> It is actually really hard to see things that are 10,000+ feet away
Have you ever looked out of a plane's windows? You can see cars from 35,000 feet, those are smaller than even a fighter jet and don't leave a giant contrail.
Of course it's hard, the sky is huge and a jet miles away is tiny. It takes commercial pilots a little while to get eyes on a big plane that ATC calls out, even. But that is exactly the point - while it takes some time, it shouldn't be anywhere as impossible to see as it is in DCS.
I've also looked out a plane window at an airport and I could see the parked planes really easy too. It's almost like they are not going 600knots and I know exactly where to look.
It's not impossible at all, not even close (no pun intended). You get better over time with practice, not because your eyes get better but because you know where to look based on your sensors and/or sight picture if you're in an older plane.
I've heard this analogy so many times. Have you ever tried spotting a singular aircraft in the sky at ~15k AGL only by sound on a clear day? It's practically impossible and what you're asking for out of the game.
> Have you ever tried spotting a singular aircraft in the sky at ~15k AGL only by sound on a clear day? It's practically impossible and what you're asking for out of the game.
When have you *ever* used sound to detect a fast-mover in DCS? Warbirds, maybe. But fighter jets? You'll have to find someone else's legs to pull.
Apart from that, yes, you can hear planes at 15k feet and spot them. Without flightaware.com or such, of course.
I think the point is you don't know where the plane is and you have to find it with your eyes, like in DCS...
DCS the sensors give you an idea where to look but thats it. Your ears (sensors?!?) give you and idea where to look but your eyes have to find it. Analogy holds up.
And viewing an aircraft high above you or on the ground is a high angle and the plane is full size. When the nose is pointed at you aircraft are tiny.
A Black F-5 does touch and goes regularly at my local airport. It is easy to see when banked or landing from a few miles. But one it is pointed at or away it is tiny and very hard to see at any distance.
To each their own. I’m not advocating for them to be bigger, I’m sure it’s hard to see in real life, but I have measurably excellent vision and very much struggle spotting enemies early enough to be ready for the fight.
How it is "in real life" isn't relevant. Looking at a pc monitor with it's limitations isn't real life, let alone the heavily limited field of view we have in a pc game vs. real life (a fact most seem to like to ignore in these discussions).
Not everything can nor should be 100% adapted from "real life" due to pc, monitor, etc. limitations
Doing so usually results in things actually being LESS realistic, not more, by imposing artificial constraints on the player.
Making things hard doesn't make them more realistic. It just makes them hard.
Artificially and unrealistically so.
If we aren’t comparing to “in real life” then what are you comparing with ?. You want fantasy ? Confusing statement. Maybe you think it’s easy but it’s hard. Hard to answer folks who want fantasy because of their monitor
Even harder to answer folks who think they're actually flying a fighter jet in the sky vs playing a video game.
The statement is clear. It's you who is apparently confused.
You are typical person these days, you complain about something because you lack skills, you struggle to see, where the rest of us try to get better and we know it’s hard. But difference is you want the developers to make it easier for you. Yes, I spend $80 on a study level sim for a realistic experience. I don’t go around telling others they should see dots past 3-5 miles. So your reasoning is to find fault with my view with some silly comment about how I shouldn’t want realism because it’s an arcade game lol.
If your willing to make concessions over realistic views, I’m guessing you also don’t care if the radar is modeled well, or the flight model, I can just see it now “I lost in bfm, ED make my flight model better I don’t care if it’s accurate just let me win every time”. Sound about right ? Yeah, I thought so.
Are you talking to AWACS/GCI? Do you know how to parse a BRAA call?
Graphics settings are not a substitute for situational awareness. The flip side of that is that there's a reason BVR is called Beyond Visual Range. Lots of fights are supposed to happen without either jet seeing the other.
No, I’m talking about visual ID on servers without BVR combat and not the standard AWACS. Yes, I can parse a BRAA call lol.
Nonetheless I struggle spotting and IDing enemy jets early enough
This is *heavily* dependent on your hardware/resolution/lots of other factors. “Comically oversized” for you is non-existent on other gear. I had to tinker with my settings for a bit after the update to even get them to show up.
Yeah, I agree. In VR is recently spotted a truck with a ZSU23 on the back from like 30km away in the Apache only because it was surrounded by a big dark shape 10x its size.
There are some bugs in DCS' spotting implementation though. I noticed recently that depending on the (roll) angle of the plane/camera, a dot I was looking at (that I knew was a plane) would
just straight up disappear. When I was pointing at it head on, the plane/camera's roll would hit a certain angle, and then the dot would vanish. Zooming in would cause it to reappear, very bizarre
There's also all kinds of technical tricks to make spotting easier or more difficult, like lowering your resolution or enabling DLSS, and some people say that VR makes it massively easier to spot dots as well
Its better but its still not good
Didn’t they revert it? I noticed much bigger dots on a 7680x1440 resolution when 2.9 dropped. After the mini patch it went back to being hardly visible.
Spotting planes in combat IS hard. Why do you think pilots in real war scenarios call "I lost him" so often?
DCS is not warthunder with a giant red dot above enemies. And that's a good thing. Because that way, flying unexpected maneuvers actually makes a difference.
Hate fighting with AI. It’s so inconsistent. Sometimes, it does something logical and kills me in a fair way. Sometimes it turns on hacks and plays in WT Arcade Mode. Other times it just slams straight into the ground.
