Scaling Issues or a battle against microbes

[-ZigZag-]

I know that size of contacts was a DCS problem but after a few new versions nothing has changed and 2.9.1.48335 is no exception here.

 

I have a 4k monitor and the small size of planes is a big problem for me.

I think that there are two main problems:

 

1. It is difficult to find a plane,especially when it is far from you. This is because contacts and markers are very small.

2. Planes( helicopters andetc) are too small when they are located close to me.

For this reason it is very difficult to win a dogfight.

 

I think that it would be good to increase the size of the planes (helicopters ,tanks etc) approximately twice (for example) and not reduce their size significantly as they are removed.

 

I hope that the size issue will be solved as soon as possible. 

I like DCS but these days it is like a battle against microbes on my screen.

 

P.S. It will be nice to get feedback.

Edited November 28, 2023 by -ZigZag-

[Flappie]

Have you tried the new "Improved Spotting Dots" setting in the Gameplay options?

[-ZigZag-]

I've tried but there is no difference.

By the way, my video settings are High. Unfortunately, it is very hard to understand where wings or tail  of my enemy, enemy planes too small

Edited November 29, 2023 by -ZigZag-

[-ZigZag-]

В 29.11.2023 в 16:03, Flappie сказал:

Have you tried the new "Improved Spotting Dots" setting in the Gameplay options?

What I have to do?
Wait your advice or new DCS version?

[Flappie]

If the "Improved Spotting Dots" option does not help you seeing the targets, I don't know what would.

On 11/28/2023 at 5:59 PM, -ZigZag- said:

I think that it would be good to increase the size of the planes (helicopters ,tanks etc) approximately twice (for example) and not reduce their size significantly as they are removed.

The scale of aircraft should not be altered.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not reduce their size significantly as they are removed".

[-ZigZag-]

1 час назад, Flappie сказал:

If the "Improved Spotting Dots" option does not help you seeing the targets, I don't know what would.

The scale of aircraft should not be altered.

I'm not sure what you mean by "not reduce their size significantly as they are removed".

It means that planes (and their markers!!!!) that close to me are small and they very fast getting small (like a point) when they fly away from me.

I need advice,help or something else, very tired from this issue.

[Flappie]

Please attach your options.lua file (from Saved Games/DCS.../Config).

[SharpeXB]

On 11/30/2023 at 2:25 PM, -ZigZag- said:

It means that planes (and their markers!!!!) that close to me are small and they very fast getting small (like a point) when they fly away from me.

I need advice,help or something else, very tired from this issue.

The other aircraft you see in DCS are a realistic size. The range an enemy aircraft can be usually detected IRL is about 3-4 miles, that’s actually what you get in DCS. In 4K the image should be quite sharp and you can even make out the type and ID them etc. But you need to have realistic expectations in a sim game like this. Also be sure you are making use of the zoom view as the wide FOV just isn’t always practical and makes everything very small. Get into the habit of zooming your view in an and out constantly. Wide for awareness and in for focusing on detail and such. 

[-ZigZag-]

В 02.12.2023 в 00:01, SharpeXB сказал:

The other aircraft you see in DCS are a realistic size. The range an enemy aircraft can be usually detected IRL is about 3-4 miles, that’s actually what you get in DCS. In 4K the image should be quite sharp and you can even make out the type and ID them etc. But you need to have realistic expectations in a sim game like this. Also be sure you are making use of the zoom view as the wide FOV just isn’t always practical and makes everything very small. Get into the habit of zooming your view in an and out constantly. Wide for awareness and in for focusing on detail and such. 

I have many years of experience in many simulators, but size of planes in DCS very small (especially in latest versions).

P.S. I sent my options.lua by private message, did you test this file? Probably it will help to understand my problem.

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, -ZigZag- said:

I have many years of experience in many simulators, but size of planes in DCS very small (especially in latest versions).

P.S. I sent my options.lua by private message, did you test this file? Probably it will help to understand my problem.

Other games aren’t necessarily relevant to DCS. Falcon BMS for example scales up the distant aircraft by a factor of 2-3x so if that’s what you’re used to it’s no wonder that the DCS aircraft seem too small. The DCS models are indeed the correct size. 
I didn’t get the .lua file message but the option you might want to try in DCS 2.9 is the “Improved Spotting Dots” although they honestly make the other aircraft perhaps too visible (you can see small fighters at 20 miles) it’s something you can use. There are also dot labels of course. Honestly as far as I can tell the dot labels and spotting dots are the same.

