Fighting against micromachines planes ... ?

[antdavidl]

As I stated in another post, this is clearly the best if not the only one flight simulator for the latest consoles ... that makes it the better.

With it, I have returned to the flight arena from about 8 years ago (latest fligh sim I remember was the 1942 Pacific Air War and Rowan's Battle of Britan). So far, I was not in situation of having a good machine for the requiremetns of the incoming flight sims.

But one thing that has surprised me is the field of view and view depth of the game. It seems to me (IMHO) that the planes size in pixels decreased too much with the distance, being really hard to me (a rookie) to aim and, mainly, to locate and keep tracking of the enemy planes in Simulator mode. In my current screen resolucion (not Full HD, but at least 1600x1024) it seems like a ME109 is seems as a simple pixel when it is 1km or more far ...
Is this realistic?

Taking an excerpt from http://www.spitfireperformance.com/s...combat-reports, which contains real combat reports:

S/L D. E. Kingaby of 122 Squadron recorded in his Combat Report for 20 January 1943:

I was flying “Dettol” Leader and when in Dover area I sighted an a/c flying below broken cloud heading towards French coast. I dived down after the a/c and identified it as an Me.109F. I was at about 900 yds. range at 4,000 ft. and the intial speed of my dive enabled me to close to 500 yds. I could not get any closer and about 2 miles off Griz Nez I had almost decided to give up the chase. I decided however, to give a short burst from 500 yards in the hope of slowing him down. I gave about ½ second burst 2 can. 2 m/g and a lucky shot hit his port radiator. He slowed down slightly, but took no evasive action than to go into a very shallow dive. I gradually closed, holding my fire till 250 yards, when I gave a 2½ - 3 second burst from astern slightly above. I saw hits all over the e/a which gave forth thick black smoke and then burst into flame and rolled and dived to the left and crashed into a wood south of Guines. I came out over the coast at 0 feet and experienced a considerable amount of light flak which I evaded by hearty weaving. I reformed the Squadron over Hawking just below cloud to deal with possible further attacks, but none materialized and we returned to base. I claim this e/a DESTROYED.
http://www.spitfireperformance.com/1...by-20jan43.jpg

In base to this report I think it should be posible to distinguish a Fw190 from a Bf109 and even a BF109 Emil from a Frank from at least 800 meters, but I IMHO this is impossible in BoP. Also, when I shotdown an enemy plane I'm unable to see where the bulluts are hitting the plane (at leats with precission). I reseemble a phrase of Bob Stanford Tuck that he waits until the engile cowl of the bombers (HE-111, DO-17 and JU-88 of these days) fills the whole ring of the


I know the human eye has far higher-resolution than what a simple screen could provide and perhaps this justify that you only have 1 to 4 pixels to represent a plan at this distance but, I don't know but, I still feel that the planes are painted too small when they are 1 km or more far, I don't understand yet how the skilled sim players are able to find the enemy simply using the map and the hat (with the additional difficulty of the plane cabin) ...

What the hell is the trick?

Am i the only one that thinks that results too complex to locate a plane in the sim mode? And more if we talk of distinguishing the kind of plane, or simply locating a ground target.

My feeling is that this doesn't happened to me in other previous games like the 1942 refered one ... I didn't need to be only at 100m to distingush a aicraft gun in the terrain.

Perhaps this is mroe a question for the senior players that comes from previous releases of Il-2 and whouls have discuss this over and over again.
I don't know if this is realistic, or simply a charactreristic of the game, or a lack of resolution from my screen, or simply that I'm still too busy simply flying as to extract more information from some other factors like the color tone of the pixels of similar ...

[loopdreams]

It is an inherent difficulty and the reason why even sim mode attempts to compensate with a zoom button, it's either that or draw the planes larger than they should really be and that would destroy any depth perception.

[antdavidl]

That's what I pressume, but even so it still seems to me that the planes are to small and that the visual range is really small ...

loopdream, in comparison with other flight sims, do you not have the same feeling? is it like the rest of sims in the market?

[loopdreams]

Well there's not a great deal to make a fair comparison with on consoles. But I can't say that the apparent smallness of the planes was something that struck me.

[KurtG85]

Well, you have to take into account the full zoom ability while spotting, which you can do while looking around. Obviously they had to make the overall resolution of objects farther away smaller in order to keep a wide perspective. I may be wrong but I also believe the game employs some degree of 'fish eye' although I could be wrong. I have played with this in other games and find it reduces the overall detail of everything while allowing you to see more. Perhaps thats a factor as well.

[GCoutinho]

I think that around 0,5km it's possible to identify targets even without zoom in IL2 BoP.

Regarding other approach's to this problem, I seem to recall that in Combat Flight Simulator for the PC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFS1) , the plane models viewed from inside the cockpit where 3x the correct size to try to compensate for the Monitor limitations.

But all this happened last century and my memories might be a bit fuzzy...

(However i do recall my first successful landing on the Ark Royal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Ark_Royal_%2891%29 on this game.)

[the_somme]

i feel a bit like op about this. it's incredibly hard to see the planes, even more so if they are friendly or not. because of this i've played most of my online matches on realistic - i just don't like to circle around for minutes before i can even spot a damn plane . thats a shame because i like sim better when it comes to the actual flying, with adjustable flaps and so on.

but i guess that its just the way it is and not much to do about..

[TexRoadkill]

It might help if they added some reflections on the canopy so that at distance you might see a glint of light shining off the other plane.

[Danny M NL]

this is due to the fact that the human eye does not work in pixels and monitors do... if you play a videogam the world has to be rendered in square pixels, which can only be one colour at a time. this means if an aircraft is far enough to only take up about 3 pixels, you can only see those three pixels instead of the aircraft, and the don't give away the shape/type of the aircraft.