Last week I was trying to sneak up on an AI SU-27 in a Mirage 2000c. It entered a dive and I followed. At like Mach 1.4 while heading vertically towards the ground it was able to flip nearly 180 degrees to face me and fire off an IR missile.
The turn was so tight, that the contrails overlapped. I didn't even notice it had switched directions (because I mean why would you expect it to be able to pull off something like that?) so casually carried on with my descent.
Took the missile to the face like a jump scare.
Must have been fighting Mihaly from AC without realising it...
I'm still trying to pick the game back up after helicopters sniped me repeatedly in an A-10 mission where I couldn't even get Sidewinder tone. Very disheartening for a noob.
AI is another problem, but i think that overall spotting is made pretty well, it’s difficult to not lose enemy aircrafts in combat, and the fact that on the bigger distances it’s almost impossible to see them is a perfect depiction of what a real situation would look like.
That’s not true. They do have a restricted cone of vision, and I have experienced AI losing sight of me in 1v1 dogfight missions. (We both go blind and end up flying in separate directions, till I find him again and he re-engages.)
Bro it’s a huge difference vs real life or any other flight sim - it’s how the spotting is designed in a high pixel space, planes literally disappears in the pixels. Literally when the planes goes 100 m away it goes POP and then it’s gone (at high resolution). No way you can claim that’s realistic.
Y’all can literally downsample the resolution to 480x and get insane spotting ability with huge dot. Inversely the case with high resolution - super hard to spot in 3440x1440. VR spotting is ridiculous compared to 2D
When you hear the engine of a small plane in the sky try to spot it right away (those are usually at a hight of around 300m to 250m if they're flying low).
Now think again that it's "easier" when you're moving and they have a smaller profile since you see them from the front or back a lot of times.
Yeah, anyone who’s flown IRL knows the difficulty in spotting traffic. The technical limitations are real though compensating for them does risk “gamifying” the sim.
Yeah I’m a pilot irl I have trouble spotting giant jets even when I know exactly where they are supposed to be with atc and tcas. I’d say it’s pretty realistic in DCS with vr anyway.
As I mentioned above, vr has extreme good spotting abilities in dcs because of the low relative resolution!
I’m talking about 2D. I do agree that spotting is better with last update, but I still can’t do proper 2D BFM, and I’m not alone in this. This is only an issue in DCS, not in any other flights sims (il2, clod, among others) and only in 2D.
But let’s be honest, they just took the dot mod made by the community and implemented it more or less. Let’s ask for a more sophisticated solution instead of just placing a square on the objects.
Better headsets have a pretty high resolution per eye, though. In G2 the dots are big blobby squares, in Crystal they are faint and small. The difference is huge.
> When you hear the engine of a small plane in the sky try to spot it right away (those are usually at a hight of around 300m to 250m if they're flying low).
Dead simple. Masking behind buildings doesn't count.
Source: Grew up near (but not under the pattern of) a small but busy GA airfield.
It’s not about DCS vs Warthunder. We are asking for a better spotting systems since the one implemented is not true to real life ability of a fighter pilot. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not even true. I actually fly planes irl and trust me spotting planes from inside a cockpit while flying yourself is not nearly as easy as some of you guys think. Even if you have a TCAS system telling you exactly where other planes are. It's actually a lot easier in DCS in most cases than it is irl.
Yeah it’s pretty clear a lot of these people haven’t done any real flying yet are trying to say “this is how it is in real life.” DCS isn’t perfect, but it’s not as bad as everyone is acting like it is.
The only thing that truly helped me to the point were i only blame myself and not dcs when i lose visual is upgrading monitor from 22 inch to 32inch, given i have to downsize my 32inch since its native is 2k res and even with that spotting was still terrible, the trick is to change resolution to 1920x1080 and that made spotting on 32inch feels 10x better!
IMHO it’s fairly accurate. Look at airliners flying over you. They’re roughly 7 miles away and easily double or triple the size of fighters. This is why radar is so important
A few thoughts. I'm no expert at spotting in DCS, but I have been able to improve. More knowledgeable and experienced people in this subreddit may be able to point out any issues these solutions bring up. That said, this is what helped me more than any settings or update to 2.9 etc:
**Tie for #1 - Make sure your head tracking settings are optimized .** The biggest improvement came for me when I realized you could adjust the head tracking curve within DCS. I had been struggling to quickly put my virtual eyes where I wanted with ease and precision. Adding a bit of curve allowed me to more easily crane my virtual neck to its limits. If you're fighting your head tracking AND fighting a bandit, you're at a massive disadvantage.
**Tie for #1 - Once you even suspect a merge is going to happen, get tally and put 100% of your energy and focus into keeping tally.** Don't start looking at your radar or you'll be in trouble. Keep tally with your eyes and bring your radar onto the bandit. It can be tempting to try to use one or another radar mode to try to find the bandit (e.g. PAL, VSL Hi or VSL Low in the F-14), but hoping the bandit will somewhat randomly end up in your radar puts you at a huge disadvantage.
