Wide screen monitor spotting settings (34 inch curve)

[[SSET]LA_West]

Hi, as the title says I need some help with the in game settings in Il2 to improve spotting. I have a 34 inch curved monitor and find it near impossible to spot someone and will easily loose them if they pass a forest or I loose track. If anyone has a widescreen and has sussed the settings out to spot easily it would be great to get some tips or if you could share your settings. Thanks in advance.

[Lusekofte]

 

[Indianer]

19 minutes ago, 216th_LuseKofte said:

 

That's for VR users. Does it work for widescreen users too?

29 minutes ago, 216th_LuseKofte said:

 

That's for VR users. Does it work for widescreen users too?

 

In this thread you can also find how to tweak spotting. It's not about performance only, like the title may suggest.

[Lusekofte]

It say so in the description. It is settings for better spotting

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

Hi, 

while it's appreciated, I must mention that this is indeed specifically for VR users.

 

Some truths on spotting are global too though. The scaling and use of Anti-Aliasing is one of those.

 

What is certainly a very good hint - especially if you're on a high resolution monitor - is that the higher the resolution the harder things scale at a distance. A good start and probably most important additional optimization you can take is to slightly upsample your picture. Many monitor players I know do that.

 

That means, if you were running on 3440x1440 , turn IL-2 off. Then go to your IL2sturmovik folder /data/startup.cfg, open it with Notepad. Scroll to the videosection.

 

There you'll find Desktop_center , put it to 1. Fullscreen to 0 (this lets you switch tabs way more easily and quicker while costing half a frame only). land_anisotropy = 2.  multisampling = 1 (which is 2x) or 0 (off). gamma = 0.700000. Then win_height = 1440 and win_width = 3440. Put the latter two to 95% of your actual resolution. win_height = 1368 , win_width = 3268 in this example. Apply to your specific monitor's resolution though. If it is too grainy, try 97/98%. Bandits at a distance will flicker much more obviously that way and not just on a single or two subpixels of the actual pixel.

 

Please remember it is a compromise. The best picture doesn't give the best spotting, it's an uncomfortable truth but a global case in every simulator title I know of. Another idea is to get a rabbit's paw or 4 leaf clover. ?

Edited April 19, 2020 by SCG_Fenris_Wolf

[SharpeXB]

6 hours ago, SCG_Fenris_Wolf said:

That means, if you were running on 3440x1440 , turn IL-2 off. Then go to your IL2sturmovik folder /data/startup.cfg, open it with Notepad. Scroll to the videosection.

 

There you'll find Desktop_center , put it to 1. Fullscreen to 0 (this lets you switch tabs way more easily and quicker while costing half a frame only). land_anisotropy = 2.  multisampling = 1 (which is 2x) or 0 (off). gamma = 0.700000. Then win_height = 1440 and win_width = 3440. Put the latter two to 95% of your actual resolution. win_height = 1368 , win_width = 3268 in this example. Apply to your specific monitor's resolution though. If it is too grainy, try 97/98%. Bandits at a distance will flicker much more obviously that way and not just on a single or two subpixels of the actual pixel.

Sorry but this advice is just wrong. You shouldn’t mess with the native resolution of your monitor. It’s just going to screw up the image and make seeing anything more difficult and make the graphics look awful. 

On 4/18/2020 at 8:43 AM, [SSET]LA_West said:

Hi, as the title says I need some help with the in game settings in Il2 to improve spotting. I have a 34 inch curved monitor and find it near impossible to spot someone and will easily loose them if they pass a forest or I loose track. If anyone has a widescreen and has sussed the settings out to spot easily it would be great to get some tips or if you could share your settings. Thanks in advance.

I have to say much of the advice you will get here is just wrong. Like the above about upscaling. 
Also don’t turn off your antialiasing, run that at 4x if you can

Don't change the gamma way out of range like some will tell you to, there’s no setting screen in IL-2 so how would you know what’s right

The best you can do is set everything in your graphics control panel to default and run the highest graphics setting you can in IL-2. Forget all the silly advice you’ll get here. It only makes it worse. 
Make sure that your monitor is calibrated to show black level and contrast correctly, it should be necessary to set it way out of range either. 

[[DBS]Browning]

I must disagree with Sharpe. Other people have given you good advice.

