Planes visibility and smooth online gameplay in DCS 2.0?

[Kwiatek]

DCS 2.0 is very close. Actually DCS got 2 main issues which affect expecially WW2 planes and early jet fighters:

 

1. Very poor planes visibility expecially at distances above 1.5-2 km when planes dissapeard

 

2. Online stutters and occasionaly huge fps drop.

 

If there sim want to evolve with new planes theathers etc. i would like to know if new engine ( EDGE ) will improve and fix these two main issues?

 

Maby someone got confirmed info about these?

[cichlidfan]

Maby someone got confirmed info about these?

 

The people that have 'confirmed info' are also under NDA's.

[Crumpp]

Very poor planes visibility expecially at distances above 1.5-2 km when planes dissapeard

 

It was pointed out that this very much depends on your hardware. I have a 1920x1080 monitor and the spotting is well...spot on.

 

Aircraft are hard to spot in the air. Very few have the "eagle eyes" required of an ace.

 

Adopt a proper scan technique just like is required in reality and the spotting is not that difficult. That is the key.

 

The spotting ranges in DCS remind me very much of what I see almost everyday spotting traffic alerts from ATC.

[Solty]

It was pointed out that this very much depends on your hardware. I have a 1920x1080 monitor and the spotting is well...spot on.

 

Aircraft are hard to spot in the air. Very few have the "eagle eyes" required of an ace.

 

Adopt a proper scan technique just like is required in reality and the spotting is not that difficult. That is the key.

 

The spotting ranges in DCS remind me very much of what I see almost everyday spotting traffic alerts from ATC.

 

I disagree.

 

 

@Kwiatek

+1

[Beagle One]

It was pointed out that this very much depends on your hardware. I have a 1920x1080 monitor and the spotting is well...spot on.

 

Aircraft are hard to spot in the air. Very few have the "eagle eyes" required of an ace.

 

Adopt a proper scan technique just like is required in reality and the spotting is not that difficult. That is the key.

 

The spotting ranges in DCS remind me very much of what I see almost everyday spotting traffic alerts from ATC.

I have to disagree. I have seen small aircraft from the right cockpit seat quite often and you will have no trouble to spot a light aircraft that is only half the size of a fighter at 2 km...and I have only 50% of eyesight left. Spotting on tft Screens is tenfold harder then the real deal for a lot of reson, one beeing that the world is not a twodimensional flat 24" square. No helping markers is not anything like "more real" its just self-chastisement. Spt the single pixel is far from "real".

[Gunrun_KS]

DCS 2.0 is very close. Actually DCS got 2 main issues which affect expecially WW2 planes and early jet fighters:

 

1. Very poor planes visibility expecially at distances above 1.5-2 km when planes dissapeard

 

2. Online stutters and occasionaly huge fps drop.

 

If there sim want to evolve with new planes theathers etc. i would like to know if new engine ( EDGE ) will improve and fix these two main issues?

 

Maby someone got confirmed info about these?

 

I wonder if the stutters have anything to do with hardware/server/internet issues? Ever since I upgraded for DCS it's been running like a dream. 90% of my gameplay is online.

[panzerd18]

My issue is the visual damage modelling of AI aircraft.

 

You can pump rounds and rounds of 50cal bullets into an AI aircraft and they keep on flying like as if on rails with no consequences. Quite the breaker of immersion. I loved how in IL-2 1946 you could blow off an aileron or hit a wing and it would cripple the enemies flight model due to the damage. You could hit the cockpit and kill the pilot, shoot away his elevators etc etc...

[Echo38]

I've always had a much easier time spotting fighter-sized aircraft in reality than in sim/games. And, yes, DCS is the sim in which I have had the most difficulty spotting things.

 

There are cases in reality where it's even harder to spot aircraft than it is in DCS (e.g. a white aircraft against cloud, coming at you head-on, while your eyes are focused on the cloud behind it, can get surprisingly close before your eyes stop "seeing around it"), but, in general, I've always found it much easier to spot aircraft in real life than in sims, including DCS.

 

Your eyes do have a handicap in spotting real aircraft compared to spotting aircraft on a P.C. monitor; in reality, your eyes must focus at a certain distance, which makes it hard to see apparently-small things that are farther or closer than that distance. However, your eyes also have large advantages in spotting real compared to spotting on the monitor. One of these is apparent image size; at normal zoom levels, in the sim, the apparent image size is much smaller than reality, because our (real-life) monitors are much narrower than our (real-life) FoV. This makes a big difference in ease of spotting. Zooming in (in the sim) can make the sim-objects have their real-life apparent image size, but then you lose almost all of your real-life FoV (in the sim).