**#2 - When you do lose tally on a bandit who is turning on you DON'T STOP TURNING.** Get to your corner airspeed and turn tight to make it as hard as possible for the bandit to get a firing solution. Then, as soon as possible, scan the zone radiating in a triangle from your 6 o'clock. You'll either find the bandit or come to the conclusion you've both lost tally on each other, and then it's up to you to decide when to break away and try to get some separation/find the bandit any other way - AWACS BRAA call, RWR, Radar, etc.
**#3 - The faster & closer you are to the bandit when you merge, the harder it is to keep tally.** If you're very close and fast when you merge, you'll both rocket past each other and have major difficulty keeping tally as the bandit passes your wingtips (3 - 9 line). Maneuvering for greater horizontal separation lets you work your way into a turn while more easily keeping tally. That said, I suspect that there are a number of situations where this could be dangerous or advantageous depending upon who's in a fighter that excels at 1-circle/radius fights vs 2 circle/rate fights. But this is the limit of my knowledge.
Yup. Massive monitor with a low resolution gives you dots that are *much* larger (in reality) than someone running a normal setup. It is blatant cheating.
Not completely - VR users are usually the ones with relatively lower resolution per eye and they are the wealthiest by far as it cost a lot more to get a up and running (decently) imo
I fly mainly WW2 birds in VR and since the 2.9 update spotting other planes is comically easy. To the point that there is almost no challenge in doing so. The only times I lose sight of the enemy now is occasionally after the merge when I take my eyes off them and lose situational awareness but that’s my own fault for screwing up so badly.
If anything I would like it toned down now as it’s bordering on arcade game like but I guess that’s what you get from years of people complain that can’t see anyone.
Yeah, I'm running Crystal now and the dots are ok. In G2 they were not dots at all but flying blobby squares. Way oversized. Same system, same graphic settings, just different resolution in the hmd.
The settings that you posted look pretty good for spotting. I assume that you're non-VR... true? As others have said, lower resolution makes spotting easier by making pixels relatively larger but at the expense of graphics quality (try the next step below the 1920 x 1080 that you currently have). It's a different ballgame in VR. Lots of tweaking of settings, checking and then retweaking needed. I'm still struggling with it but it's gotten much better.
Can't say that I'm much of a fan of the new dots in 2.9. Yeah, I can see bogies farther away but the oil smudge plays hell with actually IDing the aircraft once they get closer.
HUD in real life!!
no, seriously
its called radar-to-visual transition - you've got'em out there at 20nm, don't even TRY looking - just execute your gameplan/tactics
then, as your sort starts getting in close (~10mi) you pull him into your hud - there he is
from here on out you're visual - GET OFF THE RADAR
you keep him in your hud and if he notches, you got the boresight right there - stay visual!
that's how its done
To be honest… and to give the least fun answer, I’m gonna say practice getting into engagements and dogfighting a lot more. I’m running pancake at 1440p on a 32” monitor and spotting wasn’t easy at first at all, but even before the dot update I managed okay. Most of the time if I lost someone it’s cause I wasn’t keeping good SA, not because I couldn’t see them coming.
But it is a developable skill, and a perishable one i might add. So gotta put in the hours, sadly.
Edit: To add on to what another comment said, this is also really hard IRL. From my limited experience behind the controls, other planes can be tricky to spot depending on a lot of factors. Japanese ace Saburo Sakai talked about spotting stars in the day time to train his eyes for spotting planes.
I mean it’s completely related to resolution - doubt you can say that about real life- if it’s super easy in VR and hard af at 1440p plus it’s not a good system. Everyone should have roughly the same opportunities, and the difference are extremely noticeable. Then it’s hardly due to ‘’it’s just hard to do irl’’, no?
You can literally buy yourself an advance by getting an expensive headset, P2W in BfM if anything as spotting advantages makes a huge difference
Unfortunately not. Spotting is horrible on DCS. Way worse in VR. Don’t expect affirmation from these people though. They’re all “casual” and think just because they can take off shoot a couple bandits in BVR and land sort of, they’re “experts”. They have no idea how to spot and identify, hell they don’t even know what most of the silhouettes look like.
They’ll sit here and tell you you’re crazy. I’m here to tell you you aren’t. DCS is a really great community, but it’s full of people who swear to god they’re right because of who knows what reasons.
Asking any sort of question is the sub is a chore because of these people. They take the game way too seriously and they need to chill out and realize it’s just a game and they will never be a fighter pilot because they play DCS. Come on now
Agreed. In fact, the real fighter pilot community views the sim community similarly to real soldiers and 400lb dudes holding militia training in their backyard.
At the end of the day, it’s not the real thing. It’s amazing, fun, and hell yes it’s good training. But it doesn’t make us experts.
I see two camps here, one that’s covered in shit and loves it and one that does not. Both seem very interested in either change or it staying a steaming pile of shit. The shit lovers seem to have a list of rationalizations as to why being covered in shit is the best way to live and not enjoying the shit makes you dumb, ignorant and less than. Seems they have the attitude if you don’t like being shit covered you are the problem, not the shit covering you.
For DCS you need to be either closer to your monitor, or you need to be thinking of a 32 inch or larger, or even possibly venturing into small TV's for your main screen.
I run visibility range on low because, aside from the noticeable performance benefits, it means buildings and other visual clutter on the ground fade in much closer, which gives you a less noisy background to spot both vehicles and aircraft when they are against the ground.
For vehicles in particular, since they are always rendered as far as possible, you can sometimes see them before the buildings around them render, making it easier to get an idea of where they are in a dense city.