Edited December 3, 2023 by SharpeXB

[Flappie]

@-ZigZag- I checked your options.lua. I only have a 3440x1440 monitor, so I can't see exactly what you see @ 3860x2160. I see you prefer to fly without the  "Improved Spotting Dots" when this feature is supposed to help you spot targets, but you said it did not help you, and I trust you. II guess you're right, planes do look like microbes, especially if you don't zoom in.

 

Edited December 5, 2023 by Flappie
typo

[draconus]

On 11/28/2023 at 5:59 PM, -ZigZag- said:

I think that it would be good to increase the size of the planes (helicopters ,tanks etc) approximately twice (for example)...

Easy - use half of the current FoV value.

[-ZigZag-]

В 04.12.2023 в 22:47, Flappie сказал:

@-ZigZag- I checked your options.lua. I only have a 3440x1440 monitor, so I can't see exactly what you see @ 3860x2560. I see you prefer to fly without the  "Improved Spotting Dots" when this feature is supposed to help you spot targets, but you said it did not help you, and I trust you. II guess you're right, planes do look like microbes, especially if you don't zoom in.

 

My 3860*2160 have 16:9 and my DCS FOV 78° and sometimes 100% Zoom can't help me understand where my opponent is going to fly.

 

How I can increase size of enemy planes do not use FOV?

I reduced FOV but it did not help so much.

Edited December 5, 2023 by -ZigZag-

[draconus]

2 hours ago, -ZigZag- said:

How I can increase size of enemy planes do not use FOV?

All objects in the 3D world are at correct sizes. If you use correct FoV you'll be able to see just as IRL through your monitor. If you're not interested in natural visibility and it's still not enough for you just use the labels.

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, -ZigZag- said:

My 3860*2160 have 16:9 and my DCS FOV 78° and sometimes 100% Zoom can't help me understand where my opponent is going to fly.

 

How I can increase size of enemy planes do not use FOV?

I reduced FOV but it did not help so much.

 

DCS does a very good job with regard to visibility. In 4K it’s excellent and you should have no trouble seeing or IDing other aircraft. You do need to have realistic expectations in this regard. This isn’t easy in reality so it’s not any easier here. Plus it takes some work at the skills involved in following other aircraft. Also if you aren’t using TrackIR you should seriously consider this or some form of head tracking, this will make it much easier and more natural to follow targets. 

Edited December 5, 2023 by SharpeXB

[-ZigZag-]

Guys, I have many years of experience flight sims but DCS is a real battle against microbes. I know some virpils who have the same opinion. I just want to increase the size of planes and I know what is track IR and how to zoom and etc .

I need a real approach on how to fix it or give us pls opportunity to choose the size of planes in the new DCS ver.

Edited December 6, 2023 by -ZigZag-

[draconus]

10 minutes ago, -ZigZag- said:

Guys, I have many years of experience flight sims but DCS is a real battle against microbes.

Doesn't matter here. We were all spoiled by older "sims", crafted for fun, not realism. You can't just make aircraft bigger while having the rest the same. Zoom is not for making things bigger, it's for you to have a chance of vision as IRL.

[JCTherik]

I think there are several issues here that should really be considered independent of each other. No single solution is going to fix them all. The spotting strongly depends on the range and also on what's behind the airplane.

Range:

1. Up close <1 miles
2. Short range ~1-5 miles
3. Medium range
4. Long range 15+ miles
5. Very long range 40+ miles (nonexistent in DCS)

Backdrop:

• Sky
• Clouds
• Terrain

Display:

• VR
• Pancake (flat screen)

Resolution

• Lowres
• Highres

From now on, if I type for example Short, i mean spotting in short range of 2-5 miles against any backdrop and on any type of display, Short/Cloud/Pancake/Highres means spotting at short range against clouds on a high resolution flat screen, Short+Medium/Sky+Cloud means spotting at short or medium distances against a sky or cloud, etc.

Ideally, we would have a realistic way of spotting things.

