Hard to see the aircraft
 

Just wondering if there's a way to see other aircraft a bit more clearly.

I'm not an old man, fyi, but I constantly lose aircraft when the ground is their backdrop. Not so much when I'm below, but when I'm above, sometimes I can't see them and I'm only a few hundred feet away.

Maybe I'm the only one, and if so, I suppose it's a matter of training my eye.

I also feel as though it's very hard to see aircraft at longer distances. The dots pop in a little too late, IMO. In real life, you can spot other aircraft (and vehicles, trains, etc.) at far greater distances than you can in this sim, so I don't feel like it's a "realism" thing. I know it was very common for pilots to lose each other, but I feel like that's more in the madness of a dogfight and less about blending textures and whatnot.

I didn't have too much trouble in IL2 1946, but I'm fully aware we are comparing vastly more complex systems, I'm simply saying I feel like a mole with the wrong prescription glasses on sometimes in CLoD.

Is there anything I can tweak in the config file, or perhaps there's a mod, to help me out?

Sorry if this has been addressed. I tried to find a post like this but couldn't.

I don't believe there is a way to make it easier to see the other aircraft. It is really reallllly hard to spot another aircraft in real life. I find it easier to see them in this sim than in real life. For the most part in real life you look for a reflection more than anything else. I am sure many pilots lost the plane they were chasing just from taking their eye off the target for one second.

Are you using a head tracker or are you using your mouse to look around? Head trackers will up your situational awareness 10 fold in this sim in my opinion.

~S~

If you have a system where AA does something then turning off AA helps a bit. Also turning off shadows can help as the blinking tree shadows can fool you when looking for an aircraft above them.

There are two issues. The first is dot visibility and this is difficult - you can lower your resolution but that's about it. The second is a bug where dots disappear at a certain range. Search for meshshowlod=1 in other threads. You can also turn of AA to fix this if the CPU hit is too high.

In addition to the above, If you are running a Nvidea GFX card try using the Nvidea GFX Desk Top Colour option and increase the Digital Vibrance slider - this gives more life to the colours and adds contrast depth to the AC lods.

Interestingly enough, I watched a documentary and the BoB pilot being interviewed made a point of saying that it was very difficult to spot ac once formations were broken up and fighters/bombers were scattered- on many occaisions it was by pure chance that he would see an enemy. He laughingly said that the only use flak had was helping him to locate where an enemy might be.......it's the same in game, so may be CloD has that aspect modelled correctly.....:grin:

Documentary: '13 Hours that Saved Britain' Historical account of Sept 15th 1940

This all makes sense.

I figured my eyes were just used to the slightly cartoonish looks of other sims out there.


After a couple of hours flying around today I did get used to it.

The more I play this sim, the more I love it. The patches are making it better all the time. Comms, AI, performance...bam -- this thing is going to be a killer.

I didn't realize how much my ability to spot aircraft had improved until I was showing the sim to a friend who was visiting.

I kept telling him "there's a bogey" and he had no idea where until I pointed out each one on the screen... and even then he was amazed I could pick out such tiny dots.

I guess it's the sim equivalent of real-life pilots developing their ability to spot distant aircraft.

Charlo

Yeah even barring the "ghost dot" problem, which is legitimately frustrating, it's very difficult to spot planes. Keep your eye on your opponent and it's often the difference between winning and losing. I don't think it needs much adjusting besides maybe a reflection tweak, not that I'm a pilot or anything, but it certainly shouldn't be easy and there are limits that technology presents. I think I'd rather it be too difficult than too easy. We don't play with icons on for a reason. ;) I'm sure I mosey on past 3 or 4 planes for every one I spot and/or engage, but then I get lucky sometimes too, seeing planes from a significant distance.

I too have noticed I have a keener eye for this sort of thing now. My girlfriend occasionally watches me play and usually can't see them even after I point them out. Not until I'm almost on top of them can she spot them often-times (less than 1km-ish anyway).

I have to concur also that I can't see on this sim quite close targets which shold be easy to spot. I think somehow the level-of-detail (LOD) thingy eats up the target dots at certain range.

I have a real hard time here with a hat-switch, I can only see them if they're really close, or when my nose is pressed against my monitor.

I use a hat switch too(no TrackIR, yet), spotting them is not so hard, keeping track of ´em is. the problem here is, you can only rotate in steps of 45° and sometimes that´s just too much.

