Il2 needs improvements to aircraft visual contrast to fix problems caused by low color gamut and aliasing.

[LColony_Kong]

Il2s spotting has improved tremendously due to the changes implemented by the developers some time ago. However spotting below the horizon still has some major problems. Aircraft agaisnt terrain are too difficult to spot. Undoubtedly, aircraft are harder to spot against terrain then they are against the sky in real life, but the problem in il2 is considerable exacerbated. The source of the problem is that the color space available in games is not even close to reality, and aliasing causes major problems even with the existing color gamut.

 

In this image are several aircraft, some of them are easier to spot than others. However many of them virtually invisible. This is a still image, and movement does improve the situation somewhat, but I am trying to illustrate a point. Even when moving, due the aliasing issues, aircraft unrealistically go in and out of being visual. Not visual is meant to mean aircraft that are literally invisible as well as ones who are so poorly visible that spotting them is impractical.

 

 

This second image I have doctored to fix the problem, and now the aircraft show up much more realistically.

 

Here is the main issue:

 

 

Once aircraft are a certain distance away, generally above about 1km, this starts to be a problem. As you can see, the plane is only represented by a small number of pixels arranged to show the aircraft. The game appears to be choosing colors as close as possible to the actual aircraft textures. However, because this is a huge decrease in information, the "shape" blends in since more the "squares" or pixels are surrounded by colors more similar hue. This the effect of decreasing the objects effective size and the reduced detail makes it harder to distinguish compared to real life.

 

To fix this problem, my suggestion would be to make it so that aircraft are rendered over 1km with biased (or increased bias if the game already does this to some degree) on the color shading of aircraft. Basically the game should choose to darken the the pixels that make up the plane proportional to the degree that distance from the viewer will reduce its contrast due to pix-elation.

 

Like this (This should be taken as conceptual, it is also what I did to the above image where I fixed the contrast):

 

 

 

A link to the video, this shows that the problem exists even when planes are moving. The still images show why, and how it can be fixed.

 

 

[nighthawk2174]

Agreed and keep in mind while actually playing the game it'll only be worse due to effects like color bleed and weirdness with how our brain handles vision.  Some code to darken and increase the contrast of the aircraft based on surrounding pixels would fix this issue.

[LizLemon]

The games biggest graphical issue is being gamma incorrect, ie its feeding a linear gamma image directly to the display.

[SharpeXB]

The best way to solve this issue would be to add HDR support

This is just about universal in every game these days. Without this you are limited to a color gamut of 16.7 million colors as opposed to 1 billion. 

Of course this needs new display technology, but HDR is now universal among TVs and becoming more common in PC monitors  MSFS looks gorgeous in HDR. It’s time for combat flight sims to catch up to Xbox games  

 

[LColony_Kong]

6 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

The best way to solve this issue would be to add HDR support

HDR would be great but it does not solve the issues due to aliasing, and it would split the community. HDR isnt even a consistent thing either. Ive owned HDR monitors and I know what is out there. Most HDR monitors are only sort of HDR with peak brightnesses of 600 nits. Even those are extremely expensive. We need a solution like the one I mentioned above. This solves the problem for everyone and doesn't involve the "dreaded" scaling you hate so much.

[SharpeXB]

37 minutes ago, LColony_Red_Comet said:

HDR would be great but it does not solve the issues due to aliasing, and it would split the community. HDR isnt even a consistent thing either. Ive owned HDR monitors and I know what is out there. Most HDR monitors are only sort of HDR with peak brightnesses of 600 nits. Even those are extremely expensive. We need a solution like the one I mentioned above. This solves the problem for everyone and doesn't involve the "dreaded" scaling you hate so much.

Well when you talk about “low color gamut”, HDR is the only solution for that. If you want to discern green aircraft against a green background, you need a greater range of green. Pretty simple.