Coming back and spotting ground targets

I agree DCS is less enjoyable because of the spoting problem..

To the super realism police.. NO its a 2D monitor it is NOT realsitic. As it has been stated, There are no shines, no depth of field, no odd contrast, , so the human EYE cant distinguish pixels on a flat screen the same way a pilot can.

No matter what you say, 1:1relation in a sim is NOT realistic. Spoting and specially losing sight in DCS is ridiculusly dificult.

For a sim with the MAIN emphasis on BVR it was fine.

Enter early Jets, it is imposible to dogfight... WWII a joke.

 

This guy explains it pretty well.

That was a great video. I come from the civilian side, so I'll give some of those references too... civilian pilots screw this up too.

From a freeware developer of which I am quite fond:

Video game designers know that children will be exited by 'video game rush'. They may impose the zoomed out picture above, which confuses children who do not understand parallax compliance, into believing that the target (in this case the touchdown zone) is 'far away'. Consequently when they roll in to the target it arrives in much less time than they expect, and it is more difficult to lose height without diving to high velocity than they childishly expect, because false ZOOM, different to HUMAN ACUITY, imposed false perspective, and 'persuaded' their brains to misinterpret range. and glideslope, and time to target. Children enjoy the rush, and in many video games imposing too little time to complete easy tasks is the only thing the video game has to offer. MSFS is a simulator, not a video game. If you intend to use it as a simulator you must learn how to control and impose Human FoV versus Human Acuity, and when each is compliant. All other ZOOM factors just add childish confusion that has no place in a simulation and demonstration of real world compliances.

 

This is why many real aircrew, while using desk top flight simulators, struggle to identify small grass airfields that do not have a childish green rectangle imposed under them, or ridiculously vibrant coloured runways, at the TIME they would manage to differentiate them from the background in real life. ZOOM = 1 = HUMAN ACUITY is actually necessary to the process of timely target or threat identification, from the compliant real world baseline range. There is no point learning the compliant operation of any of the VFR aeroplanes you have downloaded if you never learn to achieve compliant VFR = COMBAT operation of your *desk top* flight simulator. Which is why even real world aircrew need more than the real world manual for each aeroplane to be simulated.

 

In both jpgs above, the glideslope, and TIME to TARGET, are identical. Only one of them depicts competent use of a desk top simulator to impose HUMAN ACUITY at ZOOM =1 during manoeuvring in close proximity to objects of external importance. Incompetent flight simulation users who are too lazy to learn to vary ZOOM compliantly, constantly deliver false and conflicting range and TIME to TARGET cues to their brain, by randomising ZOOM. There are only two ZOOM compliances during competent use of desk top simulators. They are HUMAN FoV and HUMAN ACUITY.

It is now 2014 and there is no way for software developers to know the shape of your screen, the size of your screen (17 inch or 57 inch), the definition (600p / 720p / 1080p / 1200p / or more) of your screen, or the acuity of your corrected vision. 3D computing is the solution. These days we are each required to configure our personal display device to match our personal needs. Nobody can do that for us any more and that has absolutely nothing to do with flight simulation in particular.

That was a great video. I come from the civilian side, so I'll give some of those references too... civilian pilots screw this up too.

Setting a fixed FOV is only practical if you have triple screens or perhaps an ultra wide monitor. Your view will be too narrow especially for air combat awareness which isn’t applicable to a civ sim. Civ sims also aren’t concerned with identifying distant aircraft and ground targets.

The other major point this misses is resolution. That’s why even VR needs a zoom view because any display today isn’t equal to real 20/20 eyesight. On a 1080p screen you can’t even read the small text in the cockpit or the HUD without zooming in.

Again, in order to play DCS effectively you need to utilize the zoom view command, constantly varying between wide and narrow views as the situation requires.

Setting a fixed FOV is only practical if you have triple screens or perhaps an ultra wide monitor. Your view will be too narrow especially for air combat awareness which isn’t applicable to a civ sim. Civ sims also aren’t concerned with identifying distant aircraft and ground targets.

The other major point this misses is resolution. That’s why even VR needs a zoom view because any display today isn’t equal to real 20/20 eyesight. On a 1080p screen you can’t even read the small text in the cockpit or the HUD without zooming in.

Again, in order to play DCS effectively you need to utilize the zoom view command, constantly varying between wide and narrow views as the situation requires.

No, thx, I'm really fine with constant real fov even on single 27" 1080p.

No, thx, I'm really fine with constant real fov even on single 27" 1080p.

Suit yourself. That seems really narrow to me.

Have you tried to set real fov? Set it so that the HUD looks real size to you when you sit in front of the monitor. Then don't use zoom function at all. That way you have right angular sizes for the world and objects. If you need more fov, you either move closer to the monitor or get a bigger one and set fov again.

The tricky part to this is ensuring that the right fov is also the default fov so you don't start out wrong, and (obviously) never ever touching any kind of zoom controls because good luck getting back into the default position once you touch them. It would be nice if all airplanes actually had the same zoom positions and curves to the controls rather than having the middle position mean different FoV:s in different aircraft. :(

It also gets tricky because not all aircraft have a good, known, easily measured indicator that you can calibrate from — some have mil-sized HUD elements, for instance, but a fair bunch do not, and since zoom levels differ, you still have to go through and set each aircraft individually.

Just because the range of the zoom differs from aircraft to aircraft (20°-160°, 24°-156°, 32°-142° - which also gives a different default fov per aircraft and with that a different real zoom level) doesn't mean a fixed fov of lets say 34° is different between modules. If it would be different its because of either a wrong virtual head position or wrong dimensions in the module itself.

I am using dot labels for singleplayer since the ai has the advantage to know exactly where u are, all the time.

Just reading through this, I can see you are using 3x 50" But I couldnt see what the actual resolution you are running is? I moved from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 recently and the change to the game is amazing, you have a lot more ability to spot targets. running 3x 1080p is actually not going to get you that extra pixel depth so it would be worth if you can jumping your screen res up on one screen as a test to see what difference that makes.

I've always thought a pair of binos for the pilot might be good. Attack pilots IRL have been reduced to using these in Desert Storm and Allied Force (probably it's a regular thing for all I know) because vehicles on the ground were so hard to spot. A Harrier GR3 pilot from the Falklands war has also said that spotting even a hastily camouflaged enemy artillery position was nigh on impossible, even when the position was known from intel (and much ordnance was expanded on various hillsides trying to get them - which they never did BTW).

Does the Depth of Field settings button have anything to do with any of this?

It doesn't. The option affects only external camera views (and I'm not sure if all of them, or only F2).