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

[draconus]

13 minutes ago, Tippis said:

Your dislike for proven systems that solve this whole problem is not sufficient reason to keep DCS in the dark ages.

Your blind faith in the old tech that doesn't fix anything as "the only solution" is interesting too.

[Tippis]

5 minutes ago, draconus said:

Your blind faith in the old tech that doesn't fix anything as "the only solution" is interesting too.

It fixes exactly what it is supposed to fix, and while the original is old:ish, it's still aeons ahead of the even more antiquated system DCS is trying to use and iterate on. That system has been abandoned by everyone for very good reasons.

If you can come up with something more feasible and easy to implement, please elaborate.

The fact that you call this "the only solution" in response to a post that explains that it isn't is interesting too...

[BIGNEWY]

folks please stay on topic. 

thank you 

[Bounti30]

I am still in the testing phase on differents distances, maps, weathers, objects and planes.
It seems that option 1 is the closest to what we could see in 2.8
For the rest I continue to try.
But in any case, thank you ED we can make our choice

Great job

 

[SparrowLT]

Dont know if there were big changes but now in Enigma/Heatblur im spotting way more aircraft than before.. not just dots.. can even see rendered aircraft under 5nm..or at least more than a pixel

[MoleUK]

On 12/30/2024 at 1:04 AM, SparrowLT said:

Dont know if there were big changes but now in Enigma/Heatblur im spotting way more aircraft than before.. not just dots.. can even see rendered aircraft under 5nm..or at least more than a pixel

Yea I do wonder if more tweaks were done in terms of transition points, feels great right now regardless.

Edited December 31, 2024 by MoleUK

[YoYo]

After a week of fun I will say and repeat as a VR user. Great job. I have set to AUTO for Quest (although I use quite a large upscaling to about 3100x3100pxt by eye, so the resolution is quite large), I didn't even need to check other options, but now everything is ok. Targets in the air and on the ground scale great and it finally started to look normal and realistic. Zooming the image Im able to see the target from quite a distance (spyglass) but this is ok with such a large zoom for VR, but without it it appears in the range of 10-6 nm, which is realistic. For those who don't like Auto - we still have the option of 1x or 2x pixel or OFF so everyone should find the right option for themselves. Big thanks ED for this work, the end of the year is 100% satisfaction in this respect :)! 

I'll add that I've been quite critical of the changes for people in VR that have come over the last year and I've complained quite a bit and the topic is very familiar to me, so all the more respect to ED for this work !

 

Edited January 1 by YoYo

[LizardKingYB]

I play in 2D and the last changes better but it depends on our options. My PC in MSAA 4x couldn't normally draw far clouds and in DLAA weird ghosting and TPOD don't see the heat signature of targets... But contacts are now visible Better.

[PawlaczGMD]

Feedback from me on Pimax Crystal : 2 pixels setting works well. I would say it's close to ideal. The dots are not too large like a few updates ago when everyone cried about huge bricks, but also not impossible to spot at 1 pixel. I can comfortably spot fighter targets at a few (<5) nm, but not beyond that. 

Auto seems to be the same as before this update: Extremely hard to spot for me. I will be using 2 pixels for now.

[Lixma 06]

One unintended consequence of the dots...

I set up a mission against a bunch of bare-metal Mig-15s. Without dots you can spot/track them reasonably well against the ground as long as they're in sun-light. But with dots they are effectively camouflaged until they are close enough for the rest of the airframe to peek from under the dot.

[SharpeXB]

2 minutes ago, Lixma 06 said:

One unintended consequence of the dots...

I set up a mission against a bunch of bare-metal Mig-15s. Without dots you can spot/track them reasonably well against the ground as long as they're in sun-light. But with dots they are effectively camouflaged until they are close enough for the rest of the airframe to peek from under the dot.

Yeah that’s a pretty obvious weakness to using dots. Without them you can easily see bright aircraft against dark backgrounds like the water. The whole system is a very poor solution IMO. 

[Parkour]

@BIGNEWY and Eagle Dynamics.  Thank you for adding the ability to turn off the spotting dots for VR users.

My squad and I have been flying again since the patch and we love it again. We have actually started buying modules as well.  You can actually see the number increase of players again in SteamDB player counts since this patch as I'm sure many other VR users have returned.

Thank you for listening to me rant and be a squeaky wheel. Thank you for giving us our immersion back.

Parkour out.

 

[draconus]

1 hour ago, Parkour said:

we love it again

Time to change avatar I guess?

[BIGNEWY]

1 hour ago, Parkour said:

@BIGNEWY and Eagle Dynamics.  Thank you for adding the ability to turn off the spotting dots for VR users.

My squad and I have been flying again since the patch and we love it again. We have actually started buying modules as well.  You can actually see the number increase of players again in SteamDB player counts since this patch as I'm sure many other VR users have returned.

Thank you for listening to me rant and be a squeaky wheel. Thank you for giving us our immersion back.

Parkour out.

