Realistic visibility range.

[Weta43]

Realistic visibility range.

 

Can any real pilots tell me how far can a pilot actually see?

I was just looking in the Bugs threads and someone was asking how to turn off the labels as they wanted to play as “realistically” as possible.

From where I am sitting I can see an airport about 8km (5m) away. At that range I can plainly see and identify light planes coming & going, & can easily distinguish the paint schemes of the various airlines.

It seems to me that I can probably find in the sky without too much trouble something the size of a 737 to (?) between 25km and 30km. I have nothing to judge this against so I’m just guessing.

I have FC resolution set at 1800 x 1200 and the pilots angle of view set to about 120 degrees (from memory – I’m at work). From about 1.5km – maybe 2km I can tell an F15 from a SU27. Anything outside of that & there’s not enough pixels to tell without zooming right in. For people playing at lower resolution this must be even harder.

I agree that having blue & red labels is unrealistic – as soon as the object is in sight you know whether it’s friendly or not, but you can fix that by setting both teams labels to the same colour {250, 0, 250}. Having the plane type & pilot name is a bit dodgy as well, but it seems to me that in real life I should have no trouble finding & with a bit of experience having a pretty good guess at the size and range of a plane from out to 15km?

I’ve changed my labels settings so both teams are the same colour and the distance settings for planes to something like: nothing past 30km, an apostrophe between 30km & 15km and the range only from 15km to 1km (then nothing again)

Can any pilots out there give me some advice from their experience of (on a clear day with good visibility) how far off they can (just) see another plane, at what distance they could identify it & the same thing for a truck & a person (see them – not identify them – on the basis a person is near enough the same diameter as a missile, so if you can see there’s someone standing on the tarmac at 5km, you would see a missile more easily)

 

Maybe you could suggest something for those settings – an apostrophe (which is this big on the screen ‘ ), range only then nothing - like:

Plane: 30km, 15km, 1km

Missile: 12km, 7km, 1km

Truck / Tank: 20km, 12km, 1km

 

Also – rather than just having the server able to turn labels on or off, don’t you think it would be better if they could set server-side custom labels.lua settings so there could be the possibility of playing uniformly online with something between present vanilla labels on ( unrealistically easy ) and labels off (unrealistically hard).

[SimFreak]

It depends on weather conditions. Take a look at this photo I took from a Cessna. How far would you see a vehicle and correctly ID it?

 

[S77th-konkussion]

I'm definitely not going to turn on labels of any kind to play, but there seems to be a difference vs. 1.02 for other airborne craft. I'm noting a "blind spot" if you will. I can get a visual on another aircraft at the advertised 15-18km, and I can see them up close, but to me-they simply vanish at short to intermediate distances. But hey. I'm old. :)

[Weta43]

Sim freak -I don't want to "ID" it with a label, just a " ' " to show there's something there. I figure in real life I could correctly identify a vehicle at somewhere between 0.5km & 1km, which is why I don't use team colours & I have the labels set to not give types other than "p" for plane, "m" for missile etc & only when they get resonably close (15km for planes - labels read "p 12.5km"). I turn all the labels off at 1km.

What I realy was asking was how far away can you tell there's a vehicle of any sort there if you know roughly where to look,

How far away is the bridge? My guess is that in real life you were probably able to see the traffic crossing that bridge without any big problems - not what they were, but that there was something there ( & probably whether it was a car or a truck ) better than you can in LO/FC with the labels off ( I remember watching trucks on the highway out the window flying from LA to London - we must have been pretty high but it was quite easy to spot the vehicles, even the ones that weren't that close to the path of the plane.

Witchking has a post where he hit a sound bug while toggling labels on off trying to learn how to spot vehicles on the ground, on a bit of road that he knew they were on somewhere.

I think (!) that at 10km to 15km you should be able to see that something as big as a truck is there with your naked eye without a great amount of trouble. Not what kind, not who's side it's on, but easily that there is something there, then fire up the schvall (or however you spell it) to see what it actually is. Last night I was flying a SU25 around & going after an avenger. It was in the middle of an empty field and at 10km it was almost impossible to see, even zoomed in on it.

I take it from your photo you're a pilot. On a clear day, if you stand on the runway & look back along the approach path, how far away can you readily spot a plane without having to use binoculars (which is what the zoom key is) ? - or conversely, when approaching on a clear day at what disatnce do you start to see the other planes on the ground ?

[Kula66]

I've noticed this too .. It may have something to do with camouflage ... at distance you see a black blob ... then as in draws the a/c properly, it draws it in the correct colour ... which blends in with the background. Only a theory!

[Weta43]

Tag it with a black " ' "

It'll be the same size as the original black blob, no more visible, have no more information, just won't disappear.

Oh yeah - I forgot to ask - Konkussion - what counts as old ?

[609_Recon]

What range do dots become visible in this game?

[S77th-konkussion]

What range do dots become visible in this game?

 

 

I <think> it was 16......nm. bah.. I forget. Now I'm both old AND senile.

[Witchking]

yeah! I am having a similar issue too. I can see the black DOTS at a range of around 8-9 nm. but the moment I go farther...the road is kind of disappearing and I cannot see any dots. Thats why I was training myself to correctly see the general area of target.

 

It was very difficult to find the helicopters because they kind of blend in with the trees.

[britgliderpilot]

I've noticed this too .. It may have something to do with camouflage ... at distance you see a black blob ... then as in draws the a/c properly, it draws it in the correct colour ... which blends in with the background. Only a theory!