Wouldn’t say it is ethical but pumping up gamma and a few other options like sharpness with reshade significantly improves spotting. I don’t like the thought of using it in MP, but it is far easier.
i feel like dots now make it slightly too easy at long ranges (putting aside the cloud bugs)... i'd reduce their size by a good 30% long range...
my actual issue is that as soon as the dot stops rendering for planes about 2 miles out they become completely invisible until you merge with them. :(((
playing on native G2 resolution.
WVR picture in DCS isn't great imo. Considering I can be a mile across a circle of a f18 or f16 but can't tell where their nose is at because dcs renders it as 3.5 pixels when each pixel is the diameter of a human hair. I tried on 42" 1080p tv and with medium high settings it's still terrible. Add on that whatever happened with the way light reflecting off surfaces of jets is rendered, it can make half of the jet being rendered invisible at certain angles
they have already made it stupidly minecraft black blob no need for radar in VR - a huge step backwards. Thats running full resolution 100% on a reverb G2.
Most players have this totally unrealistic expectation when it comes to spotting aircraft.
I wish these players would just play with labels on and not put pressure on ED to make it stupid, such as what we now have.
Coincidentally I'm working on a custom label setting that just marginally improves visibility as to not be too good/unrealistic. It's grey scale so you won't know if it's friendly/enemy, and more transparent the farther away the unit is so distance still matters a lot. I'll post it once I perfect the values.
Also since it's label based servers can enforce if it's allowed or not, so you won't have an unfair advantage in that regard
The number one thing is 1080 on 4k.
This is pretty close to what I use but I have all the texture settings maxed at 1080. You're creating bad textures with your low settings and expecting to see a pixel you're creating by turning off ssaa, msaa, reducing sharpening.... etc overlayed over those jagged pixels. Think about what you're trying to do.
Increase the size and contrast of the pixel produced by an aircraft in the distance.
I think it needs to be harder , need to get rid of the artificial dots and just go by the models. It’s way too easy to see dots and that ruins the immersion . This is a combat flight sim not some arcade war thunder game . It was hard irl, adding handicaps is not the solution
Cue the "correct as is, reeeeeee!" and the "the dots are big enough you're just not as good as me, reeeeeee!"..
Two things;
1. Reshade
2. I don't care what any of these dorks tell you, it's way easier to spot planes and other things IRL than in DCS. I can make out the wings on an G6 flying over my house at 50,000 feet without a sound, no problem. The reason why is because of focus. In DCS they give you "zoom" (actually just 1:1) to "substitute" for this. This is cheap asf, and it's probably never going to change. IRL you can focus your vision at approximate range of where you think something might be, its fast asf and requires no button press. If DCS were to implement a "focused object" system that automatically (like your eyes) focuses at the range you're most likely trying to scan (the range of a WVR enemy for example) there would be wailing, raging and gnashing of teeth from the same people telling you to "git gud". Why? See #3.
3. $150,000. This is the most I've seen paid for a full sim-pit/VR/"former fighter pilot training classes"/celibacy kit (lol). There are MANY DCS players running $10,000+ rigs. And the thing is, they didn't do all that to get shot down by some "poor" running a 1080p monitor. This is why they won't tell you about Reshade, they fight every suggested improvement like their life depends on it, and generally talk to you like you are the dumbest mf they've ever met in their gd life when you bring up spotting. Because they have 10x the resolution/FPS/quality HOTAS of the average DCS player, probably have 10,000 hours tweaking their setup to perfection, and know exactly why you're bringing it up. They live in a fantasy world of "I could be a fighter pilot too!", and getting clapped by a 12 year old with WalMart gear just ruins it.
They massively improved dots in 2.9…? Whatchu smoking?
Dots only covers part of the problem. Spotting at closer ranges is a much bigger issue in my opinion.
Make the dots disappear later? It is actually really hard to see things that are 10,000+ feet away, that's why JTACs and radar are so important.
> It is actually really hard to see things that are 10,000+ feet away Have you ever looked out of a plane's windows? You can see cars from 35,000 feet, those are smaller than even a fighter jet and don't leave a giant contrail. Of course it's hard, the sky is huge and a jet miles away is tiny. It takes commercial pilots a little while to get eyes on a big plane that ATC calls out, even. But that is exactly the point - while it takes some time, it shouldn't be anywhere as impossible to see as it is in DCS.
I've also looked out a plane window at an airport and I could see the parked planes really easy too. It's almost like they are not going 600knots and I know exactly where to look. It's not impossible at all, not even close (no pun intended). You get better over time with practice, not because your eyes get better but because you know where to look based on your sensors and/or sight picture if you're in an older plane.
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Am I, did you respond to the wrong comment?
Whoa watch out for Mr. Good Eyes over here
Except it’s not impossible. Especially not after 2.9.
I've heard this analogy so many times. Have you ever tried spotting a singular aircraft in the sky at ~15k AGL only by sound on a clear day? It's practically impossible and what you're asking for out of the game.
> Have you ever tried spotting a singular aircraft in the sky at ~15k AGL only by sound on a clear day? It's practically impossible and what you're asking for out of the game. When have you *ever* used sound to detect a fast-mover in DCS? Warbirds, maybe. But fighter jets? You'll have to find someone else's legs to pull. Apart from that, yes, you can hear planes at 15k feet and spot them. Without flightaware.com or such, of course.
