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

[Tippis]

6 hours ago, Avenger31 said:

This is what we all want!

No. What we want is a mission option to force it on, so that players can't exploit the rendering engine quirks and get the old bajillion-nm spotting range back. Alternatively, a “true off” setting must necessarily create pop-in at fixed ranges, making new targets very easy to spot.

What you need to realise is that this is what he's really asking for: to be given back the unrealistic and unfair advantage he once thought he had over people who didn't have the same hardware setup he had. That is not what “we all” want. Quite the opposite. What any sensible player wants is a functional spotting system that works the same for everyone and doesn't arbitrarily hand out advantages to some but not to others. There should ultimately be no option at all for this — it should just be a universally applied part of the simulation. This is also why it should under no circumstances be confused with dot labels. Those work as an option because it's just a UI element, similar to the BDA window.

In this sense, the old spotting dots were actually better than the “true off” option he's envisioning, since at least those gave different advantages to different people. He doesn't want that back because he was shocked to learn that others had an advantage over him, and the system was only perfect and needed no adjustment as long as he believed that only the opposite was true.

[Avenger31]

26 minutes ago, Tippis said:

No. What we want is a mission option to force it on, so that players can't exploit the rendering engine quirks and get the old bajillion-nm spotting range back. Alternatively, a “true off” setting must necessarily create pop-in at fixed ranges, making new targets very easy to spot.

What you need to realise is that this is what he's really asking for: to be given back the unrealistic and unfair advantage he once thought he had over people who didn't have the same hardware setup he had. That is not what “we all” want. Quite the opposite. What any sensible player wants is a functional spotting system that works the same for everyone and doesn't arbitrarily hand out advantages to some but not to others. There should ultimately be no option at all for this — it should just be a universally applied part of the simulation. This is also why it should under no circumstances be confused with dot labels. Those work as an option because it's just a UI element, similar to the BDA window.

In this sense, the old spotting dots were actually better than the “true off” option he's envisioning, since at least those gave different advantages to different people. He doesn't want that back because he was shocked to learn that others had an advantage over him, and the system was only perfect and needed no adjustment as long as he believed that only the opposite was true.

Bro chill, have your spotting dots all over your place I want it off forever. I am playing mostly sp no mp, so dont know what you are taling about. When playing mission with 1000+ units all what i see on the ground is black boxes so i want option to turn it off. 
 

 

[Tippis]

51 minutes ago, Avenger31 said:

Bro chill, have your spotting dots all over your place I want it off forever. I am playing mostly sp no mp, so dont know what you are taling about.

The problem with turning them off (and with using the old implementation to a different degree) is that this removes the cap on spotting distance. In MP, this is a spectacularly bad idea since it lets some players view opponents at utterly ridiculous distances. Emphasis on “some”. In SP, it's merely a horribly bad idea, since it lets players view AI units at highly unrealistic distances.

The only way to fix that without using a dot solution is to set a hard cap — an a very short one — on rendering distance. With nothing to cover up the switch-over from not being visible, a target will pop in as it crosses that threshold, which will be very obvious and most likely draw your eye immediately to it. If you happen to be looking in vaguely the right direction with anything other than 1:1 zoom, suddenly a huge blob of airplane models will show up where nothing was before. You better bet you'll see that, clear as day, which sort of defeats the purpose. This will be somewhat resolution-dependent, of course, but that is also a very bad characteristic.

For MP, that resolution dependence and the ability to potentially spot planes out to max rendering distance would cause very different outcomes for different players and this would make it trivially exploitable and unbalanced from one player to the next. Indeed, it is exactly this exploitability that makes some poster champion for a return of that (failure of) functionality.

The old spotting dot solution was…ehm… naive, let's call it, as far as resolution dependence goes, which caused a related issue where lower resolutions got a significant advantage by having (optically) much larger dots than if you were playing at a high resolution. It made planes easier to spot than they should be. It was also sort of the low-fi counterbalance to the range advantage that high resolutions got. And again, this rubbed people the wrong way: it was (somehow) very unfair that lower resolutions got an advantage of their own, and not just the players who ran high-res. So, again, some are championing hard to make sure that low-res players lose their advantage, but high-res players get theirs back.

 

Spotting dots are a necessary part of fixing these issues. They let you have that hard cap without causing pop-in. They let you counteract different resolutions by having a unified dot size. They let you transition in and out of full-3D-model use in a controlled manner. At the moment, it's that second part that is causing issues, where the unified size isn't properly unified and ends up being too large for some. That is a fault in the tweaking and implementation. It is not a sufficient or even a remotely good reason to scrap the whole system and go back to the exploitable situation — especially not the one where only some could make use of that exploit. At least it was fairly exploitable when both ends of the spectrum got their particular advantage. Dumb, but fair.