 

Close.

 

 

I've put it down to the ground units LOD fix. At long distance, it's low level of detail . . . . just a black block. When you get within a certain range, THEN it replaces it with the actual model.

[EvilBivol-1]

Btrit is right on, the strange "I can see it," followed by "Oh no, where'd it go?!" routine for both planes and ground units is due to the models’ LODs. ED and some very dedicated testers worked really hard to make this as painless as possible for ground units when they were working on the LOD Fix for 1.1, but without making more then two LODs or generating unique basic-level LODs for every vehicle (both options out of the question given the time and resources at hand), it will always be 'not quite there'. The situation is similar with aircraft, which actually have multiple LODs (unlike ground units before the 1.1 LOD fix), but their progression from the lowest LOD model to the higher ones is rough, so you first see a nice blob quite a ways off, followed by the plane's actual low-level LOD shape, which is far less distinguishable. I know that there were some discussions and experiments with the aircraft problem around the time that the ground units LOD Fix was being tested, but I don't know whether any useful solution was ever found. Let's hope...

 

As for the disappearing roads, that is a separate graphical issue, one which I believe can be manipulated through the variables under the HIGH/MEDUIM/LOW visibility settings in the graphics.cfg file, or via LOMAN. I’m just not sure which of the variables you have to play with. I was actually experimenting with this a few days a go, but haven’t had a chance to test my attempts. Let’s see here…

[SimFreak]

I take it from your photo you're a pilot. On a clear day, if you stand on the runway & look back along the approach path, how far away can you readily spot a plane without having to use binoculars (which is what the zoom key is) ? - or conversely, when approaching on a clear day at what disatnce do you start to see the other planes on the ground ?

 

I can't tell exact distance that I look for traffic since I never tested out my self. First thing I rely on is the radio calls combined with vision. Before I approach airport I would listen to traffic and announce my intentions. (Class D airspace, no tower) I would look at areas that matters to me that would be traffic area of 5 miles around me (no need to look at 10000 feet when I’m at 1500-2000ft). You see, to properly scan ski, it takes a lot of time since you can only scan about 10 degrees a second (per FAA) of space at once. Many times other aircraft would pop up out of no where even though I check my surroundings; of course it depends on weather / visibility. In other words, civilian aviators are not trained to spot other aircraft in distance. I know for fact that I cannot spot another Cessna/Piper at 20 miles unless they are producing some type of stand out detail (glass reflection). To spot something on ground 20 miles away you have to know A) their location so that you can concentrate vision on that exact area, B) something have to standout like reflection of a window. At times before I knew area well, I would almost fly over runway before I spot it. My Alt 2000ft, speed 90-120mph, runway is 3000 ft with ~20 parked aircraft. To properly ID aircraft on ground I would have be 2-3 miles away for something size of B25.

IMHO I would set icons for aircraft 10 for fighter, 20 for large bomber/cargo and 5 for ground targets.

(excuse my poor english skills...I just came from party and had few shots of vodka ;))

[Weta43]

Cheers SimFreak,

I've got a couple of days off coming up (shift worker) so I might jump in the car & try driving away from some cars / trucks & use the odometer to see at what distance I can / can't tell they're there anymore.

Like I said I live within a few km of an airport so I'll try the same there... though I've got an idea that the air is clearer higher up.

[SimFreak]

Cheers SimFreak,

I've got a couple of days off coming up (shift worker) so I might jump in the car & try driving away from some cars / trucks & use the odometer to see at what distance I can / can't tell they're there anymore.

Like I said I live within a few km of an airport so I'll try the same there... though I've got an idea that the air is clearer higher up.

Go to local airport and see if they have aero-club or such. Usually they have intro-rides for 30$ for 30 minutes. That is best way.

[britgliderpilot]

Cheers SimFreak,

I've got a couple of days off coming up (shift worker) so I might jump in the car & try driving away from some cars / trucks & use the odometer to see at what distance I can / can't tell they're there anymore.

Like I said I live within a few km of an airport so I'll try the same there... though I've got an idea that the air is clearer higher up.

 

 

As you get higher, your FoV gets MUCH bigger.

 

The sky and earth suddenly become very, very big places . . . . it's a bit more difficult to spot things than you might expect.

 

Was speaking to a former Jaguar pilot at Duxford the other weekend, and he said he was very impressed by how well Lomac did visibility for aircraft and ground targets. Shrug.

[Weta43]

I agree - it is a big place & I've flown enough as a passenger in comercial, light aircraft & helicopters to appreciate what you mean about there being a lot of sky up there to lose something in. The comment about the clean air - I think you can see further, but as I said there's more space to lose things in so any representation of this on the screen would have to be small enough to be hard to find unless you knew where to look.

Personaly, the few times I've tried turning the resolution of the screen down to test FPS rates at different settings, even those black blobs that show for a plane at long distance are too big. What I want is a LITTLE dot where a distant plane would be just visible, not a great big splodge or a coloured label.

I don't know how people put up with the huge text that you get at low screen settings...

Which brings me to a suggestion for 1.2 (or 1.11 if there were time) - that the label size be: 1/ user definable & 2/ independant of screen resolution, ie labels are a fixed percentage of the size of the screen. Also that they be definable server side so that servers can play with consistant custom labels (even if only to get rid of the blind spot between the "blob" and the low defn LOD becoming visible), and have the option of turning off team colours, rather than just "on" or "off".