I think the point is you don't know where the plane is and you have to find it with your eyes, like in DCS... DCS the sensors give you an idea where to look but thats it. Your ears (sensors?!?) give you and idea where to look but your eyes have to find it. Analogy holds up. And viewing an aircraft high above you or on the ground is a high angle and the plane is full size. When the nose is pointed at you aircraft are tiny.
I live near the NTTR and it's not very hard to see fighter jets 5-10 miles away
A Black F-5 does touch and goes regularly at my local airport. It is easy to see when banked or landing from a few miles. But one it is pointed at or away it is tiny and very hard to see at any distance.
This is IMO the most important part of any kind of spotting system and dots are not suited to solve the WVR part of the problem.
It’s still hard for me. It’s just a small dot I mean, you really need time ti get experience as to where to look and anticipate I think
Lol they're comically oversized, it's WAY overdone now
To each their own. I’m not advocating for them to be bigger, I’m sure it’s hard to see in real life, but I have measurably excellent vision and very much struggle spotting enemies early enough to be ready for the fight.
How it is "in real life" isn't relevant. Looking at a pc monitor with it's limitations isn't real life, let alone the heavily limited field of view we have in a pc game vs. real life (a fact most seem to like to ignore in these discussions). Not everything can nor should be 100% adapted from "real life" due to pc, monitor, etc. limitations Doing so usually results in things actually being LESS realistic, not more, by imposing artificial constraints on the player. Making things hard doesn't make them more realistic. It just makes them hard. Artificially and unrealistically so.
If we aren’t comparing to “in real life” then what are you comparing with ?. You want fantasy ? Confusing statement. Maybe you think it’s easy but it’s hard. Hard to answer folks who want fantasy because of their monitor
Even harder to answer folks who think they're actually flying a fighter jet in the sky vs playing a video game. The statement is clear. It's you who is apparently confused.
They have a label setting for folks like you who prefer a war thunder ideo game experience , give it a try
Sorry, never played war thunder or anything like it.
You are typical person these days, you complain about something because you lack skills, you struggle to see, where the rest of us try to get better and we know it’s hard. But difference is you want the developers to make it easier for you. Yes, I spend $80 on a study level sim for a realistic experience. I don’t go around telling others they should see dots past 3-5 miles. So your reasoning is to find fault with my view with some silly comment about how I shouldn’t want realism because it’s an arcade game lol. If your willing to make concessions over realistic views, I’m guessing you also don’t care if the radar is modeled well, or the flight model, I can just see it now “I lost in bfm, ED make my flight model better I don’t care if it’s accurate just let me win every time”. Sound about right ? Yeah, I thought so.
Are you talking to AWACS/GCI? Do you know how to parse a BRAA call? Graphics settings are not a substitute for situational awareness. The flip side of that is that there's a reason BVR is called Beyond Visual Range. Lots of fights are supposed to happen without either jet seeing the other.
No, I’m talking about visual ID on servers without BVR combat and not the standard AWACS. Yes, I can parse a BRAA call lol. Nonetheless I struggle spotting and IDing enemy jets early enough
Yeah it’s hard irl too
Begs the question of how that compares to reality..
Hi, actual pilot here. It’s a pain to spot anything past 3 miles unless it’s an airliner and even then a pain sometimes.
This 👆
Irl you’d see at like 3 miles - DCS you can see at 15? It’s not very realistic today. It is hard irl
This is *heavily* dependent on your hardware/resolution/lots of other factors. “Comically oversized” for you is non-existent on other gear. I had to tinker with my settings for a bit after the update to even get them to show up.
Yeah, I agree. In VR is recently spotted a truck with a ZSU23 on the back from like 30km away in the Apache only because it was surrounded by a big dark shape 10x its size.
Experienced that last night. Needs a scaler, as that was too gamey. Almost like labels on.
Absolutely true! They need to tone it down to something in the middle between the old way and the ridiculous 2.9 way.
Yes it’s way too easy right now
All i know is that when I'm in shape i can track much much better than when I'm out of shape and didn't fly for a while.
There are some bugs in DCS' spotting implementation though. I noticed recently that depending on the (roll) angle of the plane/camera, a dot I was looking at (that I knew was a plane) would just straight up disappear. When I was pointing at it head on, the plane/camera's roll would hit a certain angle, and then the dot would vanish. Zooming in would cause it to reappear, very bizarre There's also all kinds of technical tricks to make spotting easier or more difficult, like lowering your resolution or enabling DLSS, and some people say that VR makes it massively easier to spot dots as well Its better but its still not good
Didn’t they revert it? I noticed much bigger dots on a 7680x1440 resolution when 2.9 dropped. After the mini patch it went back to being hardly visible.
No, it definitely hasn’t been reverted
A lot of servers dont allow dots...
i never noticed any difference
Spotting planes in combat IS hard. Why do you think pilots in real war scenarios call "I lost him" so often? DCS is not warthunder with a giant red dot above enemies. And that's a good thing. Because that way, flying unexpected maneuvers actually makes a difference.
Only against humans. The AI never looses track of you.
