots at even the slightest hint of potential visibility, that caused issues.

Something that, at a given FoV and resolution would be a sub-pixel object would still be rendered because it was under the hard-cap drawing distance, and it would have to be significantly smaller than that pixel for the engine to just say that, no, it shouldn't bother with it. That's how we arrive at the situation where lower resolutions would show contacts more clearly: the pixel was larger, the engine was very keen on still drawing sub-pixel objects (thereby ballooning their size to the minimum available: 1px), and with the ability to zoom, it was rarely the case that a given contact was small enough to be ignored until it hit the hard-cap maximum range.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Tippis

[PeevishMonkey]

According all you told above, I assume that return to the full analog of 2.8 by turning ON or OFF any settings in 2.9 impossible in principle.

[SharpeXB]

3 minutes ago, PeevishMonkey said:

According all you told above, I assume that return to the full analog of 2.8 by turning ON or OFF any settings in 2.9 impossible in principle.

According to ED turning the improved spotting dots Off in 2.9 reverts the feature to the way it works in 2.8. When I try this myself that’s indeed what I see. 

[Tippis]

6 minutes ago, PeevishMonkey said:

According all you told above, I assume that return to the full analog of 2.8 by turning ON or OFF any settings in 2.9 impossible in principle.

Even back in 2.8, to truly turn the dot off, you'd have to inject something into the rendering pipeline to suppress the dot drawing.

Why485 should be able to explain how his mod works in more detail, but I think – and he'll have to correct me if I'm wrong – that it mostly just adjusted the dot to be a lot more reasonable because to go deeper would not just be tricky but trigger all kinds of tampering alerts.

[Why485]

2 hours ago, PeevishMonkey said:

According all you told above, I assume that return to the full analog of 2.8 by turning ON or OFF any settings in 2.9 impossible in principle.

As far as I can tell, putting the new setting to off renders dots with exactly the same logic as it did in 2.8.

[SharpeXB]

Now that this has been introduced into the 2.9 Stable version (still WIP) it’s worth noting again that it’s totally exploitable in MP since either option can be chosen without restriction.
- 1080p players can see aircraft 30+ miles away by selecting Off.

- Any player can lower their resolution to see bigger dots and aircraft at crazy distances by selecting Off 

- VR players can see huge dots by selecting On

The only people who are penalized are VR or high res screen players who don’t want to see unsightly unrealistic dots by selecting Off.

This doesn’t seem like a very good solution.  

 

Edited November 30, 2023 by SharpeXB

[Tippis]

13 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

This doesn’t seem like a very good solution.

Everyone gets to pick their preferred solution. No-one is left out. Seems about as good as it can be.

Not to mention that we're still on the first iteration and it has already delivered vastly improved visuals and realism if you set it up that way.

[Talisman_VR]

15 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Now that this has been introduced into the 2.9 Stable version (still WIP) it’s worth noting again that it’s totally exploitable in MP since either option can be chosen without restriction.
- 1080p players can see aircraft 30+ miles away by selecting Off.

- Any player can lower their resolution to see bigger dots and aircraft at crazy distances by selecting Off 

- VR players can see huge dots by selecting On

The only people who are penalized are VR or high res screen players who don’t want to see unsightly unrealistic dots by selecting Off.

This doesn’t seem like a very good solution.  

 

 

Very much agree with this.

Happy landings,

Talisman

[Mivina]

These UFOs are hideous and are absolutely ruining the pvp experience, and client-side settings will do nothing to fix this.

[KoN]

Is there not a option for server hosts to turn new spotting off . Before hosting so that every one is on same song sheet . 

[Tippis]

1 hour ago, KoN said:

Is there not a option for server hosts to turn new spotting off . Before hosting so that every one is on same song sheet . 

The problem with the old system was that no-one was on the same song sheet to begin with, so forcing the spotting off wouldn't actually achieve that goal — it would just lead to a different kind of “I don't know what the other guy sees” than if you let the clients choose.

To an extent, you'd probably want the exact opposite: the ability to force it on so you can at least be a bit more certain of the outcome.

[peakfirearm]

On 10/19/2023 at 7:57 PM, DrSlaughterRex said:

Anyone who says that the dots should have been reduced is thinking in the wrong direction. Dots were nigh impossible to see at 1440p.

Yeah, I'm using TIR on 1440p 32in and it was impossible to spot a single gray pixel against any kind of background in 2.8. 

[KoN]

On 12/4/2023 at 1:37 AM, Tippis said:

The problem with the old system was that no-one was on the same song sheet to begin with, so forcing the spotting off wouldn't actually achieve that goal — it would just lead to a different kind of “I don't know what the other guy sees” than if you let the clients choose.

To an extent, you'd probably want the exact opposite: the ability to force it on so you can at least be a bit more certain of the outcome.

DCS is in a bit of a pickle then . It's a shame that ED have not kept up with the change in hardware and the new technology that has been thrown into PC gaming. The spotting debate has gone on for years in DCS . And I mean years . 

[JCTherik]

On 12/6/2023 at 12:23 AM, KoN said:

DCS is in a bit of a pickle then . It's a shame that ED have not kept up with the change in hardware and the new technology that has been thrown into PC gaming. The spotting debate has gone on for years in DCS . And I mean years . 

And it will continue for years to come, since several years ago the community has decided to throw away scaling based on a bad experience with the then current implementation. 

The render distance of that dot needs to be reduced a lot, it shouldn't really exist past around 15 miles. For longer distances, an occasional sun glare should be the only way of spotting. At 10-15 miles, a dot would make sense, and in 3-10 miles the best solution would be a gentle scaling.

Obviously the scaling shouldn't be applied to zoomed objects seen through a targeting pod.

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, JCTherik said:

and in 3-10 miles the best solution would be a gentle scaling.

No because you’d see ridiculous stuff like this. That’s an example of what silly Serfoss scaling would look like in DCS

 

 

[Tippis]

2 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

No because you’d see ridiculous stuff like this. That’s an example of what silly Serfoss scaling would look like in DCS

 

 

No you wouldn't, because that's not how scaling works. You'd know this if you had actually tested it or read up on it or done anything other than make up guesses based on pure imagination.

[JCTherik]

7 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

No because you’d see ridiculous stuff like this. That’s an example of what silly Serfoss scaling would look like in DCS

 

 

It's a strawman argument, but I'd still rather have that than an airplane that's a clearly visible UFO at 20 miles but an invisible shimmer at 5 miles, since we're talking about looking ridiculous.