[SharpeXB]

56 minutes ago, [DBS]Browning said:

I must disagree with Sharpe. Other people have given you good advice.

Do these other people have this exact same monitor? No...

 

Follow silly advice at your own risk but don’t then start complaining that the game is broken. 

[SCG_Fenris_Wolf]

It's done by quite a few players to improve their spotting. It's been publicly recommended by, for example by pro-players like Sinerox, or popular YT's like DerSheriff on his Discord, and countless others who've tried it.

 

I'm not here to engage in a discussion with you Sharpe, you might as well ride against windmills. LA_West can do what he wants, and if it fits for him and his rig, he goes along with it, if not, that's fine as well. He can always put it back in a minute.

 

Have a nice day ?

Edited April 19, 2020 by SCG_Fenris_Wolf

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, SCG_Fenris_Wolf said:

It's been publicly recommended by, for example by pro-players like Sinerox, or popular YT's like DerSheriff on his Discord, and countless others who've tried it.

It doesn’t matter if they are “pros” it’s still bad advice to run a game at non native resolution. If you want to run lower res then just get a lower res screen. Why send 1368p to a 1440p screen? It’s just going to make the game look like garbage. Also IL-2 has an issue with aircraft in front of clouds since the antialiasing doesn’t function in that scenario and running lower res would make that even worse. If anything you would want to supersample to smooth that out and if your GPU can handle that it’s a good solution.

[SJ_Butcher]

It's a game engine rendering problem, I don't know if devs are capable of fixing this soon due the priorities they have. To me the game engine have been modernized a lot but is starting to show a lot of technological limitations. My entire squad left the game few weeks ago because the spoting issues.

Edited April 20, 2020 by SJ_Butcher

[blitze]

16 hours ago, SJ_Butcher said:

It's a game engine rendering problem, I don't know if devs are capable of fixing this soon due the priorities they have. To me the game engine have been modernized a lot but is starting to show a lot of technological limitations. My entire squad left the game few weeks ago because the spoting issues.

 

Next up on the to do list - Game Rendering Improvements with a move to Deferred Rendering.  We shall see in time but it has been mentioned by the Devs.

 

As to the effect on clouds and spotting, again, we shall see but remember - on the whole, spotting wasn't as easy as folks like to think and the sim also has some elements in radio chat that are to aid in locating targets.  It would be nice if all sides used the O'Clock system of calling out enemies.  Using compass reads when you are flying a Brit plane is very annoying.

[JG13_opcode]

For sure there are serious rendering problems in this game—understandable, really, given that it's an independent engine.  They could have gone with Unreal or Unity or other big-name engine but chose to write their own.  Teething issues like these are part & parcel of new technology:

 

- Airplanes become invisible against clouds, as if the cloud is being rendered in front of the airplane

- Spotting is very very difficult

- 10 km "render bubble" makes high-altitude bombing mostly impossible

 

I'm sure they'll get it right eventually.

 

In the meantime, OP, while I've never been able to solve the issues listed above, what did help me with my spotting was going into the graphics settings and turning off all the checkboxes except for the Sharpen filter, which I have enabled.  I noticed a difference right away.

[SJ_Butcher]

1 hour ago, JG13_opcode said:

For sure there are serious rendering problems in this game—understandable, really, given that it's an independent engine.  They could have gone with Unreal or Unity or other big-name engine but chose to write their own.  Teething issues like these are part & parcel of new technology:

 

- Airplanes become invisible against clouds, as if the cloud is being rendered in front of the airplane

- Spotting is very very difficult

- 10 km "render bubble" makes high-altitude bombing mostly impossible

 

I'm sure they'll get it right eventually.

 

In the meantime, OP, while I've never been able to solve the issues listed above, what did help me with my spotting was going into the graphics settings and turning off all the checkboxes except for the Sharpen filter, which I have enabled.  I noticed a difference right away.

 

I would like a more professional engine like unigine, it's perfect for simulation environments

[Dakpilot]

13 hours ago, SJ_Butcher said:

 

I would like a more professional engine like unigine, it's perfect for simulation environments

 

Easy to say

 

Cheers, Dakpilot

[KoN_]

Its the game Im afraid . Since big patch on the 10-km bubble the spotting has become worst ,its like it back to front . 