Note for @draconus: by realistic I mean realistic in terms of performance. As in, an average DCS player should have the same chance at spotting an airplane at a certain distance against a certain backdrop as an average pilot IRL in the same situation. That doesn't necessarily mean that the angular size of the airplane at that distance must be the same as in IRL. It would be great if it was, and there's no reason for it not to be up close, but following such a simplistic algorithm into medium and long ranges results in a spotting system that is both unrealistically hard on some hardware and unrealistically easy on another, which then necessitates the use of labels, which is by far the least realistic option of them all. In real life, our view is not split into flat matrix of pixels, thus we need to take some compromises and tradeoffs. I know you want realism, we all do, but naively following simple physics equations does not lead to realism when you don't account for that solution being squeezed through a mesh of pixels.

 

Main issues:

1. Up close - looks great on most hardware
2. Short/VR+Pancake/Lowres - losing aspect information due to low resolution, unless zooming in
3. Short/VR/Highres - losing aspect information due to shimmer from fresnel lenses and oversampling
4. Short/VR - hard to scan a large FOV at once due to somewhat limited FOV of headsets and inability to zoom out
5. Short/Pancake - virtually impossible to keep an airplane in view in trackIR when highly zoomed on it, except when in a 2circle, due to trackIR being imprecise, and bearings and altitudes changing quickly in a dogfight
6. Short+Medium/Terrain - hard to track an airplane if the airplane is in the same distance as the grass/tree/object rendering distance, or the distance where detail quality of ground objects is changing. You're looking for a handful of moving pixels in a sea of a million pixels of trees suddenly growing into existence
7. Short+Medium/Terrain/VR/Highres - extremely difficult to spot due to terrain and aiplane both shimmering from fresnel lenses and oversampling. It gets worse with increasing range to the point that even just keeping a tally against terrain becomes impossible past a few miles, especially when combined with the rendering distance issue above
8. Short+Medium/Clouds/VR/Highres - has similar issue as above due to fresnel/oversampling shimmering and due to smoke and clouds still doing that weird movement when turning head on a roll axis
9. Medium - closing airplane is a big obvious dot (since improved dots), but as it gets close the dot suddeny disappears and gets replaced by an object that's much harder to see, creating a discontinuity and a strange situation in which you have to get further away to see them better
10. Long - too easy at the moment since the improved dots, but at least it's a huge improvement because it's now a lot more fair, since it's similar to how easy it was on low res flat screens
11. Long/Terrain - dot is sometimes visible, I don't think it should be possible to spot a plane against terrain from 15+ miles
12. Medium/Long/Very - should produce an occasional glint of from the airplane based on aspect and sky/sun/moon/water reflection positions for realistic spotting at long distances. At long enough distances, no black dot should be there at all

 

Summary

Problems 2 and 3 are not solvable unless some form of scaling is present or the zoom function can also auto-lock a camera onto a target

Problems 4 and 5 are just the limitations of crutches that we use. It makes sense to zoom out to get a bigger FOV and it makes sense to zoom in based on resolution, so that everyone is able to zoom in to see the same amount of detail. VR has a lack of smooth zoom-in and a complete lack of a zoom-out, but a much bigger issue is in Pancake, that's the assumption that you can keep the bandit both zoomed in and reliably in your view with trackIR.

Problem 6 - I don't know what to do with it apart from model scaling again or increase contrast of the airplane in those distances, or perhaps limit how the ground objects behind the airplane change or blur the background behind them?

Problem 7 - again, either scaling or contrast increase or bluring the terrain behind the airplane?

Problem 8 - Cloud and smoke sprites shouldn't be following you when turning your head, this isn't Wolf3D. It's generally a lot less of an issue than problem 7 I'd say.

Problem 9 - The distant dot shouldn't be bigger than the airplane that is closer. The airplane becomes single pixel a lot earlier on Lowres but on Highres the airplane keeps shrinking and shrinking until it hits the limit where it becomes that big black dot. Again, scaling would make sense. We cannot make the dot smaller, that is impossible to do on Lowres.

The alternative is to make the dot appear a lot earlier on every display, at the same distance where Lowres would start rendering the airplane as a single pixel. That would be annoying on Highres but fair.

Problem 10 - some adjustment needed, it shouldn't be possible to spot an airplane as a dot from 40 miles.

