Aircraft appear as uniform bold specks across a variety of distances...
 

I'm not sure if this has been pointed out (couldn't find a thread on the topic), but in future, the devs may want to look at changing the colour which distant aircraft appear as at varying distances.

As it stands now, they appear as a bold, black speck all the way out to 9km, and the speck is the same whether the plane is 3km away, or 9km. Then past 9km, they don't appear at all.

This makes it unrealistically easy to spot distant aircraft, and it makes it impossible to judge the distance of aircraft between 3km and 9km.

(forgive my crappy paint skills, but you get the point)
http://i1234.photobucket.com/albums/...sy50/dist3.jpg

This could be solved by softening the colour of the specks as they get farther away, perhaps by using transparency (because the speck would have to soften relative to it's backdrop - a light grey/blue speck against a dark green land background would defeat the purpose).

I totally agree with you!

I'm having trouble remembering, but was it 1942: The Pacific Air War that had distant planes a light grey speck, and the closer they got the darker they got until they changed to an actual LOD model?

Distance and AC identification is the biggest immersion killer in flight sims today. Fixing that would totally change the game for the better.

Yeah, this is the problem which CoD faces, besides its real bugs and issues.

Did you actually fly an aircraft and tried to spot one-engine planes at greater distances IRL? But the 'unrealistic' argument stands firm, right?
I've read quite a few stories about pilots spotting bogeys at distances greater than 10km. So, what's the issue again? The screenshot looks perfectly reasonable to me. RL pilots have a way better resolution than we do on our pixel screens. Plus there is still the single biggest advantage in RL: Stereoscopic vision.I'm 100% certain that our view is (still) worse than those of real pilots.
And as to juding different distances... well, I see differently-sized spots on your screenshot (which is probably down-sized), the size of them corresponding quite accuratly with your range labels.
Additionally, a bigger spot near a smaller spot could be an 109 at 7km and one at 9km - or it could be an 109 and a He111 travelling alongside at 9km.
Judging distances is an advanced feature that should take a while to get used to. And you can alwas switch back to markers.

Try flying with a cloud between yourself and another plane. They are glaringly obvious then even if they are on the ground.

+1 with that..love the way you can see them through hills too..

also im not sure if its just the blue stripe ATI horizon thing but when the dive below the horizon from a distance they disappear for a brief second...

Does everyone get that?

this is a bug, obviously.

I'm not making any claims about how far a pilot could or should be able to spot and identify another aircraft. I am however saying that in this universe, the visual appearance of an object at 9km is going to be different than the visual appearance of that same object if it is 3-4km away. Sorry, you can't tell me that two of the same aircraft, one at 9km, and the other at 3km, are going to be identical in size (as they are in CoD). That defies logic.

Precisely why i suggest softening the colour, to make the object appear smaller once you can no longer reduce the number of pixels (i.e. if the object is only occupying one pixel).

I've got 2560 x 1440. Must be better than RL! :-P
(Don't take the blue pill)

Thank you for posting this (and for the work)!

I was playing online yesterday and I had started wondering why I had became so bad judging the distance...!

You are right

Actually I found it ridiculously hard to track a RAF plane in a dogfight. It's impossible for me to dive on a target without loosing sight as soon as I hve a quick check at my instrument panel.

Planes color and shining need to be improved drastically !

By the way in term of sighting dist nothing better than to report to an USAAF survey (see attached file) . Pls bear in mind that an F16 silhouette might represent 2 time the size of that of a 109 and the the much greater speed of the merge reduce the sighting dist too

~S!