[Bug] Aircraft Not Rendering Beyond 1km in Sim Mode – Game Nearly Unplayable

I noticed in my last match in Ruhr that the entire factory at Bochum would appear/disappear from about one square away on the deck using zoom. Maybe they’re using some new way to render assets at a certain range that is affecting us.

I stated on a reddit post that this is a game- in games we’re the hero, the 1%, the one that ballads are sung about, the main character of the story, so we should get that extra ability of combat awareness. There’s got to be a way to roll back the spotting.

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If they cannot get VR spotting back to before then I truly have no hope for Ace of Thunder lol

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oh dude now we have same problem :) by this version happy belongs to those guy who does not really ask for fighting in sim matches :D hope they fix it

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100% not your fault dude this new update really suffur us for a week

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That is the exact issue. Prepatch linear size of contacts was less affected to zoom in zoom out, which is was unlrealistic in terms of equal perspective rule, but was realistic in terms of what real pilots could spot with field of vew of their eyes scaled down to size of PC monitor.
When you zoomed out all linear size of objects srhinked but planes, and that was done from 1.5-2 to 10 km. Planes remained same linear size in monitoer, making them larger then all other objects angular.
That changed to 5 to 10 km, so now we can’t see sh.

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i think this is the most accurate assessment of the issue.

please share this point on the new ticket opened on the issue: Community Bug Reporting System

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Hey,
na, I also play on 1080p and have the same issue as all of u have. I can see the plane at 5+ km pretty well. The moment you get in missile range, the plane disappears.

Even if u try to help a mate in a fight and u know the position of the planes, it´s close to impossible to see where they are fighting.

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The screenshot I posted here:

Spoiler

was taken in test flight with a level 75 aced crew for F-16C. You can’t get a better crew.

I don’t think it’s a matter of crew skills…

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The more games I play in different weather and times of day, the more I notice that spotting is still inconsistent. It works fine during clear daytime conditions, but as I mentioned before, spotting could still be improved—especially for VR.

In close air combat, contact is instantly lost from sight, which wasn’t the case before. As a result, turning combat turns into a game of who spots whom first.

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It was in reality - who would notice whom first. In WarThunder it is - who will be the first to be drawn.
p.s. Sorry for my google-english…

I’ve been playing the past few days and yes, the devs did make the details of contacts zoomed in shaper, but it’s just not working overall compared to the enhanced contacts we had before.

Yes I can still hunt, and fight, and get kills, and even have some decent dogfights here and there, but the experience of playing Simulator is very different, very lonely in a bigger and emptier sky, and the level of frustration is much increased.

I play on a 4k monitor, and the contacts seem to be smaller and harder to notice as resolution goes up making contacts non-intuitively harder to locate on a larger 4k monitor compared to a smaller lower res screen.

I’ve had three different occasions over the last 2 days of trying to intercept the enemy recon plane. In each case I was IN ITS SECTOR, moving in parallel, along its flight path for 2-3 sectors, and could never locate it. This means it was probably no more than 5 miles away, somewhat near my altitude (been playing long enough I know their expected altitudes) yet I could never find them. This has NEVER occurred in the previous years of playing Sim.

While I can get bounces, and enjoy occasional one on one dogfights, it is very easy to just lose a contact and never find it again; meanwhile trying to keep SA up in a group of several contacts is just impossible on a 4k screen. Snapping a quick glance back over my shoulder to clear my 6, often means my primary contact up front is gone in the 1/4 second it takes to take a look… never to be seen again.

Worse, is that after playing 1-2 EC rounds my eyes hurt, and were noticeably sore, from constant sweeping of the screen to try to find barely noticable pixels that might, maybe, be a contact - also something that I never experienced before the Leviathan update.

I LOVE Warthunder, and Simulator, and especially the Sim community - each of you all are so awesome to fly with and against, but honestly I can’t put time into a game that is me causing negative physical side effects.

I really, really hope Gaijin fixes this, and fast. I’m just sad about the whole state of things.

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I play on an extremely high resolution VR headset, running the game at 5500x5500 pixels per eye, and it’s even worse, it’s next to impossible to see anything beyond 1 km unless I use the zoom, I had cases where I am next to base, I can see the explosion, but no sight of the plane that bombed it.

Thanks for a change that nobody asked for Gaijin, now all the zombers have an invisibility device and can bomb in peace, sim is finally dead.

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Same, also on 4k here… and before anyone says “you can’t spot the dots”, I sit in front of a 43", pre Leviathan, I could spot them quite well (not always, but that’s wt). Now? I am in a turnfight WITHIN 500m and I can’t see them AT ALL.
You can’t tell me “its because of pixel displacement yada yada”… at 500m or even less, the plane is as big as my fist and still invisible…

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To make this (in)visible:

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This is the final straw, refusing to fix it even now.

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Yeah sim right now is literally 95% zombies bombing

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That video shows something subtle that has also occured post Leviathan, on top of the size of contacts.

Even if you can see the contacts, they “blend in” with the environment more than they used to, which has the net effect of making them seem semi transparent.

I think it’s related to them accidentally breaking this feature from 1.53 when Gaijin dialed up the contrast of planes to make them both more visible against the environment, and easier to see how they are maneuvering. That effect is clearly gone now.

the image dynamic range was increased 8-16 times, and this means that if earlier at shorter ranges (up to a kilometre) a glimmer on a plane’s wing could practically “disappear” before by blending in with a neighboring non-glimmering surface, then now you can more precisely detect an enemy aircraft’s orientation and the manoeuvres they’re performing.

To be honest, this entire bug issue feels like a classic software case of “new guys broke something that old guys who don’t work there anymore wrote” The enhanced contacts visual system was added in 2015. I would not be surprised if the current devs accidentally busted it with Leviathan, and are trying to dig up the ancient code to understand how it even functions and how to retrofit it to work with the the new graphics engine updates.

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Now instead of playing the game I just look at forums so that I can complain about how horrible it is. LOL.
Do they not have game testers so they can work out the bugs before they release a huge update?

Has anyone been successful at getting extended premium time because of this?

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I haven’t touch WT for 2 weeks lol. Meanwhile, I’ve been getting back to DCS & IL-2 and checking the forum every darn day for a fix by Gaijin. This is just sad.

Also please someone drill a hole to a thick skull of [MatrixRupture] in bug report, that guy is firmly believe that the new spotting mechanic is good and realistic…

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