 

Furthermore, your real eyes don't suffer from aliasing, which makes differentiating a small moving dot from the stuff around it much more difficult than it is in reality. There are other ways that the real eye is superior to the virtual one in P.C. flight sims, but I think most of them are self-evident.

Edited March 3, 2015 by Echo38

[Orionis]

DCS 2.0 very close? The way I understand it, it probably wont be out till 2016...

[Screamadelica]

DCS 2.0 very close? The way I understand it, it probably wont be out till 2016...

 

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! :no_sad:

 

It will be here soon, it will be here soon, it will be here soon, my precious, my precious, I must have it.

[USARStarkey]

It was pointed out that this very much depends on your hardware. I have a 1920x1080 monitor and the spotting is well...spot on.

 

Aircraft are hard to spot in the air. Very few have the "eagle eyes" required of an ace.

 

Adopt a proper scan technique just like is required in reality and the spotting is not that difficult. That is the key.

 

The spotting ranges in DCS remind me very much of what I see almost everyday spotting traffic alerts from ATC.

 

Funny how my F-16 pilot friend who also flys the P-51 and other war-birds doesn't agree with you. Ive showed him images of DCS on my 2560x1440p monitor and he has told me multiple times that its ludicrously unrealistic. In fact, every pilot Ive consulted as said spotting distances in practically every sim are worse than they are IRL. What is really interesting is that the distance he and his wing would spread from each other is about 2 times the distance I can see a plane in this game.........

[Random]

Around where I live light aircraft can be seen flying around. Generally unless close to an airfield they will be around half a mile up.

 

They look like an aircraft in DCS about 300 FEET away. If im right under them.

[Kwiatek]

Yes in all sims planes visibility is worse then IRL. Big problem is that all game is in scale and all objects ( planes) are much smaller then IRL.

 

But unfortunately DCS is way off in planes visiblilty. Truly speaking it is the worst from other sims ( CLOD, BOS, even old IL2).

[Kwiatek]

I wonder if the stutters have anything to do with hardware/server/internet issues? Ever since I upgraded for DCS it's been running like a dream. 90% of my gameplay is online.

 

Unfortunately these is game engine issuse to me.

 

During online gamaplay there are occasionally huge fps drop expecially when thre is somewhere a lot of shoting in the air. Fps could drop from 60 fps to even below 20 fps. It really broke online gamaplay.

 

All my mates got the same problem. We have different system ( some got I5 or i7, Gtx 770 or similar cards). Every experienced such issuse.

[Anatoli-Kagari9]

I believe stutters are mostly related to tracers and sound implementation of DCS 1

 

I strongly hope both get addressed for 2.0 !

 

Yesterady I had a miserable experience at the ACG Server, with just 6 online users. In my K4, stutters prevented me from performing a stable flight and maneuvers to either shoot at, or run away from the foes... :-(

[NeilWillis]

DCS 2.0 very close? The way I understand it, it probably wont be out till 2016...

 

I suggest your understanding is WAY off then.

 

Read the latest newsletter. It is progressing, shortly in Alpha, so where do you get your int from, cuz it sure as hell isn't the same as mine!

[airdoc]

I believe stutters are mostly related to tracers and sound implementation of DCS 1

 

I strongly hope both get addressed for 2.0 !

 

Yesterady I had a miserable experience at the ACG Server, with just 6 online users. In my K4, stutters prevented me from performing a stable flight and maneuvers to either shoot at, or run away from the foes... :-(

 

You 're right jcomm. Stutters are mainly related to tracers firing. This causes major fps drops offline and huge lag online.

 

Wags has already posted about this and said that this issue will be actively addressed once EDGE is out (there is no meaning in trying to fix it now, with the new engine on the horizon). Don't have the link to the post handy unfortunately.

[JST]

Yes in all sims planes visibility is worse then IRL. Big problem is that all game is in scale and all objects ( planes) are much smaller then IRL.

 

But unfortunately DCS is way off in planes visiblilty. Truly speaking it is the worst from other sims ( CLOD, BOS, even old IL2).

 

This, and the lack of rendered and displayed pixels to properly see an object in distance.

 

Proper LoD models only help as much. You can complain about view distance and visibility all you want, but the simple fact is that hardware just isn't there yet.

[otto]

Zooming in (in the sim) can make the sim-objects have their real-life apparent image size, but then you lose almost all of your real-life FoV (in the sim).

