Isnt zooming on the HUD kind of cheating?

[Ghanja]

For me zooming in ruins immersion nevermind labels.I watch a ton of DCS videos and the ones I like the most are the ones that have no labels and the player doesn't zoom much.Looks more real to me this way and reminds me of the great Ironhand videos where he would say things like "somewhere down in that valley is a sam ready to fire on me" and then you see the ignition and smoke trail.

Not quite -even Ironhand used the Zoom-function ... :music_whistling:

[Frostiken]

Regarding labels: Moving things are easier to see in real life for some visual reasons related to the movement of pixels, as well as relative movement of yourself and the world around you. There's no sun reflection / glare off of vehicles or glass. There's not really any visual cues for moving things. The smallest a vehicle can be is the size of your pixel pitch, which is, even on a 2560x1600 monitor, still much larger than the fine details your eye can see, resulting in misshapen, meaningless gray blobs. Things moving in real life are moving at infinite FPS - things moving in-game are all moving at the same rate the terrain behind them is moving: 60 times per second? Probably much less for most people. Humans are really good at seeing moving things in real life - in a game, it doesn't work quite as well. There's also plenty of simple visual hints that don't exist like track marks, smoke from a battle... you cannot even ask the guy on the radio things like "I see a church." "Yeah, it's 2000 feet due east of the church."

 

Regarding zooming: Your 'effective' FOV is limited by the width of your monitors. Your in-game FOV thus must be unfairly squashed in order to let you see around the cockpit to some degree. When you look straight forward at the HUD in a default FOV, you see the hud, you see nearly all your instruments, you see both your screens. In order to effectively 'see' all that in real life you'd be sitting four feet away from everything in the cockpit. In reality, everything you look at consumes the visual region of your eye that has the highest acuity (the fovea). You aren't "seeing" both MFCDs at the same time. Additionally, how wide do you think the HUD appears from the seat in an A-10? Do you think it's the whopping 4 inches that it appears to be on my 30" screen? Zooming in so the HUD consumes most of your vision is actually much, much more realistic than *not*, in that sense.

 

There's nothing wrong with using subdued labels, and certainly nothing wrong with zooming.

Edited March 15, 2012 by Frostiken

[tintifaxl]

I wouldn't know how to find anything on the ground without zoom. :music_whistling:

[Guest Izoul123]

I only played with labels on when I was first learning the sim. Now I always play with them off. They ruin immersion for me + bog down frame-rate. I use track IR5, TMWH control, and 22" monitor. I need to use zoom. I don't consider zoom cheating at all. It makes up for the lack of limitation of PC monitor graphics/peripheral vision that you get with 'real life eyes'.

 

Also it really depends on a lot of things. Many times if you have JTAC, you're not really 'hunting' to hard once you get coords for easy acquiring in the TGP.

 

I zoom in on MFD's a lot, use zoom as a form of binocs at level alt hold AP for spotting. I also zoom on TGP so it takes up practically my whole monitor while I'm hunting via TGP.

 

I also use it for gun runs to focus on the hud/improve frame-rate for a more stable firing platform once PAC1 is engaged. This allows me to focus on a small area like you would in real life.

 

There are also times I'll do practice stormy night landings via ILS looking just focused mainly on the center instrument stack. Zoom is needed for this for frame-rate + focusing on the concept of just flying by the instruments only in front of you. Really keeps you focused flying by the instruments. Sometimes I'll even shut the HUD and MFD's off for this practicing instrument failure so literally all you have is the analog cluster panel to fly by. I need zoom for this!

 

It's all about control of the aircraft. Zooming isn't cheating as we're severely limited looking at a pc screen/pc processing speed limits vs real life eyeballs.

 

I remapped my controls slightly for easy use of zoom. I have on the TMWH flight stick my trim control Nose Down set to 'zoom in slow' Nose up set to 'zoom out slow'. I have my thumb button on my mouse for track ir focus/center reset so it's a quick 'reset' to normal when needed. Also off topic, since I don't have rudder pedals I reset left wing down to rudder left and right wing down to rudder right. For trim I hold down control on the keyboard and then use trim control on the joystick as normal. Works great.

 

Anyway, I'd consider anything outside of learning mode having labels on 'cheating' as you're getting 'to much' visual queue of where everything is at. Maybe those new helmets that the F22 pilots use actually do some form of real life 'augmented reality' labels from downloaded information via JTAC or such, but the A10 pilots are not using that helmet is my understanding. Who knows, maybe they'll get them.