Problem 11 - I think the dot should entirely disappear if the backdrop isn't a sky

Problem 12 - If long range glints were implemented that would be great

 

Scaling

There's plenty of ways to do it that have been described a thousand times and every form of scaling is going to be a tradeoff, because it makes some parts of the game ugly - tanks bigger than houses etc, which doesn't feel realistic.

It doesn't have to be that way though. If the scaling is only temporary, bound to a Hold-to-scale button. If you hold the button, objects are visually scaled to a bigger size. Once you release the button, they get back to normal. You could imagine as the pilot forcing his eyes to focus in a distance more.

For an added realism, some sort of eye-fatigue could set in if people just hold the button indiscriminately, reducing the scaling after several seconds or something. Maybe add a few seconds of in-cockpit blur as the pilot readjusts to a close range vision after a session of long range spotting or something.

I think there are plenty of artistic ways to make this feel realistic in addition to the spotting performance of the virtual piloit to be realistic.

For an added effect, the objects could scale proportionally to how close they are to the center of the screen, that would force people to move their view left and right and up and down to actually scan the sky effectively, again somewhat simulating IRL spotting.

I don't think that the question of scaling is whether scaling yes or scaling no, but rather of scaling how.

We do already have scaling in DCS. First, the dots are a form of scaling, and then the zoom is a form of scaling that scales the entire world!

The side effect of the current zoom system is the massive FOV limitation and the uncomfortably high sensitivity of TrackIR and VR when zoomed. The question is if this form of scaling is the best form of scaling. It definitely has an advantage of simplicity and making the size of objects always match the size of the terrain, but the disadvantages are making its usefulness very limited.

Ideally, I'd like to see a set of options, perhaps an experimental release with several different implementations to compare.

 

Contrast

As an alternative to scaling in certain situations, particularly against a terrain, lightly bluring the background behind an airplane and/or artificially increasing the contrast could help to keep things realistically visible.

 

Long+Very long range glints

I believe this should be implemented. It could be a set of maps of airplane aspects and light source angles to be compared against the angles of the big light sources (sun/brightly illuminated clouds/reflecting snow/reflecting water/moon). It is effectively an implementation of path tracing, but the angles of shiny surfaces of airplanes can be precomputed and low res and only few rays per airplane in view need to be sent, thus the performance hit should be very small. A solution for glints from sun, moon and sea reflections should be doable in O(1) time per airplane in view. Accurate solutions that account for snow, cloud cover, illuminated clouds and water surfaces which are not on sea level would depend on how easy it is to cast and intersect a ray with a terrain or cloud in DCS. Also it doesn't need check every frame.

And for a zero effort - zero performance impact simulation, just produce those glints randomly every now and then. Slightly less lazy solution would adjust the chances based on weather, date and time.

 

The issue of VR with fresnel lenses (almost all headsets)

Due to the fresnel lenses producing an extreme amount of aliasing, the VR headsets ask to render in higher resolution and then downsample, effectively running a built in SSAA, meaning not every pixel which DCS renders is shown to the user if the VR headset is ran at full res, and the extra pixels are only used to slightly change the colour of the shown pixels.

This lead to the flickering or disappearing of the single pixel dot in Meadium+Long/Sky+Clouds before Improved Dots were a thing, and pixels are missing or shimmering on an airplane on the distant end of Short making it very difficult to read aspect.

Same effect also happens with the edges of trees and other ground objects, and when moving over an area, lot of ground stuff tends to shimmer slightly. That's not usually a problem, as it's still much preferable over flickering jagged edges but it does mean that the ground is constantly full of faint pixels coming in and out of existence.

That plus the fact that pixels in the airplane also tend to shimmer an come in and out of existence makes distinguishing the airplane pixels from terrain pixels pretty much impossible. This affects Short+Medium/Terrain/VR.

I think that Long/Terrain should pretty much be impossible to do IRL.

Spotting Short+Medium/Terrain airplane should be hard IRL too, but I believe it should not be that difficult to keep track of that airplane once spotted. But due to the effect of the fresnel lenses and necessary overrendering for full resolution, even just following an already spotted airplane is very difficult even in Short+Terrain/VR

 

 

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, JCTherik said:

an average DCS player should have the same chance at spotting an airplane at a certain distance against a certain backdrop as an average pilot IRL in the same situation.

They already do. And the chance of seeing things IRL is actually rather low compared to what some players expect in the game. DCS in fact adds spotting dots which make it possible to see distant aircraft at fantastic ranges which would not be possible IRL. With the egregious dots turned off, the spotting in DCS matches the real world quite well. Meaning it’s possible but difficult. 