Tried and tested on three different monitors . And a 43" TV . Got me best results . 

This is my biggest gripe with the game the Spotting .

Some people have no issues . Most have issues .

Now with high res monitors getting cheaper nearly all PC gaming house holds will have 1440p or even 4K most at 2k. 1440p.

If this game needs to survive the spotting needs to be addressed, there are  countless threads on this painful subject . 

 

15 hours ago, JG13_opcode said:

For sure there are serious rendering problems in this game—understandable, really, given that it's an independent engine.  They could have gone with Unreal or Unity or other big-name engine but chose to write their own.  Teething issues like these are part & parcel of new technology:

 

- Airplanes become invisible against clouds, as if the cloud is being rendered in front of the airplane

- Spotting is very very difficult

- 10 km "render bubble" makes high-altitude bombing mostly impossible

 

I'm sure they'll get it right eventually.

 

In the meantime, OP, while I've never been able to solve the issues listed above, what did help me with my spotting was going into the graphics settings and turning off all the checkboxes except for the Sharpen filter, which I have enabled.  I noticed a difference right away.

You would of thought choosing an already proven game engine would stop this headache for them . Just think of the man hours wasted on this spotting issue . its a dam fine game with the new damage patch . 

Edited April 21, 2020 by ACG_KoN

[[DBS]Browning]

Some people talk like changing to a different game engine is a couple of months work. It is not, such things are a much bigger undertaking.

Aside from some art assets, changing the engine the game runs on means starting completely from scratch; making a new game. There is typically very little that can be ported over.

 

It is not like swapping the engine in a car, it is more like swapping the structural frame out of a car for a different one.

You may have lots of nice body panels and windows, but none of them will fit the new frame without a complete rework. You may as well build a new car altogether.

[grcurmudgeon]

And most of those engines need work and customization to adapt them to the specific use case, not just changes to the game code.

Given that our eyes have pretty high resolution compared to computer monitors, flight sims will continue to need icons / GUI elements to point out to the player things a human in the real world would have seen. Even if it's just a black dot or some sort of flash or whatever, you need to special case the visibility of distant small objects to make them visible to the player at ranges where they would be visible to a real pilot. The days of 640x480 where you couldn't even tell which way the target was moving at reasonable ranges were lots of fun...

[SharpeXB]

1 hour ago, grcurmudgeon said:

Given that our eyes have pretty high resolution compared to computer monitors, flight sims will continue to need icons / GUI elements to point out to the player things a human in the real world would have seen. Even if it's just a black dot or some sort of flash or whatever, you need to special case the visibility of distant small objects to make them visible to the player at ranges where they would be visible to a real pilot.

Any sort of icon at all, even a dot, is too much enhancement. The very idea of having icons on your enemies is a rather ridiculous feature that flight sims have adopted over the years. Many games feature adversaries which are difficult to see, for example distant snipers in FPS games, yet none of them go so far with the crutch of placing tags over them to give them away. Icons in flight sims contribute to this belief that they are somehow “realistic” or simulate what you “should” see but they are entirely artificial. 

[[DBS]Browning]

4 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Icons in flight sims contribute to this belief that they are somehow “realistic” or simulate what you “should” see but they are entirely artificial. 

 

Presumably, you would also like to see any zoom features removed from Il-2 as well?

[SharpeXB]

18 minutes ago, [DBS]Browning said:

 

Presumably, you would also like to see any zoom features removed from Il-2 as well?

Your monitor is smaller than real life, so...

 

If you want to use icons they are in the game. The majority of players choose not to use them though so it’s clear that most players don’t need or want them. The trouble is there is no way to make them realistic, even the smallest enhancement will draw your eye right to them and you won’t learn to see anything else. 

[SJ_Butcher]

9 hours ago, Dakpilot said:

 

Easy to say

 

Cheers, Dakpilot

 

Never said it is easy, but for such small team you shouldn't be wasting resources improving your engine, you should be a client of a game engine and just modify to do your stuff there, I put unigine on the list because their solution is build to simulate even military environments. It's never a easy task, but you should start at some point. I develop small software and I can't even image how complex is the game...if this genre would be more popular devs would have more resources to do whatever they want.

Edited April 21, 2020 by SJ_Butcher

[[DBS]Browning]

2 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Your monitor is smaller than real life, so...

