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

[SharpeXB]

55 minutes ago, Silver_ said:

But that is corrected with prescription glasses, not software.

It’s like people want ED to be their eye doctor

[Bounti30]

Annoyed by the situation

it's a rollback to version 2.9.5.55918 for me

[Ebolaboy]

Reverb G2 VR.

Previous version dots were perfect. Latest version now has huge black squares that could either be bombers or parachutes. Please for the love of all that is holy, make this a user selectable option - at least for single player. The check box in the menus to disable the "improved" dots does nothing and the autoexec solution also does nothing. This absolutely ruins the game.  The pictures below do not fully capture how atrocious this looks live, in game. Please revert!

Edited October 4, 2024 by Ebolaboy

[dutchili]

I would say this calls for a hotfix.

[Tippis]

20 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Pixel dots are a terrible solution and should be relegated to dot labels. A single pixel is too large for a faraway target and pixels appear bigger at lower resolutions. My vote is to scrap the whole idea.

And replace it with what? Describe a mechanism that fulfils all these needs:

• It must display the smallest thing possible.
• It must display equitably across a wide array of display types and resolutions.
• Its appearance must be tied to actual distance, not resolution.
• Its appearance must be unaffected by FoV.
• It must not pop in.
• Its being turned into a fully-featured 3D model must be tied to resolution (and FoV), not distance.
• It must not blink out.

Come up with a scheme that does this, that is not some variation of a dot solution. Unless and until you can, all you're asking for is the return of your preferred cheat and exploit because you can no longer hack it when you don't have that advantage over others.

20 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Let’s go back to before this

If you want to cheat, just cheat. Don't beg the devs to do it for you. Because that's what you're asking for here.

And before you even go there, don't beg for a cheat on the back of some appeal to realism, when what you're asking for is by very definition the most unrealistic “solution” that must inherently affect different players unequally. If you don't want a simulation, may I suggest Afterburner Climax as your next flying game of choice? It even has a cheat menu built in to cater to your needs.

15 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

It’s the same “logic” that was behind model enlargement

It really isn't. But you wouldn't know this  because you have no idea what model enlargement does, how it works, how it looks, or what it's even for.

Edited October 4, 2024 by Tippis

[waterman]

They look exactly like kite surfers from where i live in Australia .

Its coming up to 1000 complaints and replies to this thread you just have to be patient.

Maybe they will make them into coloured balloons and just get rid of the Aircraft for ever when you hit your First 1000 !

Edited October 4, 2024 by waterman

[Midair]

I fly in VR and I hate this horrible squares. Since last update it's impossible to disable this s*** . Can you please hotfix that quickly? I don't want a phone game, I want a realistic flight simulator! Thank you.

[Midair]

Hi,

I'm very upset about your so called "improved" spotting dots. It's horrible in VR and for those who want the best immersion possible like me it's a big step backward to develop such things. DCS is a flight simulator or a stupid shooting game for almost blind people?

Since last update we don't have the choice to remove this awfull thing and I prefer to stop flying and wait for your team to Hotfix this.

Thank you.

[edudix]

2 hours ago, Ebolaboy said:

Reverb G2 VR.

Previous version dots were perfect. Latest version now has huge black squares that could either be bombers or parachutes. Please for the love of all that is holy, make this a user selectable option - at least for single player. The check box in the menus to disable the "improved" dots does nothing and the autoexec solution also does nothing. This absolutely ruins the game.  The pictures below do not fully capture how atrocious this looks live, in game. Please revert!

 

Bufff amazing pic man!!! Unplayable game like this

How can we simulate in this way!?

 

Edited October 4, 2024 by edudix

[Turbonix]

All i hear in this thread is about spotting dots. Spotting dots size, spotting dots render distance, spotting dots color, spotting dots fading, spotting dots shining trough clouds and dust, etc...

I and many others don´t want them at all.

Why isn´t it possible to turn them off completely for those who don´t like the concept at all?
Is this just a bug, or is this really intentional and meant to be an "improved" feature?