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, JCTherik said:

If the scaling is only temporary, bound to a Hold-to-scale button. If you hold the button, objects are visually scaled to a bigger size. Once you release the button, they get back to normal.

You could accomplish the same thing by using the Dot Labels On/Off command. 

[draconus]

Scaling is terrible idea to begin with. That was a solution to the problem in some old milsim with the very specific goal in mind. No longer applicable to the current realistic graphic engines.

Sun glints are very welcome and should be implemented for all distant objects, not only aircraft but having them appear randomly is absolutly crazy and unacceptable. In fact they already are there in DCS but only for close LODs - not really much of performance cost.

Obviously there are limitations to our hardware but it's on the user to choose one they can afford or want. There are solutions for both monitor users and VR users likewise. VR shines with its good fov, RL scale, realistic tracking and depth perception, but it lacks in the resolution and peripheral image quality. Monitors are unbeatable in image quality all over the screen but lack the fov&scale (both adjustable vs screen size), depth perception and have worse tracking solutions. Choose your own horse because the game cannot solve it for you. It'd be best for users to understand it and manage their expectations, especially knowing that spotting is hard IRL.

Having said that ED still can improve the system not only with glint effects but of course with better rendering - no matter the res, it doesn't stop with one pixel. It shouldn't be always black either. There are nearby pixels too and they have colors/brightness to mess with. We need good algorithms to handle it consistently in all ranges while still allowing the plethora of upscaling to work with it correctly. Tough nut if you ask me.

If some users still want to see everything from far away keeping their high fov - the labels are still there.

Edited December 11, 2023 by draconus

[JCTherik]

5 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

You could accomplish the same thing by using the Dot Labels On/Off command. 

Labels are miles less realistic than scaling. I don't know why do people hate scaling so much, claiming that it's unrealistic and then suggesting using labels which are visible even through clouds or cockpit floors and do nothing to help read aspect at 3 miles distance on a shimmering cluster of pixels. 

You can't say that DCS has realistic spotting, ever, without also mentioning what hardware and what scenario you're talking about. 

Some hardware is grossly overperforning, other hardware is grossly underperforming. 

[JCTherik]

5 hours ago, draconus said:

If some users still want to see everything from far away keeping their high fov - the labels are still there.

For each their own, labels exist.

I definitely don't want to see everything from far away and I'd like to stay away from labels.

Currently i can see an airplane 20 miles away a lot easier than an airplane 5 miles away, especially against terrain. I'd dare to say that that seems pretty unacceptable. 

That said, i still prefer having those huge dots, knowing that people with 720p monitors have always had those huge dots.

 

The spotting should be fair, with similar performances on different hardware and matching IRL performance. It is a tough nut to crack, and i think that by throwing away scaling we're throwing away one of the best tools to crack that nut.

Perhaps the old implementation of scaling was very bad, but that's not a problem with scaling, that's a problem of implementation.

Any technique could be the worst if it's done wrong enough.

Btw why would random glints be bad? I'd say that random glints with reasonable frequency, duration and intensity would be much preferable over the long distance black dot.

In fact, it could be very difficult to distinguish randomly generated glints from raytraced glints if the frequency, intensity and duration are set just right and varied based on distance, airplane type, weather, etc.

 

Ofcourse proper glints would be better, but random glints may be dead easy to implement.

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, JCTherik said:

Labels are miles less realistic than scaling. I don't know why do people hate scaling so much, claiming that it's unrealistic and then suggesting using labels which are visible even through clouds or cockpit floors and do nothing to help read aspect at 3 miles distance on a shimmering cluster of pixels. 

People hate scaling because it would look ridiculous. What’s hilarious is anyone here who brings up scaling writes these lengthy treatises with numbers and figures but never shows any screenshots of what it would look like. Because it would look absurd!

Here’s a screenshot of what “Serfoss scaling” would look like in DCS. This isn’t disinformation, it was actually made by a proponent of the idea. Look how ridiculous this technique is when there are non scaled objects in the vicinity Nobody wants this

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, JCTherik said:

You can't say that DCS has realistic spotting, ever, without also mentioning what hardware and what scenario you're talking about. 

This is completely realistic here