 

Great to hear you have seen improvement, we hope you enjoy your flights. 

best regards

bignewy

[speed-of-heat]

On 1/12/2025 at 9:42 PM, SharpeXB said:

Yeah that’s a pretty obvious weakness to using dots. Without them you can easily see bright aircraft against dark backgrounds like the water. The whole system is a very poor solution IMO. 

actually it just needs one change ...luminosity to reflect that  (pun intended) functionally changing the colour of the dot based upon the albedo between the observer and the target so if its shiny and over dark make the dot white... 

[SharpeXB]

5 hours ago, speed-of-heat said:

actually it just needs one change ...luminosity to reflect that  (pun intended) functionally changing the colour of the dot based upon the albedo between the observer and the target so if its shiny and over dark make the dot white... 

A flaw that’s inherent to dots is that they aren’t able to show the target color. They can’t show the difference between a light colored aircraft against the sea or a dark camouflaged one against terrain. In some cases (without dots) you can practically ID a target by its color alone. 

[okopanja]

1 minute ago, SharpeXB said:

A flaw that’s inherent to dots is that they aren’t able to show the target color. They can’t show the difference between a light colored aircraft against the sea or a dark camouflaged one against terrain. In some cases (without dots) you can practically ID a target by its color alone. 

Luminosity(as e.g. a glint of Sun reflection as I posted earlier) can play a great difference when it comes to the ranges at which you can spot the thing.

This can be best seen in morning or eveming if airplane is positioned so it reflects light toward observer. There is no way you can miss this, looks like a very bright star in sky.

[SharpeXB]

11 minutes ago, okopanja said:

Luminosity(as e.g. a glint of Sun reflection as I posted earlier) can play a great difference when it comes to the ranges at which you can spot the thing.

This can be best seen in morning or eveming if airplane is positioned so it reflects light toward observer. There is no way you can miss this, looks like a very bright star in sky.

It would be great if the game could do reflections like that in a realistic manner. But again dots wouldn’t be able to do this.

Edited January 16 by SharpeXB

[speed-of-heat]

42 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

A flaw that’s inherent to dots is that they aren’t able to show the target color. They can’t show the difference between a light colored aircraft against the sea or a dark camouflaged one against terrain. In some cases (without dots) you can practically ID a target by its color alone. 

A dot is a pixel… or a combination of pixels, the can literally be any colour that can be produced on a monitor or headset… but let at least start with something that improves the situation.

 

 

[SharpeXB]

1 minute ago, speed-of-heat said:

A dot is a pixel… or a combination of pixels, the can literally be any colour that can be produced on a monitor or headset… but let at least start with something that improves the situation.

Yeah but at this stage they’re just simplistic in the extreme. They’re just dot labels. You’d have to make the label actually read the aircraft livery or something. On a monitor you don’t need the dot in order to see the aircraft model anyways. Why make the dot livery-colored when you can just look at the aircraft livery itself? Heck some aircraft have different colors on each side. When they go inverted over the sea they stand out really well. A dot can’t show target aspect like that either. 

[speed-of-heat]

Ffs…

Why exactly are you here, you don’t want the feature just turn it off, for others it’s useful

And of course it can’t it’s not meant to do everything it’s meant to allow visibility

 

Your problem is with … physics…

[SharpeXB]

4 minutes ago, speed-of-heat said:

Why exactly are you here,

Providing feedback, which is what this topic is all about. 

6 minutes ago, speed-of-heat said:

just turn it off

That’s not an ideal solution to the whole problem either. More like a “cop out” if you ask me. A good solution would simply be a default in the game. 

[Tippis]

8 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Yeah but at this stage they’re just simplistic in the extreme. They’re just dot labels.

They are very obviously not dot labels and they can already do the thing you claim they can't.

The problem is that you don't understand what the various dots we have are, what they represent, or how they work. Nor do you understand how monitors work. It's these technical details that keep tripping you up when you say that the system you claim you wanted but then didn't but then it was fine but then it wasn't doesn't work like you want to. It's because you keep wanting new things, and none of them actually relate to the issue at hand, and none of the arise from any of the technical aspects you complain about. And you always complain. You never offer any kind of constructive input or… you know… feedback.

The only constant has been that you are deathly afraid of some hypothetical advantage that someone might gain over you in a vanishingly small and utterly irrelevant PvP scenario, which itself goes counter to your previous claim about how everything was absolutely fine in PvP because of the advantages you gained over others.

8 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Providing feedback, which is what this topic is all about. 

You're not providing feedback, though. To do that, you'd have to know what on earth you're talking about and at no point in the entire history of spotting discussion in DCS has anything you've said every been even remotely related to reality. Every single claim you've ever made has been uninformed and objectively, factually wrong.

You refuse to do the research.
You refuse to learn how anything works.
You refuse to actually use reality rather than your own imagination, and you always end up proving your own point wrong.

That is not feedback. That is just plain old trolling.

[Bounti30]

after 1 month of testing, for my system option 1 seems to be the best.
Thank you ED even if I was very critical I am flying multiplayer again with a lot of pleasure
great work

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

For me, my main gripe is that aircraft at distances 10-20nm are very easy to spot (depending on the type of aircraft), while they completely disappear at around 1-2nm to shorty after suddenly re-appear as full-size models.
I haven't yet found any way to fix that.

Also, black dots suddenly turn light blue when against a backdrop of clouds (same issue that plagues power lines would be my bet).