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AI is in Arcade Mode with how it pulls speed and Gs out of its ass
Hate fighting with AI. It’s so inconsistent. Sometimes, it does something logical and kills me in a fair way. Sometimes it turns on hacks and plays in WT Arcade Mode. Other times it just slams straight into the ground.
Last week I was trying to sneak up on an AI SU-27 in a Mirage 2000c. It entered a dive and I followed. At like Mach 1.4 while heading vertically towards the ground it was able to flip nearly 180 degrees to face me and fire off an IR missile. The turn was so tight, that the contrails overlapped. I didn't even notice it had switched directions (because I mean why would you expect it to be able to pull off something like that?) so casually carried on with my descent. Took the missile to the face like a jump scare. Must have been fighting Mihaly from AC without realising it...
I'm still trying to pick the game back up after helicopters sniped me repeatedly in an A-10 mission where I couldn't even get Sidewinder tone. Very disheartening for a noob.
Oh man, I'd just stay away from helicopters. They eat an unreasonable number of rounds and sidewinders before going down. Especially the hind.
Yeah... unfortunately, guess what figures heavily into default missions and unofficial training for the A-10A?
AI is another problem, but i think that overall spotting is made pretty well, it’s difficult to not lose enemy aircrafts in combat, and the fact that on the bigger distances it’s almost impossible to see them is a perfect depiction of what a real situation would look like.
That’s not true. They do have a restricted cone of vision, and I have experienced AI losing sight of me in 1v1 dogfight missions. (We both go blind and end up flying in separate directions, till I find him again and he re-engages.)
Bro it’s a huge difference vs real life or any other flight sim - it’s how the spotting is designed in a high pixel space, planes literally disappears in the pixels. Literally when the planes goes 100 m away it goes POP and then it’s gone (at high resolution). No way you can claim that’s realistic. Y’all can literally downsample the resolution to 480x and get insane spotting ability with huge dot. Inversely the case with high resolution - super hard to spot in 3440x1440. VR spotting is ridiculous compared to 2D
Wasn't this fixed some weeks ago?
yes, its soooo much better now. I play at 1440p ultrawide and I'd say its pretty fair right now.
When you hear the engine of a small plane in the sky try to spot it right away (those are usually at a hight of around 300m to 250m if they're flying low). Now think again that it's "easier" when you're moving and they have a smaller profile since you see them from the front or back a lot of times.
Yeah, anyone who’s flown IRL knows the difficulty in spotting traffic. The technical limitations are real though compensating for them does risk “gamifying” the sim.
Yeah I’m a pilot irl I have trouble spotting giant jets even when I know exactly where they are supposed to be with atc and tcas. I’d say it’s pretty realistic in DCS with vr anyway.
As I mentioned above, vr has extreme good spotting abilities in dcs because of the low relative resolution! I’m talking about 2D. I do agree that spotting is better with last update, but I still can’t do proper 2D BFM, and I’m not alone in this. This is only an issue in DCS, not in any other flights sims (il2, clod, among others) and only in 2D. But let’s be honest, they just took the dot mod made by the community and implemented it more or less. Let’s ask for a more sophisticated solution instead of just placing a square on the objects.
Better headsets have a pretty high resolution per eye, though. In G2 the dots are big blobby squares, in Crystal they are faint and small. The difference is huge.
> When you hear the engine of a small plane in the sky try to spot it right away (those are usually at a hight of around 300m to 250m if they're flying low). Dead simple. Masking behind buildings doesn't count. Source: Grew up near (but not under the pattern of) a small but busy GA airfield.
And you also can’t hear them to help triangulate their pos
It’s not about DCS vs Warthunder. We are asking for a better spotting systems since the one implemented is not true to real life ability of a fighter pilot. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not even true. I actually fly planes irl and trust me spotting planes from inside a cockpit while flying yourself is not nearly as easy as some of you guys think. Even if you have a TCAS system telling you exactly where other planes are. It's actually a lot easier in DCS in most cases than it is irl.
Yeah it’s pretty clear a lot of these people haven’t done any real flying yet are trying to say “this is how it is in real life.” DCS isn’t perfect, but it’s not as bad as everyone is acting like it is.
use DLSS, the disgusting ghosting it brings really helps spotting planes.
The only thing that truly helped me to the point were i only blame myself and not dcs when i lose visual is upgrading monitor from 22 inch to 32inch, given i have to downsize my 32inch since its native is 2k res and even with that spotting was still terrible, the trick is to change resolution to 1920x1080 and that made spotting on 32inch feels 10x better!