I'd like it if there was an option for some manner of ROF style icon or something of the sort. Right now playing online is frustrating since people are so obsessed with everything being 100% real that they leave "tags" off because WWII pilots didn't have them, but fly 20 feet above the ground looking up . . . because WWII pilots knew having an altitude advantage was a bad thing?

I remember that famous scene from the Battle of Britain movie where the Brits and Huns were circling around the south of England, desperately trying to get under their opponents. It was so tense, watching those Spits and 109's getting lower and lower. ;)

Ive allways wanted the option to be able to change that 45 degree to a lesser amount.. i wonder if there is a way to do that..

I thought that you could choose either snap or pan view for POV switch?

This may be due to your settings. Anisotropic Filtering (AF) seems to extend the range at which detail can be rendered and perhaps resolution has a lot to do with it.

My AF is set to 16x and resolution is 1680x1050. I can see faint dots fairly easily and even extremely faint ones about 1 pixel size(?) if I look carefully although they are quite grey-blue.

I have my Samsung 226BW monitor set to 'game' settings:- Color Tone Normal, R=50, G=50, B=50, Brightness 100%, Contrast 70%, Gamma on 'Mode 1' (brightest of the three) but all that of course will depend on your monitor controls - try experimenting. Its essentially a fairly bright setting rather than a subdued one you might use for everyday documents, spreadsheets etc..

I will try your suggestion with the AF switched to 16x, thanks!
Moste of my time on the ATAG I fly around for almost an hour without spotting anything.... and then suddenly a crowd of 3-4 planes nearby "appears" (my eye just didn't caught them earlier).

Guess a little bit luck plays a role there too, but (apart from the weak high level performance of nearly all planes) it has a reason that the vast amount of fights takes place below 2000m imho.....
When you're up high its almost impossible to spot a plane below.

I am sorry to disagree - it is fairly easy to spot them from up there. Especially mid channel on the water surface, but over the land, too. It is also pretty impossible to miss a contact at co-alt when you're cruising at 18.000ft. Also, formation of bombers are easy to be spotted from distance, you can also see if there is any fighters around, actually pretty nicely done ingame! I have had many great fights in 5km alt on ATAG especially because I have got better SA up there. YRMW

To the original poster - it really is only about experience. And I would add that often it's not about seeing contact as such, but rather knowing where to look.

BOB revisited......
 

http://www.pbase.com/daverilstone/image/141371706.jpg

Goering: "But come now, gentlemen, I have chastized you enough. Tell me what you need to help you succeed up there!"

Galland: "Well, Herr Reichmarshall....the option to select icons to help spot those verdamnt Spitfiren!"

Snap View = You rotate to a Certain degree, releasing the Hat-Switch centers your view. And trust me, Snap view is even more worse than pan view. The smallest Rotation iirc were 90°.

none, that i´m aware off.

I love that figurine set. Wonder what it would cost to get my hands on it!

A program called NewView helps a lot.

It allows you to simulate TrackIR with your hatswitch. When you start pressing hatswitch right for example, it moves smoothly to the right. Initially slowly and then accelerates faster (the time, speeds and acceleration are fully adjustable). When you release the hat switch the view stays in that position. You can then set a button for centering the view quickly if needed. That makes it quite easy to keep eyes on target even without TrackIR.

I'm not sure if it works with Cliffs of Dover but I used it for a long time with IL-2 1946 before I bought TrackIR

http://war.by-airforce.com/downloads/newview.html

AA is helping because it smudges the 1/2 dot pixels over their neighbors, making the spot a little bit bigger than the no AA dot. On the other hand, it blends the edges against the background, which should make it a little bit harder to see.

So, overall, I guess the AA/noAA dot sighting improvement really comes down to specifics (resolution used, dot's distance, dot's background, user's sight, monitor settings, room lighting, etc).

The biggest problems atm with the dots are the hardcoded distances at which the dot is switched off and the smallest LOD is switched on. they are not overlapping each other, and this is what is causing the disappearing dots problem. Also, it seems that at around those distances, the dot's relative (rendered) size is bigger than lowest LOD's relative (rendered) zie, which again leads to the above mentioned problem.

Hey, Klem, this is the website I grabbed the pic from:

http://www.hobbybunker.com/products/...-figures-lw048

Looks to be $155 for the set.

mmmmmmmm........ now if I could just find $155 :)
Mind you I'm looking for an extra SSD too :(

Nice.. good to know that..