The spotting issues with the 3.201 update and our part in it

[SeaW0lf]

Yesterday I posted this video below in the bug report Expert visibility - contrast change dependent on zoom level. It is relevant to us because it is from Flying Circus with expert visibility and the distances and plane profiles are different from the OP (WWII modules).

 

Check the resolution at YouTube. Mine played better at 1440p.

 

 

 

This is just one of the bugs. The other is the bug when planes disappear in certain areas of the sky in full midday for example, as the video below (the sound got messed up after the latest patch or hotfix I guess).

 

 

 

 

 

And then the apparently well known cloud bug, that was being reported before. The devs don't call it a bug and say it might not be fixable for some reason, but I behaves like a bug and I don't know what else to call it, so I mentions it as a bug as well. The one below is just from a distance of 2km. These two SE5as also disappeared a couple more times ahead in the track (the sound got messed up after the latest patch or hotfix I guess).

 

 

Tip: I’m using ShadowPay (Nvidia app) to record the new tracks. It is giving me much better results than OBS with my GTX 1060 6GB.

 

So keep in mind that if you are experiencing these same issues - and it is happening in different resolutions, the OP of the contrast bug at 2560X1440p, mine with 1080p IPS ultrawide -, and if you have a track with other bugs happening, please share. Or if you have a track that is relevant to these bug threads, please post it there. Or else go there to support these reports. Give it a like or an upvote.

 

I also think that the reflection / contrast attempt that was made (the one that is making the planes blend with the sky) might be shutting down our rapport with real life spotting. In other words, it looks so alien and not aligned with reality that the brain might be shutting these things off and regarding it as noise, clutter, and putting it aside, because these contacts that are going blank in game are very hard to see (some at very close distances) unless you know the plane is there or if you record the track and play it back later. It happens often to me with planes that just pop into view nearby or in front of me. If I was recording a track, something that I do all the time to understand what went wrong with visibility, I go back to see from where did it came from and I see that it was pale visible a bit further away, usually from a range of 1.5/2km.

 

If you are being affected by this, and most people should be, play a part in it and give your help and support if possible and give it a like or an upvote in those visibility bug reports so the issue does not drag for long, since spotting is basically the bread and butter of game play and spatial perception in air combat. If it is that bugged and people have to fly zoomed in all the time to hunt pixels, the experience will be bugged as well and it is a strain to the eyesight.

 

Edited November 12, 2019 by SeaW0lf

[US63_SpadLivesMatter]

Did spotting get worse after the latest update for anyone else?

 

It feels like it's reverted to the pre-improvement state.

Edited November 12, 2019 by J28w-Broccoli

[slug_yuugen]

There’s another rendering issue as against the ground where contacts go from pretty solid to something akin to the Predator’s suit in the movie. I’ve found as long as I stick at full zoom and keep the contact centered up I can get closer until it disappears and  I can track it by the blur of pixels. It feels like I know where it is by being able to track where it’s not if that makes sense. Like the results of an edge detection algorithm. Then as you get closer still the details resolve out again.

 

If I had to guess it’s a pixel aliasing issue when a model changes from a low LOD to a higher one and the resulting finer details at that range and screen resolution turn into a pixel soup blended with the background.

[=69.GIAP=Shvak]

Thank God, I thought I was going blind, being clearly able to see the plane and then it would disappear until I closed range and it would suddenly reappear. 

[SeaW0lf]

8 hours ago, J28w-Broccoli said:

Did spotting get worse after the latest update for anyone else?

 

It feels like it's reverted to the pre-improvement state.

 

There were two patches if I'm not mistaken. The 3201 update (with the visibility update beyond 9.5km and all) and then a hotfix right after, that made spotting really hard. I just got to see the hotfix. Some people says the 3210 update was perfect, some say it was too easy to spot and they asked for the hotfix. I'm not sure how to compare before and after, but BOX always had bad spotting. Since I never saw the 3201 update, only the hotfix, I could say it got worse because of the new bugs and planes being really thin ar very close distances (pixel hunting).

 

6 hours ago, meheleventyone said:

There’s another rendering issue as against the ground where contacts go from pretty solid to something akin to the Predator’s suit in the movie. I’ve found as long as I stick at full zoom and keep the contact centered up I can get closer until it disappears and  I can track it by the blur of pixels. It feels like I know where it is by being able to track where it’s not if that makes sense. Like the results of an edge detection algorithm. Then as you get closer still the details resolve out again.

 

If I had to guess it’s a pixel aliasing issue when a model changes from a low LOD to a higher one and the resulting finer details at that range and screen resolution turn into a pixel soup blended with the background.