At this point all the effort and and hundreds of hours of free time we´ve put in learning and improving our skills to find other objects in the sim by simply using visuals, GCI, AWACS, Radar and Datalink are just meaningless now.
Most military planes, vehicles, equipment and personnel have some sort of a camouflaged appearance, either against the sky or against the ground. They literally DON´T want to be spotted easily.

At the current state of this ridiculous spotting mechanic, i just feel disappointed and even f****d by the devs.
It feels like being robbed by the own bank.

We have spent lots of money for this game over the past years.
For me it was approx. 1200$+ just for game content. Not considered hardware and peripherals worth 3000$+, which I mainly just bought end of last year just to enjoy this game best possible.
And I even think that i´m just an average DCS player. 

Why does ED mess up its own work and this highly sophisticated real world simulation that much, with such an unrealistic and for me and many others game breaking "inconvenience"?
 

Edited October 4, 2024 by Turbonix

[TCKnight]

But could some of the developers answer us? rollback for me.

Edited October 4, 2024 by TCKnight

[Bounti30]

what is shocking is this silence, it is the lack of respect towards the community. It is made up of enthusiasts who spend their money.
I don't understand ED. We need answers and not just a ''we are working on''

[Avenger31]

I just can’t believe how much ED team is ignorant on this topic

[BIGNEWY]

57 minutes ago, Bounti30 said:

what is shocking is this silence, it is the lack of respect towards the community. It is made up of enthusiasts who spend their money.
I don't understand ED. We need answers and not just a ''we are working on''

 

13 minutes ago, Avenger31 said:

I just can’t believe how much ED team is ignorant on this topic

We made it clear in the patch notes we will be working on a system to account for various vr devices and tweak dots again, so not silent, please read the notes again. 

[Tippis]

1 hour ago, Turbonix said:

Why isn´t it possible to turn them off completely for those who don´t like the concept at all?
Is this just a bug, or is this really intentional and meant to be an "improved" feature?

Because DCS tries to be a simulator and dots are part of that simulation — specifically the simulation of the pilot's perception. It's a cognitive process that can't be adequately represented by just throwing polygons into the renderer.

It's a bit like asking to turn off drag: it may be troublesome with the effects it has on your flying, but if you could turn it off, you would suddenly be playing a very different game to everyone else with advantages that they can't have (and you shouldn't have). The infinite-energy AI planes are bad enough. Imagine if opposing players could choose to play by similar rules.

1 hour ago, Turbonix said:

At this point all the effort and and hundreds of hours of free time we´ve put in learning and improving our skills to find other objects in the sim by simply using visuals, GCI, AWACS, Radar and Datalink are just meaningless now.

They'd be even more meaningless if we were to return to the previous state where some players could see planes rendered out to 40nm and others had issues seeing them well within visual range. No amount of stealth or sensor supremacy or clever paint schemes would help you — the other guy could see you before your radar could even resolve his contact, all because of his particular hardware and setting setup. All your skills are for naught because the other guy paid to see you.

Indeed this is why some posters are so eager to clutch at the ups and downs of this tweaking period as an argument to bring the old system back: because they want their unrealistic and nonsensical advantage back.

1 hour ago, Turbonix said:

We have spent lots of money for this game over the past years.

So have many others. That is not a factor in whether or not the game should strive for accurate simulation in the realm of spotting.

[Michal]

New big dots dissapears at certain zoom level or head movement. I play in 2D with track IR. Please revert this to last version. This is terrible.

[Avenger31]

1 hour ago, BIGNEWY said:

 

We made it clear in the patch notes we will be working on a system to account for various vr devices and tweak dots again, so not silent, please read the notes again. 

Something that worked one update before (to be able to turn spotting dots off) shouldnt be so big deal to give it us back by one hotfix. 

[seven10]

1 hour ago, BIGNEWY said:

 

We made it clear in the patch notes we will be working on a system to account for various vr devices and tweak dots again, so not silent, please read the notes again. 

This is all well and good, but it would be excellent if for the time being we could at least be able to turn these on and off. In the future it would also be great if mission makers and server owners could force these off like how labels are managed.

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, Turbonix said:

I and many others don´t want them at all.

Why isn´t it possible to turn them off completely for those who don´t like the concept at all?

This! There needs to be a true off setting. And that needs to be mission/ server enforceable. 