Ultimately, dots are a natural part of a sensible and working perception simulation. This simulation should not be optional, especially not in an MP setting. If it were optional, the related MP option would not be to force it off, but to force it on, to ensure that everyone runs at the same level of realism. For SP, it doesn't matter as much, but again, the mission maker will most likely want to retain the option force it on, because they have designed their mission around that level of realism.

Edited October 8, 2024 by Tippis

[MAXsenna]

Bro chill, have your spotting dots all over your place I want it off forever. I am playing mostly sp no mp, so dont know what you are taling about. When playing mission with 1000+ units all what i see on the ground is black boxes so i want option to turn it off. 
 
 

You'll soon come the to conclusion that Tip and Sharp are neighbours.

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[Turbonix]

vor 5 Stunden schrieb MAXsenna:

You'll soon come the to conclusion that Tip and Sharp are neighbours.

 

[draconus]

Then add option to turn dots off with object rendering limits and it's done as a quick fix. No reason to keep ugly blobs because of some edge cases.

[SharpeXB]

15 hours ago, MAXsenna said:

You'll soon come the to conclusion that Tip and Sharp are neighbours.

Tippis has been on my ignore list for a long time

[Tippis]

6 hours ago, draconus said:

Then add option to turn dots off with object rendering limits and it's done as a quick fix. No reason to keep ugly blobs because of some edge cases.

This would yield pretty much the exact same thing. They'd pop-in at the max distance and most likely be ugly blobs at that stage since there is no mechanism for fading them in gracefully. Oh, and most likely we'd be back at the state of affairs where you want to run at strictly lower resolutions in MP.

Edited October 9, 2024 by Tippis

[draconus]

1 minute ago, Tippis said:

since there is no mechanism for fading them in gracefully.

Then it should be - there already is atmospheric perspective in DCS.

[Tippis]

46 minutes ago, draconus said:

Then it should be - there already is atmospheric perspective in DCS.

Oh, sure. I'm not saying there aren't any methods for it. There are, but those include the very things people are up in arms about and want gone at the moment due to the current state of the dots. I'd almost venture so far as to say it's simple (but that's always a dangerous word to use in relation to this topic):

1. Dots. Make sure they are large enough to cover up a target even in a high-res-high-zoom situation. You'll probably need 2±1px for that, and then you can controllably shrink it down to 1–2px and then fade it out. This is what they're going for right now, but it's… well… you know how it is right now.
2. Scaling. Once the target goes beyond a specific range where you determine it should have no details visible anyway, rapidly and forcibly shrink it down to 2±1px, and then fade it out to zero as the target passes beyond WVR. Requires a bit more coding, but offers a foundation for immense flexibility in tweaking as well as the foundation for a good tracking solution once further in than just outer-edge spotting.
3. Both. Fade in to dot; fade out to scale; sale into 1:1 size at gunfight range (to make sure HUD and fixed reticle cues to determine lead are accurate).

What isn't a viable option is to just rely on the raw model geometry + perspective trigonometry, because that's what brought us all the exploits and abuses that highlighted how broken spotting is (or was) in DCS at every point along the spectrum.

So it's not that there is no mechanism in all of programming to make them fade gracefully — it's that, at the moment, the one available to DCS is exactly the one everyone dislikes because of where we find ourselves in the iterative tweaking process. And that the best solution has a ton of political opposition, both within ED and within the community. For some reason.

[draconus]

52 minutes ago, Tippis said:

And that the best solution has a ton of political opposition, both within ED and within the community.

Because it's not the best or even acceptable. When everybody goes the wrong way it's time to rethink if you're riding the right way.

[Tippis]

35 minutes ago, draconus said:

Because it's not the best or even acceptable.

Sure it is.

Because nothing else solves the full spectrum of issues that fall into the panoply of “spotting”. We can't rely on pure geometry, because we have tried that and have seen the inequitable and unrealistic results this yields. It is an unacceptable solution from a realism standpoint, as well as from a general game balancing standpoint. Graphics settings should not unevenly and haphazardly dictate how the world is simulated. It is only the cheapest solution, but that puts it on the opposite scale from “good”, much less “best”.

We can't rely on just hard-capping that geometry because we even have a term for what happens, and it's not a good one. Pop-in is generally regarded as something that looks ugly, that draws the eye to itself (that's pretty antithetical to representing something that is defined by how hard it is to see), and that should never happen. It is also not acceptable, but at least it has some vague notion of realism to speak for it that puts it at… oh… “not worst”. But still definitely not “good” and nowhere close “best”.

