twistking Posted January 23 Posted January 23 With DCS lighting tech getting more sophisticated each year, this longstanding issue is getting ridiculous. I made my first post about it 10 years ago. Since then there have been dozens of posts, a lot of them in the bug section, because people rightfully felt that the current implementation is just "broken"... Since it's still not fixed i'll treat it as a "missing feature" and -again- do a wishlist post instead... Proper visibility for nav lights and beacons is way more important than sophisticatedly computed penumbrae while basic sprite lights don't even come with a performance hit: Flight sims in the 2000s could already render nav lights and beacons to realistic distances. It's just sprites! Tactical night flying is borderline impossible without modern jets' HMCS and buddy tracks. Aircaft beacon lights and landing lights should be visible at 25 - 50km Nav lights (green/red) should be visible (and distinguishable) several kilometers at least. Brightness settings should be respected, so that dimmed lights are less visible (obviously). Tanker aircraft should be lit realistically during AAR Weather and atmospheric properties would ideally be taken into account, however since opting to use external lights generally comes with the explicit intention to actually be seen, this is not even that important and could be crudely approximated There should be AI logic and ME options to control lights on AI units. Light status should be taken into account for AI spotting capabilities All this does not require new lighting tech or complex retooling. The engine can already render sprites at sufficient distances and do so without a hit on performance. With the upcoming PTO and CW Germany those improvements are needed even more. How would you even do a rejoin at night without all the modern gizmos if your external lights cannot be seen after a few hundred feet? If you like the proposed improvements, please rate this thread 5 stars: Thanks! 20 My improved* wishlist after a decade with DCS *now with 17% more wishes compared to the original
Rolln Posted February 24 Posted February 24 Also would like to add that when in VR, anything greater than 1.5nm away, they glow super bright and big like UFO lights or something. 1
Cgjunk2 Posted Thursday at 07:39 PM Posted Thursday at 07:39 PM On 2/24/2025 at 2:20 PM, Rolln said: Also would like to add that when in VR, anything greater than 1.5nm away, they glow super bright and big like UFO lights or something. These excessive light orb blooms have been a problem forever. However, It does not seem to be an impossible problems to solve, because the F18 had huge light orb blooms for years until they fixed them about a year or two ago. The carrier landing approach lights also had excessive light bloom which made the meatball unreadable. I think they made the IFOLS overlay to address the fact that the light orbs made reading the lights impossible. Regardless, they fixed the carrier lights for a short time and they became much more realistic, and completely usable. Unfortunately, they broke the IFOLS lighting again, so it's back to being a completely unreadable bloomy orbs that obscure the landing area once you're initially turning into the groove. The problem with the light-orb bloom effect is that the size of the orb remains the same absolute size on the screen, regardless of how far away you are from the light source...it does not scale down relative to the apparent size of plane/ship. Currently the worst offender is the CH-47. When you are 7 or 8 miles away, the red flashing beacon lights look light a 2000lb GBU flash-bang grenade. The nav lights create a orb/bloom capable of hiding multiple Ch-47s behind it. I'm not saying that the fix should be to properly scale the hazy light-orb with distance...the real answer is to get rid of the light-orb bloom completely. It's not realistic for most atmospheric conditions, and even when the human eye would see a hazy light blooming around a nav light (for example in foggy conditions), their luminosity would be attenuated by the the fog as distance increases. As far as blooms around the IFOLS lighting, perhaps if the ship is in a marine fog layer, maybe I could imagine the light blooming as badly as they do right now in clear atmospheric conditions in-game. But I don't think that's enough of a reason to keep the light bloom effect, when it makes absolutely everything else very unrealistic. It's horrible. Is this only a problem with VR?
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