[Turbonix]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb Tippis:

t's a bit like asking to turn off drag: it may be troublesome with the effects it has on your flying, but if you could turn it off, you would suddenly be playing a very different game to everyone else with advantages that they can't have (and you shouldn't have). The infinite-energy AI planes are bad enough. Imagine if opposing players could choose to play by similar rules.

No my request is actually the opposite. I don´t want to use this visual aid feature. That would give me in fact a disadvantage over others.
I simply don´t want to get bothered by these "pixel failures" in my VR headset during flight.

I can understand that people in 2D, especially on higher resolution and antialiasing methods activated, need some aid in this regard. I was on 2D with headtracker on a 1440p monitor for years.
But in my Quest3 headset i usually have a resolution 1.3 -1.4 with DLSS or just DLAA depending on the situation. Single pixels aren´t that small compared to 2d high res.
I think that pure contact visualisation would be sufficient for me.
 

vor 1 Stunde schrieb Tippis:

They'd be even more meaningless if we were to return to the previous state where some players could see planes rendered out to 40nm and others had issues seeing them well within visual range. No amount of stealth or sensor supremacy or clever paint schemes would help you — the other guy could see you before your radar could even resolve his contact, all because of his particular hardware and setting setup. All your skills are for naught because the other guy paid to see you.

Indeed this is why some posters are so eager to clutch at the ups and downs of this tweaking period as an argument to bring the old system back: because they want their unrealistic and nonsensical advantage back.

But now it is exactly like that. Just an example: I can clearly see the dot of a contact way before the F4´s radar can even get a brick in the scope, no matter what i tell jester to set the radar up.

The "advantage" is now mandatory there for everybody. 
If somebody wants to use it, fine.
I don´t want it! 

there should be three options to choose from in the main menu setting:

- big and blobby as it is right now to help on 2D (worst realism for VR)
- smaller dots compared to above
- OFF

I can see that making the spotting equal for everybody on every system is hard to accomplish
so let there be help for the ones who need,
but don´t force it on others who are happy without.

Edited October 4, 2024 by Turbonix

[SharpeXB]

22 minutes ago, Turbonix said:

there should be three options to choose from in the main menu setting:

- big and blobby as it is right now to help on 2D (worst realism for VR)
- smaller dots compared to above
- OFF

These would all need to be mission/server settings. Dot labels are effectively the same thing and are mission enforced, the same logic would apply to spotting dots. I think having this extra setting needlessly complicates the game a divides up the player base though. It would be better to get rid of spotting dots alltogether.

[Rufuz64]

2 hours ago, Tippis said:

Indeed this is why some posters are so eager to clutch at the ups and downs of this tweaking period as an argument to bring the old system back: because they want their unrealistic and nonsensical advantage back.

The only advantage in the old system was when people played at low resolution. Let them. They can play at 800x600 if they're happy with it...

[Tippis]

56 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

This! There needs to be a true off setting. And that needs to be mission/ server enforceable. 

Other way around. There needs to be a mission-enforceable on setting so make sure people don't try to get their old 40nm spotting advantage back.

 

54 minutes ago, Turbonix said:

No my request is actually the opposite. I don´t want to use this visual aid feature. That would give me in fact a disadvantage over others.

That's just it: it wouldn't. You'd be relying on rendering limits alone, and you'd now have to choose between one of two options:

• Unlimited and uncontrollable spotting range. Planes would be rendered out to maximum distance and it would be entirely reliant on your hardware setup whether you could see them at 160nm, 100nm, or a “mere” 40nm. Note that all of those ranges have at the very least one zero too much in them. But no matter what, you'd get hugely unrealistic results that applied unevenly and inequitably across the player base, which people would exploit to the fullest degree.
• Massive pop-in. If you enforce a maximum rendering distance that is more in line with how far out you should be able to see planes, the moment they cross that boundary, they will pop in and be very obvious. For some. Again, hardware and settings dependent, and people would exploit this ability to choose visibility to the fullest degree.

Those are both bad outcomes.

54 minutes ago, Turbonix said:

I can understand that people in 2D, especially on higher resolution and antialiasing methods activated, need some aid in this regard.

