Runway width during final approach

Realism and immersion are perfectly married in ED products - To my mind, the best flight sims ever. One thing, though, causes me some irritation and does not correspond to my IRL piloting experience.

When you are on the final, during a visual landing attempt, it is OK that the runway is needle narrow at long distance, but it should progressively broaden up as you approach its threshold and when passing the inner marker it should be there, in front of you, broad and welcoming. To my mind this is not the case in DCS World (nor for that matter in any other PC flight sim I have come across) it stays extremely narrow all the way down till touch down and then ------ Whooops ----- all of the sudden it broadens up to a realistic width during the roll out. If you want, it is easily verified, by remembering the runway width at take-off - fly out and make a 180 followed by a low pass parallell and close to the runway - look down at it --- it does not have the same runway width as the one you just started from.

I have searched the forum for a thread on this subject but not found any. Does this mean, I am the only one to find this runway width/landing issue irritating?

I think you are spot on! :thumbup:

I think it's a matter of Field of View and the fact you can't squeeze too much in our monitors without all looking weird. Maybe with the advent of VR things will look a bit more real in this aspect.

AG-51_Razor and Zaelu,

Thank you for your comments. We are at least 3 wanting ED to look into this matter or at least give a comment to it.

AG-51_Razor and Zaelu,

 

Thank you for your comments. We are at least 3 wanting ED to look into this matter or at least give a comment to it.

As said, it depends on FOV. You set FOV yourself effectively by using zoom. If you set your FOV to a "realistic" setting in accordance to your monitor, you will feel like looking through a straw but the runway will look like you know from reality. So there is a tradeoff due to the fact we only have a relatively small monitor. This is simply a fact of life, sometimes you need to compromise. Or get a huuuge projected screen or VR.

Zaelu and Viersbovsky,

Thank you for the FOV explanation! So what happens at touch down is a simulator commanded zoom in to give us the realistic runway width experience. Have I understood it correctly?

I'm sure the runway has different lods like any other model, and these could be widened. Problem is they will have to do a lot of testing at each airbase to verify they look right and dont overlap other airfield objects as their lods change.

So there might be a small chance of some change like this being done, however if you think about it realistically it would not be worth the time and effort for ED to invest. Its not a bug and not a showstopper of any kind.

I welcome the opportunity for someone to come tell me I'm flat out wrong in all respects though. I may even invest some time into checking out the runways in a model viewer to see if anything can be done.

As said, it depends on FOV. You set FOV yourself effectively by using zoom. If you set your FOV to a "realistic" setting in accordance to your monitor, you will feel like looking through a straw but the runway will look like you know from reality. So there is a tradeoff due to the fact we only have a relatively small monitor. This is simply a fact of life, sometimes you need to compromise. Or get a huuuge projected screen or VR.

Damn I just lost a long post on peripheral vision. Grrr.

Anyway, years ago a mate invited me to the Qantas 747-400 sim at Mascot for a few hours and what is essential is peripheral vision.

I had a discussion with an owner at a scenery forum once and was promptly banned when he stated 3d was the second coming and I disagreed. :megalol:

My chopper used to like blowing landing lights and at night it was so much easier touching down on the runway using the edge lighting for altitude reference. Quite disorientating landing off airport using a next to useless taxi light. It's amazing how much we subconsciously rely on our peripheral vision.

I find that when I'm vertical in jets in DCS I'm always turning my head and looking out over the wing for references.

I doubt VR will help. AFAIK it's using the same 16:9/16:10 aspect. I have never tried occulus rift though.

So what happens at touch down is a simulator commanded zoom in to give us the realistic runway width experience. Have I understood it correctly?

Nope, I think you got it wrong. To me it seems that DCS works like it should and that effect you are describing is simply how high field of view looks like on a single monitor.

Check this video from around 4:50 forward. Does it look like what DCS looks like to you? At 4:50 the aircraft is around 1,4NM from the threshold and the runway looks more like you were 6NM out in real world. At 5:16 the aircraft is over approach lights which are 900m long and the runway still looks tiny. As you probably well know the height of the aircraft is around 200 feet at that point. The FOV of the GoPro which it was filmed with is quite similar to what DCS normally uses. So I think there is no trickery used in DCS as the same effect is present on a real world video filmed with high FOV lens.

[ame]

In SimRacing (especially in iRacing) world this is actually talked about quite a lot. There it is important to drive using the proper FOV so that everything looks the same while you are driving in your real car. When all the FOV is correct it is easier for your brains to understand. the upcoming corners, braking points, distances to other vehicles etc. Hence many simracers buy triple screens to see more to the sides while having the proper FOV and triple screens is usually the first thing more experienced persons suggest as a hardware upgrade for newcomers as it is such an important matter. I think the same thing is equally important in flight simming too so that the three degree glidepath actually looks the same as the three degree glidepath when you are flying for real.

Wildfire,

I agree, it is not a showstopper at all, just an irritating experience when realism is what we are looking for.

I dont know what a lod is or what it is short of, but I guess it has to do with simulator modelling and that you have experience working with such models. I also note that you see a way forward to at least experiment, searching for an improvement. I can only say, I would be very interested in reading/seeing the result of such an effort.

Wildfire,

 

I agree, it is not a showstopper at all, just an irritating experience when realism is what we are looking for.

I dont know what a lod is or what it is short of, but I guess it has to do with simulator modelling and that you have experience working with such models. I also note that you see a way forward to at least experiment, searching for an improvement. I can only say, I would be very interested in reading/seeing the result of such an effort.

LOD = Level Of Detail

Using three 42" screens and a total FOV of around 155 degrees, it seems perfectly natural to me.

This also means my virtual cockpit on the screen is very close to real size, almost 1:1 with that FOV

So, in short, DCS has the ability to look real, but it needs proper hardware to do it.

Sydost,

You are right - Your camera FOV IRL landing video has convinced me that there is nothing wrong with the DCS-simulator. Having watched it a few times, I find it looking pretty much as my described simulator landings. So Thank you very much! for a good educational video on the subject of FOV. The remedy to get more realism is then have access to a bigger display area, as pointed out by yourself and others on this thread.

Glad to be of service! :thumbup:

I am hoping to get a bigger display area too but need to first upgrade the computer.