 

So...some visual enhancement are in order?

On this much, we agree.

[Velxra]

10 hours ago, ACG_KoN said:

 

This is my biggest gripe with the game the Spotting .

Some people have no issues . Most have issues .

Now with high res monitors getting cheaper nearly all PC gaming house holds will have 1440p or even 4K most at 2k. 1440p.

If this game needs to survive the spotting needs to be addressed, there are  countless threads on this painful subject . 

 

Like I outlined in my performance thread. The game has a blur or smoothing filter over the entire screen. Its effect can be reduced via reshade adaptive sharpen and it makes a world of difference for spotting. I really wish the devs would just let us turn off this blur/smoothing or reduce it. Alas, it's hard coded into the game and we have no way to alter it.

 

That is why spotting is so difficult for most people or the primary reason. I will exclude the lighting and color pallet as they have been improved since 2018.

Edited April 21, 2020 by Geronimo553

[KoN_]

3 hours ago, Geronimo553 said:

 

Like I outlined in my performance thread. The game has a blur or smoothing filter over the entire screen. Its effect can be reduced via reshade adaptive sharpen and it makes a world of difference for spotting. I really wish the devs would just let us turn off this blur/smoothing or reduce it. Alas, it's hard coded into the game and we have no way to alter it.

 

That is why spotting is so difficult for most people or the primary reason. I will exclude the lighting and color pallet as they have been improved since 2018.

Reshade makes the game look very nice . i have it installed . 

[SharpeXB]

5 hours ago, [DBS]Browning said:

 

So...some visual enhancement are in order?

On this much, we agree.

Icons are already an option in the game. But any “realistic” setting by definition has these turned off. There’s no realistic way to incorporate icons. 

[JG13_opcode]

I seem to recall Warclouds (well-known to be the server with the consistently-highest skill level amongst the player base) had a limited set of icons, where you'd only have it within a few hundred metres, and it would give you type information a bit closer.

[69th_Panp]

yep 
I really miss that server and the players, lots of fun times ? 

[SJ_Butcher]

23 hours ago, JG13_opcode said:

I seem to recall Warclouds (well-known to be the server with the consistently-highest skill level amongst the player base) had a limited set of icons, where you'd only have it within a few hundred metres, and it would give you type information a bit closer.

 

Warclouds was my favorite server, in fact that limited set of icons would be great

[JG13_opcode]

I think it's a good compromise for people with bad hardware setups.  By the time you're able to get an icon on the guy it's too close to be a crutch - i.e. the fight's already probably decided.

 

Combat Box seems to be taking the role of the "consistent plane sets late-war server".  I wonder if they'd be amenable to a Warclouds-style icon set.

Edited April 23, 2020 by JG13_opcode

[JV44HeinzBar]

S! All,

I used to be an admin and map maker for Warclouds so many years ago. Sparx, the founder of Warclouds, used the config.ini to set the icon display.  It used the following "syntax": mp_dotrange [FRIENDLY|FOE] [DEFAULT] [DOT ] [RANGE ] [TYPE ] [ID ] [NAME ]. Each of these parameters could be set for the server to display at a selected range in kilometers.

 

For example: mp_dotrange FRIENDLY COLOR 0.1 DOT 10 RANGE 2 TYPE 0.1 ID 0.1 NAME 1.0.

 

So, the aircraft dot will appear at 10km range; 2km pilot's name at 1.0km;  everything elase will display at 100metres.

 

I had to go back and look at some of my old IL2 Sturmovik missions and try to remember how this was done, but I think this is the way we did it. I can't remember if the Color type is where Sparx determined the density of the dot or just the color of the icons when they are rendered within the given parameters. Perhaps, it scales the LOD of the dot?

 

I haven't fooled around with the IL2 Grand Battles - server. I don't know if something similar can be done. It would be nice though for the visually impaired, like myself

 

HB

 

 

Edited April 23, 2020 by JV44HeinzBar
added thoughts

[216th_Jordan]

No, custom icons are sadly not a thing. For people with not so great eyesight who still want to experience some simulation without knowing everything it is problem.

 

Well maybe this can get some attention in the next time when spotting ability is in focus. 

[Dakpilot]

There is a  custom icons topic in Mods section,  second page I think 

 

Cheers, Dakpilot