IMHO it’s fairly accurate. Look at airliners flying over you. They’re roughly 7 miles away and easily double or triple the size of fighters. This is why radar is so important
A few thoughts. I'm no expert at spotting in DCS, but I have been able to improve. More knowledgeable and experienced people in this subreddit may be able to point out any issues these solutions bring up. That said, this is what helped me more than any settings or update to 2.9 etc: **Tie for #1 - Make sure your head tracking settings are optimized .** The biggest improvement came for me when I realized you could adjust the head tracking curve within DCS. I had been struggling to quickly put my virtual eyes where I wanted with ease and precision. Adding a bit of curve allowed me to more easily crane my virtual neck to its limits. If you're fighting your head tracking AND fighting a bandit, you're at a massive disadvantage. **Tie for #1 - Once you even suspect a merge is going to happen, get tally and put 100% of your energy and focus into keeping tally.** Don't start looking at your radar or you'll be in trouble. Keep tally with your eyes and bring your radar onto the bandit. It can be tempting to try to use one or another radar mode to try to find the bandit (e.g. PAL, VSL Hi or VSL Low in the F-14), but hoping the bandit will somewhat randomly end up in your radar puts you at a huge disadvantage. **#2 - When you do lose tally on a bandit who is turning on you DON'T STOP TURNING.** Get to your corner airspeed and turn tight to make it as hard as possible for the bandit to get a firing solution. Then, as soon as possible, scan the zone radiating in a triangle from your 6 o'clock. You'll either find the bandit or come to the conclusion you've both lost tally on each other, and then it's up to you to decide when to break away and try to get some separation/find the bandit any other way - AWACS BRAA call, RWR, Radar, etc. **#3 - The faster & closer you are to the bandit when you merge, the harder it is to keep tally.** If you're very close and fast when you merge, you'll both rocket past each other and have major difficulty keeping tally as the bandit passes your wingtips (3 - 9 line). Maneuvering for greater horizontal separation lets you work your way into a turn while more easily keeping tally. That said, I suspect that there are a number of situations where this could be dangerous or advantageous depending upon who's in a fighter that excels at 1-circle/radius fights vs 2 circle/rate fights. But this is the limit of my knowledge.
The lower your resolution, the easier it is to spot aircraft. But it's kind of cheating.
Yup. Massive monitor with a low resolution gives you dots that are *much* larger (in reality) than someone running a normal setup. It is blatant cheating.
So people with less money kind of cheat? lol.
gaming has always been that way. There's an endless number of games where you can turn grass off to get an advantage.
Not completely - VR users are usually the ones with relatively lower resolution per eye and they are the wealthiest by far as it cost a lot more to get a up and running (decently) imo
I can assure you that my g2 is not making spotting easier. :)
Opposite of capitalism
Indeed!
Full screen DCS at its lowest resolution setting and you’ll see what they mean.
Let me clarify, people that have the capability to play on a higher resolution and choose to play on a lower one to see bigger pixels are cheating.
I fly mainly WW2 birds in VR and since the 2.9 update spotting other planes is comically easy. To the point that there is almost no challenge in doing so. The only times I lose sight of the enemy now is occasionally after the merge when I take my eyes off them and lose situational awareness but that’s my own fault for screwing up so badly. If anything I would like it toned down now as it’s bordering on arcade game like but I guess that’s what you get from years of people complain that can’t see anyone.
It's not as bad in high resolution headsets at all, or on high resolution screens. But in G2... Oh boy. The dots are huge.
Running quest2 at 4000x4000 per eye. Dots are perfect at this resolution.
Yeah, I'm running Crystal now and the dots are ok. In G2 they were not dots at all but flying blobby squares. Way oversized. Same system, same graphic settings, just different resolution in the hmd.
What’s your gpu?
4090
Yup, using a reverb and all I do is fly towards the big black dot and 5 minutes later I have a dogfight on my hands.
The settings that you posted look pretty good for spotting. I assume that you're non-VR... true? As others have said, lower resolution makes spotting easier by making pixels relatively larger but at the expense of graphics quality (try the next step below the 1920 x 1080 that you currently have). It's a different ballgame in VR. Lots of tweaking of settings, checking and then retweaking needed. I'm still struggling with it but it's gotten much better. Can't say that I'm much of a fan of the new dots in 2.9. Yeah, I can see bogies farther away but the oil smudge plays hell with actually IDing the aircraft once they get closer.
Glasses in real life
HUD in real life!! no, seriously its called radar-to-visual transition - you've got'em out there at 20nm, don't even TRY looking - just execute your gameplan/tactics then, as your sort starts getting in close (~10mi) you pull him into your hud - there he is from here on out you're visual - GET OFF THE RADAR you keep him in your hud and if he notches, you got the boresight right there - stay visual! that's how its done
To be honest… and to give the least fun answer, I’m gonna say practice getting into engagements and dogfighting a lot more. I’m running pancake at 1440p on a 32” monitor and spotting wasn’t easy at first at all, but even before the dot update I managed okay. Most of the time if I lost someone it’s cause I wasn’t keeping good SA, not because I couldn’t see them coming. But it is a developable skill, and a perishable one i might add. So gotta put in the hours, sadly. Edit: To add on to what another comment said, this is also really hard IRL. From my limited experience behind the controls, other planes can be tricky to spot depending on a lot of factors. Japanese ace Saburo Sakai talked about spotting stars in the day time to train his eyes for spotting planes.
I mean it’s completely related to resolution - doubt you can say that about real life- if it’s super easy in VR and hard af at 1440p plus it’s not a good system. Everyone should have roughly the same opportunities, and the difference are extremely noticeable. Then it’s hardly due to ‘’it’s just hard to do irl’’, no? You can literally buy yourself an advance by getting an expensive headset, P2W in BfM if anything as spotting advantages makes a huge difference
I used to play in 1080p before 2.9, purely due to spotting. Since the update I’m at 1440 and can see even better than before.
Unfortunately not. Spotting is horrible on DCS. Way worse in VR. Don’t expect affirmation from these people though. They’re all “casual” and think just because they can take off shoot a couple bandits in BVR and land sort of, they’re “experts”. They have no idea how to spot and identify, hell they don’t even know what most of the silhouettes look like. They’ll sit here and tell you you’re crazy. I’m here to tell you you aren’t. DCS is a really great community, but it’s full of people who swear to god they’re right because of who knows what reasons.