 

With incredible control of the TGP via the TMWH though, it's almost way more efficient to just use the TGP since that's the fastest way to search in my humble opinion. If anything the TGP itself is a cheat lol. Now using just KB+mouse....ouch...yeh I'd probably put labels on if that were the case as well as you're focusing so much energy on keyboard commands/etc.

 

So many factors/opinions. All good though.

 

I do like the idea that labels should have a scalable option though, that would be really nice for learning with/player preference.

Edited March 18, 2012 by Izoul123

[Frostiken]

Labels "bog down framerate"?

 

And let me guess, high-ping players 'lag the server for everyone else' too :D

[WildFire]

Next time your on a commercial flight, wait for about 10-15 minutes after takeoff. You should be anywhere from 7000 feet and usually much higher. Look out the window and look as close to straight down as you can. You'll notice in RL you can see stuff from 10-15 thousand feet pretty easily. Like dogs and kids playing frisbee and even girls in swimming pools.

 

Keep in mind if you are watching a video of someone up at 10-15 thousand that it will give the same interpretation as the game, since the image is first processed through a camcorder. You have to actually fly to see what I'm talking about.

 

Now put a tank in a field in dcs and fly up to 10000. Look straight down with no zoom. Tell me if you can see him at all. See in RL your eyes pick up on vertices and surfaces. Depth perception is insanely important and something that is superbly difficult to replicate in a game, and they do decent in this one. But the lines and 3d type surfaces that your eyes pickup are insanely acute as compared to whats on a computer monitor. This type of ocular ability is why the US has switched to digital camouflage uniforms; they break up all the lines and surfaces, the patterns that the human eye identifies easily.

 

Simply put a computer monitor cannot output a digital image that is beyond the scope of our ocular ability. Technology has far to go to surpass the limits of our eyes, it is one of the most miraculous thing a human body has going for it. Your eyes see in 2 dimensions, but with the space between the eyes, the eyes transfer the data to your brain which reassembles the data to 3d with depth perception. This slight difference in the position of our eyes is what helps to pick up on the surfaces that we see, simply put one eye sees a different surface and angle than the other and they can easily differentiate.

 

A computer monitor puts out one image, with no ability to create depth. So they use artistic ability to give the image depth. It works but its no where near comparable to RL. With this all being said I say yes zoom. Because in RL your eyes are way better than what is processed on this screen, and a fighter/attack pilot in the US armed forces will have perfect vision.

[Frostiken]

I'm playing through a few of the stock missions that I haven't done, like 'CSAR'. This missions has convinced me more than ever of the necessity of labels... I honestly cannot see how this mission is possible to complete whatsoever without the use of labels, or rather without using metaknowledge of the mission...

[Weta43]

There have been many threads about this subject, and it still seems to me that modified lablels offer more realistic SA than no labels, while no labels look better...

 

New Scientist March 2012 says the human eye can resolve a 10 square metre object at 36Km.

Even if you took this as a typo (which happens in New Scientist from time to time) and read it as 10 metres square, that's a couple of orders of magnitude better than possible with a monitor and a field of view somewhere around that of the human eye.

[Frostiken]

All the more reason for ED to implement a label-less way of enhancing visibility of ground units :)

[159th_Viper]

All the more reason for ED to implement a label-less way of enhancing visibility of ground units :)

 

Ground units are not supposed to be easily visible from the air I would have thought........why would you want to have that In-SIM? Often overlooked in these discussions are Civil vs Military and the lengths military vehicles will go to to remain 'hidden'.

[Frostiken]

Ground units are not supposed to be easily visible from the air I would have thought........why would you want to have that In-SIM?

Have you read any post in this thread?

 

Let me sum it up for you:

 

 

Here's what a Smerch launcher looks like when it's firing. Now think about what it looks like in-game.

Edited March 25, 2012 by Frostiken

[159th_Viper]

Have you read any post in this thread?

 

Have you been in the Military, specifically Mechanized Infantry or Armour?

[EtherealN]

 

Photo taken by me, and it's with my crappy cell phone camera, so no miracles, but consider the fact that within this picture is actually a fairly large military installation. (Mechanized Combat school exercise area if I remember right.) I know it's there somewhere, but even at a measly 1000 meters altitude I just couldn't find the IFV's* that I knew had been simulating all out war only half an hour earlier... :)

 

Ground units that don't make any attempt to hide are easy to spot. Ground units that know their stuff and are actively looking to hide are damn near impossible to find.