 

Is this with expert visibility? If you could record a track and open a bug report it would be nice.

 

2 hours ago, =69.GIAP=Shvak said:

Thank God, I thought I was going blind, being clearly able to see the plane and then it would disappear until I closed range and it would suddenly reappear. 

 

I'm experiencing this all the time. The worse is that, when they reappear, you don't know if it is the same plane or another one, meaning that there could be another contact somewhere. Plus the fact that they generally disappear when zoomed out, the result is total chaos.

[HagarTheHorrible]

I didn't have much chance to play around with 3201, but from my limited play time, the main compaints that seem to have arisen were, distant aircraft were easy enough to spot, BUT it was difficult to judge distance/range based on that.  The second moan was with regard to "zoom", a player would easily spot a target but when they zoomed their view, to identify the bogie, the target would increasingly get smaller the further the player zoomed his view.

[slug_yuugen]

1 hour ago, SeaW0lf said:

Is this with expert visibility? If you could record a track and open a bug report it would be nice.

Yup and will do.

25 minutes ago, HagarTheHorrible said:

I didn't have much chance to play around with 3201, but from my limited play time, the main compaints that seem to have arisen were, distant aircraft were easy enough to spot, BUT it was difficult to judge distance/range based on that.  The second moan was with regard to "zoom", a player would easily spot a target but when they zoomed their view, to identify the bogie, the target would increasingly get smaller the further the player zoomed his view.

 

That's the Alt spotting basically. The biggest issue is perceptual where the target stays a constant size as you zoom in when it's in it's 'enlarged' state. Given a lot of our depth perception at long range is down to depth cues rather than binocular vision (which we lack on flat screens anyway) it gives the impression that the aircraft is shrinking even though it's actually staying a constant size in terms of screen space. It's even worse when you have a gaggle of aircraft together as it feels distinctly weird to have their distance cues change so much relative to one another. Also you lose the ability to tell how far away they are relative to one another so something 10km away is the same size as something 40km away. As best as I could tell as the real distance closes it switches off the enlarging effect and you're back to the issues we have with Expert spotting.

 

There's similar fun perceptual weirdness I found doing some VR development. If you alter the users scale but keep their head position still it feels really bad. But if you alter the users scale and keep their feet position still it feels correct. The problem with the former is that your depth cues don't change very much whereas with the latter it makes sense as you feel like you are changing height.

Edited November 12, 2019 by meheleventyone
added in a bit about not being able to tell distance differences

[SeaW0lf]

4 minutes ago, HagarTheHorrible said:

The second moan was with regard to "zoom", a player would easily spot a target but when they zoomed their view, to identify the bogie, the target would increasingly get smaller the further the player zoomed his view.

 

That I think is with Alternate Visibility, but since I did not test the original 3201, I can't say for sure. J5 Flugpark set Alternate Visibility for a week, and it is so broken that it is unplayable from my part. Several other people said the same, mainly because of the zoom bug. The impression is that planes are teleporting due to the shrinking with the zoom, which then makes spatial perception an impossibility, thus making air combat an impossibility.

 

Which then comes to me that in reality both modes, expert and alternate, are broken at the moment. We can play with expert mode, since planes don't teleport, but the bugs and how thin the profiles are make people be on the hunt for pixels all the time, plus the instances when planes simply disappear. Of course that some people resort to the low res gimmick and such (it is said that if you lower the native resolution of your monitor or something the spotting becomes better), but that's a trick for a few people. Most people would not go to such lengths just to play a game because it is broken, me included. I went far enough to get gamma to 8 and reduce the horizon to 70km (shared the horizon tip last week on the servers), but I think 40km gives it too much haze, like flying overcast.

 

One update has gone by without any tweaks or fixes though. If anyone has any word on future fixes and tweaks, please share.

[US63_SpadLivesMatter]

@SeaW0lf I am talking about after the 4.0 patch.  Last night when I was on I could hardly spot anything, even the AI which I generally knew their location.

[SeaW0lf]

Just now, J28w-Broccoli said:

@SeaW0lf I am talking about after the 4.0 patch.  Last night when I was on I could hardly spot anything, even the AI which I generally knew their location.

 

Oh, OK, I did not noticed any tweaks with the new patch (for better or worse).

[slug_yuugen]

Latest DD promises some improvements to losing people against clouds and subsequently sub-2km.

[SeaW0lf]

1 hour ago, meheleventyone said:

Latest DD promises some improvements to losing people against clouds and subsequently sub-2km.

 

Yup, I saw that, thanks. Let's hope for the best.

Edited November 15, 2019 by SeaW0lf