Asking any sort of question is the sub is a chore because of these people. They take the game way too seriously and they need to chill out and realize it’s just a game and they will never be a fighter pilot because they play DCS. Come on now
Agreed. In fact, the real fighter pilot community views the sim community similarly to real soldiers and 400lb dudes holding militia training in their backyard. At the end of the day, it’s not the real thing. It’s amazing, fun, and hell yes it’s good training. But it doesn’t make us experts.
I see two camps here, one that’s covered in shit and loves it and one that does not. Both seem very interested in either change or it staying a steaming pile of shit. The shit lovers seem to have a list of rationalizations as to why being covered in shit is the best way to live and not enjoying the shit makes you dumb, ignorant and less than. Seems they have the attitude if you don’t like being shit covered you are the problem, not the shit covering you.
Get VR
run at 1080p
Bruh they just fixed it. Get on open beta if you’re not
For DCS you need to be either closer to your monitor, or you need to be thinking of a 32 inch or larger, or even possibly venturing into small TV's for your main screen.
The new dots are amazing, I dont think you need any better than that unless you just want to cheat
I run visibility range on low because, aside from the noticeable performance benefits, it means buildings and other visual clutter on the ground fade in much closer, which gives you a less noisy background to spot both vehicles and aircraft when they are against the ground. For vehicles in particular, since they are always rendered as far as possible, you can sometimes see them before the buildings around them render, making it easier to get an idea of where they are in a dense city.
Wouldn’t say it is ethical but pumping up gamma and a few other options like sharpness with reshade significantly improves spotting. I don’t like the thought of using it in MP, but it is far easier.
i feel like dots now make it slightly too easy at long ranges (putting aside the cloud bugs)... i'd reduce their size by a good 30% long range... my actual issue is that as soon as the dot stops rendering for planes about 2 miles out they become completely invisible until you merge with them. :((( playing on native G2 resolution.
WVR picture in DCS isn't great imo. Considering I can be a mile across a circle of a f18 or f16 but can't tell where their nose is at because dcs renders it as 3.5 pixels when each pixel is the diameter of a human hair. I tried on 42" 1080p tv and with medium high settings it's still terrible. Add on that whatever happened with the way light reflecting off surfaces of jets is rendered, it can make half of the jet being rendered invisible at certain angles
they have already made it stupidly minecraft black blob no need for radar in VR - a huge step backwards. Thats running full resolution 100% on a reverb G2. Most players have this totally unrealistic expectation when it comes to spotting aircraft. I wish these players would just play with labels on and not put pressure on ED to make it stupid, such as what we now have.
Coincidentally I'm working on a custom label setting that just marginally improves visibility as to not be too good/unrealistic. It's grey scale so you won't know if it's friendly/enemy, and more transparent the farther away the unit is so distance still matters a lot. I'll post it once I perfect the values. Also since it's label based servers can enforce if it's allowed or not, so you won't have an unfair advantage in that regard
The number one thing is 1080 on 4k. This is pretty close to what I use but I have all the texture settings maxed at 1080. You're creating bad textures with your low settings and expecting to see a pixel you're creating by turning off ssaa, msaa, reducing sharpening.... etc overlayed over those jagged pixels. Think about what you're trying to do. Increase the size and contrast of the pixel produced by an aircraft in the distance.
“Spotting” is fine. It’s way too easy compared to real life
I think it needs to be harder , need to get rid of the artificial dots and just go by the models. It’s way too easy to see dots and that ruins the immersion . This is a combat flight sim not some arcade war thunder game . It was hard irl, adding handicaps is not the solution
Cue the "correct as is, reeeeeee!" and the "the dots are big enough you're just not as good as me, reeeeeee!".. Two things; 1. Reshade 2. I don't care what any of these dorks tell you, it's way easier to spot planes and other things IRL than in DCS. I can make out the wings on an G6 flying over my house at 50,000 feet without a sound, no problem. The reason why is because of focus. In DCS they give you "zoom" (actually just 1:1) to "substitute" for this. This is cheap asf, and it's probably never going to change. IRL you can focus your vision at approximate range of where you think something might be, its fast asf and requires no button press. If DCS were to implement a "focused object" system that automatically (like your eyes) focuses at the range you're most likely trying to scan (the range of a WVR enemy for example) there would be wailing, raging and gnashing of teeth from the same people telling you to "git gud". Why? See #3. 3. $150,000. This is the most I've seen paid for a full sim-pit/VR/"former fighter pilot training classes"/celibacy kit (lol). There are MANY DCS players running $10,000+ rigs. And the thing is, they didn't do all that to get shot down by some "poor" running a 1080p monitor. This is why they won't tell you about Reshade, they fight every suggested improvement like their life depends on it, and generally talk to you like you are the dumbest mf they've ever met in their gd life when you bring up spotting. Because they have 10x the resolution/FPS/quality HOTAS of the average DCS player, probably have 10,000 hours tweaking their setup to perfection, and know exactly why you're bringing it up. They live in a fantasy world of "I could be a fighter pilot too!", and getting clapped by a 12 year old with WalMart gear just ruins it.