 

*EDIT: I believe it was IFV's at least - it sounded like mainly HMG and 30mm fire; the 120mm smoothbores have a bit more oomphf to them.

Edited March 25, 2012 by EtherealN

[Frostiken]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ICcHxoNjVY

 

Here's:

 

1) What happens when tracked vehicles move over open land,

 

and

 

2) A Tunguska firing all manner of things leaving a hell of a lot of smoke floating around it for quite a while.

 

 

Here's:

 

3) What the ground looks like in FLIR: Note that it doesn't appear like splotchy lava. http://www.x20.org/images/DGI_FLIR_scene.jpg

 

Stuff

 

Awful picture that's pretty irrelevant because of it aside, you're also looking for ground units engaging ground units in what appears to be a heavy forest.

 

What about SAM units? SAMs need pretty unobstructed lines of fire - even an IR missile requires a not-insignificant amount of time to find, acquire, ID, lock, and engage an air target. Some can get away with less cover than others, but you aren't going to see much success firing SA-9s from a thick forest. Tanks also are best used in pretty open areas, and will entrench hull-down to take full advantage of clear lines of fire - great for ground combat, not so great for being subtle.

 

Here's the thing: If a ground unit wants to hide, it can hide pretty well. If a ground unit doesn't want to hide, it can be seen really easily (or even if he does want to hide, sometimes it doesn't matter). The problem is in DCS, unstealthy units aren't easy to see. No dust trails, no weapon smoke, no track marks / telltale signs of passage, no intelligent AI that can give me guidance to an enemy (in the CSAR mission the pilot says 'infantry 2000 meters to my east' before you even know where he is - meanwhile SAMs and AAA is lighting you up... like... really? Really?

Edited March 25, 2012 by Frostiken

[159th_Viper]

.....The problem is in DCS, unstealthy units aren't easy to see. No dust trails, no weapon smoke....

 

Nonsense.

 

I honestly cannot see how it is that DCS is supposed to make it any easier to see. It's a shooting-gallery at the best of times - I mean honestly, units stand out like a boil on a Fly's backside........provided that you are looking in the right place to begin with, that is.

 

Herewith screenshots taken at default zoom (view not tweaked to accord with accepted 12x Bino view as utilized by A-10 pilots operationally). Had the view been tweaked it would have been even easier to spot units:

 

Note the conspicuous dust trail.....

 

 

 

 

Tunguska:

 

 

 

 

 

Tunguska in a different field - even easier:

 

 

 

Note the conspicuous weapon smoke........

 

 

 

That is not difficult to spot no matter how you attempt to peel this particular onion.

[159th_Viper]

Here's what a Smerch launcher looks like when it's firing. Now think about what it looks like in-game.

 

Granted, the smoke effect could do with a wee bit of work, but if you are insinuating that Smerch units are difficult to spot then think again..........barring as said the dust-effect, pretty good I would say:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7km Distant:

 

 

And the coup de grâce - 26km distant at 6700ft with NO ZOOM:

 

 

You still telling me that that is difficult to spot?

Edited March 25, 2012 by 159th_Viper

[sgibson]

Hi,

 

As one of the posters said look down from an airplane after 15min of flight. It is pretty easy to spot cars driving around.

 

HOWEVER - it is a bigger challenge with military vehicles when deployed for combat - even more so with anti-aircraft.

 

I have been in the army and everyone else who has been can tell you that vehicles (jeeps, transports, armored, ...) are fully camouflaged when deployed in the woods. Not talking about that their paint won't reflect. It is so incredibly difficult to spot them from ground when they are camouflaged properly. I guess the same applies from air ... I would say the only real chance to spot them with bare eyes is when they are moving or firing.

 

One time at night, with night vision goggles on(!), I only realized that I'm in front of a radar guided AAA site when I was approx 15m away from it. It was so perfectly camoflaged! The funniest moment was when a guy stepped out the ground and I realized Im standing next to a MG position that secures the AAA. :-)

Edited March 25, 2012 by sgibson

[Frostiken]

- Dust trails last for all of one second. Vehicle stops, dust disappears immediately after. It also looks like it's from 1999.

 

- Your 'weapon smoke' is from the active motor plume. The Smerch is most obvious when, after it finishes firing, it might as well have fired nothing at all. The massive cloud of debris it kicks up, to say nothing of the blasted crater of earth it leaves behind it, and even the rocket plumes themselves, are pretty obvious for quite a long time after firing. This is an acknowledged problem of rocket artillery and makes them prone to counter-battery fire. I notice you elected to not show in your screenshots what the Smerchs look like mere seconds after they fire their last rocket.