 

This is true.

 

+I've read about an israeli pilot folowing with his eyes a mig that was 11 km lower (on the deck).

 

-There was the israeli pilot Giora Epstein who could spot a a plane at a distance of 24 miles (44 km).

 

-Sometimes when i'm looking for an enemy fighter below i spot the shadow first. This is not realistic. A real plane would reflect a lot more light that it's shadow,would reflect sunlight, shine etc.

[macky]

+1 on the aircraft spotting.

[shagrat]

The "issue" with spotting is, DCS currently renders even the "one pixel" of a plane, only if its size exceeds the pixel according to calculation.

In game this means at FullHD resolution a fighter "disappears" at a range far closer than what you could spot in real life!

...if the plane isn't even represented as one single pixel at distances higher than say 2 miles you can't spot them, fact!

 

So either ED introduces LOD / dynamic scaling, whatever, to show at least one pixel up to a realistic distance, ignoring resolution. Or we need to go beyond 4k resolution to show at least one pixel at higher distances...

By the way, 4k using DSR with a Nvidia card helps a bit to spot fighters on FullHD monitors. :D

[NineLine]

I would hope it improves some in 2.0, it would make sense with better everything (least on the new maps anyways) that said, spotting is a skill as well its dependant on your ability to see colours. If any of you have ever taken a colour test, for example:

 

http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

 

You will understand there are many factors in play. Is your monitor calibrated? How old is your monitor (yes they change over time). It goes on and on... its not a simple case of making it better when there is such a broad range of equipment and quality of a person eyes. Then there are components of the sim itself.

 

Sure there are handicaps out there like scaling and dot systems, but its not so cut and dry and when you are talking a hardcore sim crowd, and trying to please everyone.

 

As well, the comparisons to real world get a little ridiculous at times as well. Most peace time flights, modern ones are are heavily aided by radar and other aids, its hard to claim these guys have super vision. I believe in a WWII scenario, with limit radar support, spotting was a tough thing. And there are many reports of guys being able to spot at greater distances than others. As well as the difference between spotting a plane and actually identifying it... so while it can improve in the sim, its not so cut and dry.

 

You ask a fighter pilot how far they can spot an aircraft, that fighter pilot trains and tunes himself to be an effective warrior, dont assume because joe fighter pilot can spot another fighter at a certain distance means you or I should automatically be able to do the same... goes back to my theory of IAS (Instant Ace Syndrome) some of these things come down to practice, from spotting to flying, to aerial combat (again, NOT saying it cant improve in the sim, just saying, there is more to it).

[Fri13]

The "issue" with spotting is, DCS currently renders even the "one pixel" of a plane, only if its size exceeds the pixel according to calculation.

In game this means at FullHD resolution a fighter "disappears" at a range far closer than what you could spot in real life!

...if the plane isn't even represented as one single pixel at distances higher than say 2 miles you can't spot them, fact!

 

So either ED introduces LOD / dynamic scaling, whatever, to show at least one pixel up to a realistic distance, ignoring resolution. Or we need to go beyond 4k resolution to show at least one pixel at higher distances...

By the way, 4k using DSR with a Nvidia card helps a bit to spot fighters on FullHD monitors. :D

I can spot planes from ~30km distance and even see is it a fighter or C-130. This trough Mig-21Bis dirty front glass and HUD.

The range is further before Mig radar shows a target.

 

Still I lose fighter in dogfight if I look elsewhere a second.

[shagrat]

I can spot planes from ~30km distance and even see is it a fighter or C-130. This trough Mig-21Bis dirty front glass and HUD.

The range is further before Mig radar shows a target.

 

Still I lose fighter in dogfight if I look elsewhere a second.

At what resolution? As I said DCS calculates the size of a plane and if the size is smaller than one pixel on screen, it won't show a pixel... unless you use some mod like ACG LOD mod.

[USARStarkey]

I can spot planes from ~30km distance and even see is it a fighter or C-130. This trough Mig-21Bis dirty front glass and HUD.

The range is further before Mig radar shows a target.

 

Still I lose fighter in dogfight if I look elsewhere a second.

 

I assume you are talking about seeing a fighter at 18miles (30km) in game, to which I respond: no you cannot.

 

 

@everyone talking about res as a fix: This has limits with the current rendering system. 4K is not a reasonable demand for everyone to have for one. Also, good luck seeing a single pixel ona 4K monitor. Part of the advantage of a high res display is that it is very hard to pick out single pixels. So while DCS might choose to render a single pixel at that res, you probably wont see it.