Relying solely on dots has some significant limitations, in particular in how it doesn't gracefully transition into 3D models and how it doesn't solve the mid-distance issue with models fading in and out of visibility depending on settings. With sufficient tweaking, it might offer an acceptable solution to edge-of-visibility spotting, but it is lack-lustre for other range segments. It's good enough, potentially even “best” in its niche, but that niche is rather narrow.

 

There is a gap here that needs to be filled.

If you want to suggest that there is some other “best” or at least acceptable solution to fill that gap and also to solve the problem all the way out to the edge of visual range, then please describe it. But just going “nuh-uh” is a vapid statement.

Edited October 9, 2024 by Tippis

[Branimir76]

What's the wait???
Give us the old spotting dot back, and do your testing and tweaking somewhere else!

[Thamiel]

1 hour ago, Branimir76 said:

What's the wait???
Give us the old spotting dot back, and do your testing and tweaking somewhere else!

Without (beta) testers impossible to do. That is why you are all experiencing this wonderful test setting free of charge. You are all essential to this process. How dare you do misinterpret that appreciation as mistreatment?

[SparrowLT]

Sorry if i asked this before ... but those who feel spotting works.. what monitor size are you using?

 

im using a 23" screen ..  been thinking in upgrading to 27 or something like that for a long time and migh be critical

[MAXsenna]

Sorry if i asked this before ... but those who feel spotting works.. what monitor size are you using?
 
im using a 23" screen ..  been thinking in upgrading to 27 or something like that for a long time and migh be critical

30" 2560x1600. Dots off.

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[SharpeXB]

37 minutes ago, MAXsenna said:

Dots off.

There’s no way to turn the dots off

[draconus]

5 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

There’s no way to turn the dots off

Some report that the option works for them (not dots off, just "improved dots" implementation: off, meaning some previous version).

[SharpeXB]

9 minutes ago, draconus said:

Some report that the option works for them (not dots off, just "improved dots" implementation: off, meaning some previous version).

Yeah there’s never been a true Off option. Although the 2.8 version was basically invisible in 4K

Edited October 11, 2024 by SharpeXB

[MAXsenna]

There’s no way to turn the dots off

Well, then the dot is a single pixel for me. Could probably be faded out if possible. Guess it would need more pixels then. It's completely different from before, no boxes or nothing. In previous versions, I couldn't change settings or choose off. Now I can. Whether it works or not. When I get closer, I can easily see what it is, and which direction it flies.

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[Branimir76]

A single ground unit (BTR-80) sitting on the runway is as wide as the runway itself from 5nm distance. 
A convoy of units on the road is a huge black snake from a distance, much wider then the road itself.
There is no point in flying any kind of mission right now.

[Turbonix]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb Branimir76:

A single ground unit (BTR-80) sitting on the runway is as wide as the runway itself from 5nm distance. 
A convoy of units on the road is a huge black snake from a distance, much wider then the road itself.
There is no point in flying any kind of mission right now.

same for me. Honestly, ED, WTF??!

[Tippis]

4 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

There’s no way to turn the dots off

Objectively wrong.

4 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Yeah there’s never been a true Off option. Although the 2.8 version was basically invisible in 4K

Objectively wrong. Both of them.

You see, it's not the number of pixels that determine visibility — it's resolution in relation to distance.

Oh, and remember that time you used exactly that version to show that actually things could be seen just fine and therefore there was nothing wrong with spotting?

 

5 hours ago, SparrowLT said:

Sorry if i asked this before ... but those who feel spotting works.. what monitor size are you using?

To  be the annoying person who answers with a question, what do you mean by “works”?

Spotting has never worked in DCS because it has never had a functional and realistic simulation of perception. Spotting dots work(ish) but have a limited applicability and are currently in a bad place because they are trying to use them to solve a problem they are not suited for.

But spotting is dependent just a s much on your physical display setup as the graphics settings you've applied. They barely work for me (34" ultrawide) but a large part of that is having made sure that the monitor sits at a distance where individual pixels are just visible but will happily get smeared out if the contrast or ∆E* is too low.

[Bulldogg]

SMUDGE 12 O'CLOCK HIGH!!

The "improved" spotting dot in the last patch is a disaster for realistic VR - e.g. any beyond visual range work is ruined and most other a/c on a/c.  

ED please implement an option to REMOVE all spotting effect as before this last update.  Thanks.

[KoN]

Ed needs to test on most heads sets , not just crystal. 

Surly we have beta testers here .