 

- Try reading the whole thread.

Edited March 25, 2012 by Frostiken

[159th_Viper]

- Try reading the whole thread.

 

Watch the condescending attitude - will not end well ;)

 

That said - you got called out and found short.......The unit visibility in-SIM is currently fine. If you are struggling to see units, zoom. That will more than make up for any deficit experienced as a result of RL vs Monitor view.

 

If you still have issues, post with screenshots, mission-files, tracks etc etc. Much more productive than merely shooting your mouth off without substantiation.

Edited March 25, 2012 by 159th_Viper

[EtherealN]

Awful picture that's pretty irrelevant because of it aside, you're also looking for ground units engaging ground units in what appears to be a heavy forest.

 

Like I said, the photo just illustrated the situation I was talking about. I don't know if they were in the forest, I just know they were somewhere in that area. And I flew over said area actively trying to spot them, at 1000 meters, and failed.

 

Now, had I known from other sources exactly where they were, I probably would have found them. Same thing happens in the simulator - it's hard to find someone where I only know their general whereabouts (but I'd say slightly easier than my RL experience), but if I have data to narrow things down I usually find the targets pretty quick.

 

What I am responding to is your notion that spotting ground units should be made easier. I don't agree with personal experience to back it up. (And Viper has experience from the side of the ground trooper, as an aside.) The exception is some aspects of it where other things limit what can be done, and the smerch rocket trails and other such smoke effects fall in that department. Would be nice to have more, ED could implement more, but we need more powerful computers first if we want to avoid mission design nightmares from the performance perspective.

[Ghanja]

Regarding the visibility I also found this:

 

On the modern battlefield, an A-10 Thunderbolt 30-mm high-angle strafe attack probably provides the best opportunity for a fixed-wing attack pilot to visually identify a tactical target. The aircraft has a typical roll-in and engagement decision range occurring at approximately 9,600 feet. To put this in the perspective of what the pilot sees at this range, a T-72 tank appears smaller than the word "TRUST" viewed on a quarter held at arm's lengtharm's length.

 

At best, this target may be recognizable as a vehicle and possibly armored, but the characteristics that determine friend from foe cannot be reliably distinguished visually, even at this short tactical rangeA range in which realistic targets are in use and a certain freedom of maneuver is allowed. At a 6,000-foot firing range, the T-72 is barely wider than the two milliradian aiming index of the A-10 sight (2.56 mils).

 

Standoff weapon deliveries produce similar identification problems, even with the aid of aircraft sensors. A typical weapon's release slant range The line of sight distance between two points, not at the same level relative to a specific datum. For a medium-altitude PGM attack is 26,000 feet. Using an onboard targeting pod with 20-power magnification, a T-72 on a cockpit display would be approximately the size of George Washington's head, using the same arm's length quarter comparison. Although this equates to a larger apparent target size, the gains in magnification are offset by a loss in detail due to the display's resolution and environmental factors of the increased range.

Edited March 26, 2012 by Ghanja

[Tailgate]

Regarding the visibility I also found this:

 

On the modern battlefield, an A-10 Thunderbolt 30-mm high-angle strafe attack probably provides the best opportunity for a fixed-wing attack pilot to visually identify a tactical target. The aircraft has a typical roll-in and engagement decision range occurring at approximately 9,600 feet. To put this in the perspective of what the pilot sees at this range, a T-72 tank appears smaller than the word "TRUST" viewed on a quarter held at arm's lengtharm's length adj. the description of an agreement made by two parties freely and independently of each other, and without some special relationship, such as being a relative, having another deal on the side or one party having complete control of the other.

 

I would say the T-72 gets a bum deal in this contract.

 

:D

Edited March 26, 2012 by Tailgate

[Speed]

It does seem like rocket motor smoke and dust clouds don't linger long enough. Dust falls so quickly in game!

 

I suppose it's a trade-off with performance though... if you have a ton of lingering smoke/dust trails, you're going to have one hell of a frame rate hit.

Edited March 26, 2012 by Speed

[Dejjvid]

If BMS can incorporate Smart Scaling, then ED can too. Really helps the eye.

[Tailgate]

If missions have adequate airborne and ground-based FACs, that would help a great deal. BTW, why aren't E-8 J-STARS modeled? Looks like in-sim, the Predators are in that role, though they obviously have limited coverage.