Everyone does, because the goal is to create a unified level of visibility, and unless you are exactly on the reference spec that decides what that visibility should look like, you will need some help to tone up or tone down or tone sideways how the dots appear. But they'd still have to be dots, because that is pretty much the definition of what we are trying to recreate here — if they're not dots, it has failed as an implementation, irrespective of whether they're rendered as actual dots, or if they are using 3D models that are forced to appear as nothing but dots.

54 minutes ago, Turbonix said:

But now it is exactly like that. Just an example: I can clearly see the dot of a contact way before the F4´s radar can even get a brick in the scope, no matter what i tell jester to set the radar up.

And without this kind of solution, it would be even worse. We know this for a fact because we've had it. The only difference is that it wasn't universally known how bad it was, so only some “in the know” could take advantage (and you can now see them clamouring for the return of that advantage, bolstered by the criticism against how the much-needed fix is developing).

54 minutes ago, Turbonix said:

The "advantage" is now mandatory there for everybody. 

That is how it should be.

Now, granted, you could argue for having the ability to turn off that advantage, but that option must not come with an advantage of its own, nor should it be something that can be enforced. Quite the opposite — parity should be enforceable. If a mission maker doesn't care, then yes, they could allow you to cripple yourself but there should not be an option to arbitrarily and uncontrollably give some people an advantage that others can't have.

Note that I'm not saying you should be happy with how that advantage looks, but that is a separate matter.

54 minutes ago, Turbonix said:

I can see that making the spotting equal for everybody on every system is hard to accomplish

Honestly, it really isn't.

But it has a couple of requirements that, for a variety of reasons, the advantage-hunters and ED don't really like, and either try to kill at every opportunity or try to avoid implementing.

• It still needs to be a dot system for the actual spotting part.
• It needs to understand that spotting is only one part of a whole, from just beyond BVR all the way into faceplanting into the other plane's engine exhausts.
• As such, it can't be one system. One size does not fit all.
• It needs to be ok to borrow from other games.
• It needs to yield results that are very different from how things have historically looked in DCS (because DCS is notorious for how wrong it has always gotten this).
• It needs to match actual real-world data.

Only the last part is actually hard, in part because the data itself is disparate and hard to come by. Or, well… the fourth point is also politically difficult, but that's when the big-boy pants need to come on.

 

26 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

These would all need to be mission/server settings.

No. Only one of them need that: enforce on, or player's choice. The on option is for PvP- and realism-oriented missions; the player's choice for when it doesn't matter. And ultimately, it doesn't need to be a choice at all, same as how you can't turn off other parts of the world simulation (yes, yes, I know, wake turbulence yadda yadda…).

 

5 minutes ago, Rufuz64 said:

The only advantage in the old system was when people played at low resolution.

No. There was also the advantage of when people played at high resolution.

One got ease of spotting; the other got spotting range. It was a bit of a sliding scale between those two, and you could pick your favourite, but both ends of the spectrum were horrible and silly.

It was a late discovery that the much more intuitive and obvious high-res advantage was pseudo-balanced against a different low-res advantage, and some people were mightily upset to learn that some players had an advantage over them when they thought that they were the one with an advantage over those peons.

Edited October 4, 2024 by Tippis

[TCKnight]

3 ore fa, BIGNEWY ha scritto:

 

We made it clear in the patch notes we will be working on a system to account for various vr devices and tweak dots again, so not silent, please read the notes again. 

We players read all the notes, we are greedy for patches. So, to understand, we should keep this crap, which no one asked you, for how long?. The patch should improve, not make the situation worse. But haven't you experienced this nonsense that you have released? We just need a hotfix, like for the f10 map, to disable them. Thanks

[Parkour]

3 hours ago, BIGNEWY said:

 

We made it clear in the patch notes we will be working on a system to account for various vr devices and tweak dots again, so not silent, please read the notes again. 

So you consider the inability to turn OFF the Improved Spotting Dots as "working as intended"???  As I've explained in detail, the OPTIONS > GAMEPLAY > Improved Spotting Dots is currently broken. There is no difference in the size or when they activate when you set this to either ON or OFF.

This is unbelievable. Hotfix this nightmare.