With every update, more and more aircraft with advanced technologies come into the game. These technologies include modern targeting systems that are used to find, identify and track enemy vehicles. At least in real life. In the game, their usefulness is limited by one single game mechanic - spotting. You can only see enemy planes that are about 10-15 kilometers away from you or closer, or are spotted by your teammates (which in some cases doesn’t even work).
Now, in other gamemodes that would hardly be a problem, because there are either markers or the maps are small enough that the enemies are spotted all the time. But in Air Simulator Enduring Confrontation, many maps are as big as 16000 km², and there are no markers. If we imagine that there is a targeting pod that can rotate 360° and the enemies appear at a distance of 12.5 km, then we get a coverage of about 500 km². That’s a little more than 3% of the whole map. But that is obviously the perfect scenario, in reality the pilot would see about 15-30% of that, and only in front of the aircraft, having to look behind with own eyes.
Many aircraft rely on a targeting system as their only source of information, and countless, especially lower tier vehicles, on the sight of their pilots. But with such a low distance of render, they simply can not find enemy aircraft to attack or to defend from.
Extending the enemy spotting range to 35-50 kilometers should solve this problem while not creating any others. This would give players an opportunity to be prepared to engage in fights knowing what enemy they are facing and lower the meantime between them. This also would reduce dullness in lower tier battles, where, especially on the bigger maps, it is very hard to find an enemy which results in pointless waste of time trying to find a fight
+1 Absolutely needs to happen. Not only an increase but also a fix for enemies straight up despawning. I’m sick of chasing someone and then them just vanishing into thin air or being in a dogfight and the second they get past my canopy or are blocked by a post they cease to exist. It’s a joke.
My primary way to spot and IFF a target is to cheese the spotting system. Hostile dots visibly blink into and out of existence according to both your “keen vision” and “awareness” skills, as well as the skills of friendly aircraft. If a dark black dot suddenly appears in open sky, or is blinking into and out of existence near a steady (probably friendly) dot, then I know definitively that dot is hostile. Interestingly, in BVR, I can tell if an aircraft up high is hostile or not just by looking. Contrail with a dot at the front? Friendly. Contrail with no dot? Hostile. All you high altitude guys wondering why you keep getting whacked from below? That’s why.
I think there needs to be a fade-to-grey mechanic past the “Line-of-Sight Detection Range” for hostile players no matter what, but I have two separate ideas for how that might work. Either:
Eliminate the effects of “Keen Vision” and “Awareness” in sim. Have ALL aircraft rendered all the time under the same rules as both friendlies and enemy AI do currently: a barely visible grey speck at range, and gradually realizing into a dark black dot, with all aircraft fading in and out of visibility at the same rate. This is simple, and probably better for a sim environment, but also cuts out crew skills.
Keep the effects of “Keen Vision” and “Awareness” as they are. Simply implement a fade-to-grey mechanic past the “Line-of-Sight Detection Range”. Perhaps have the dot fade and fully disappear at twice the listed detection range?
Example: Say a crew has a Detection range of 3.8km. Past this point, the dot fades to grey, before fully disappearing at 7.6km. Another crew has a detection range of 7.6km. Past this point, the dot fades to grey, before fully disappearing at 15.2 km.
Me personally i believe for simulator aircraft the keen vision perk and awareness perk shouldn’t be connected to rendering distance at all but instead should be connected to a call out from your crew or pilot,for instance your flying high and everyone that’s around you can be visually spotted by you and now you have to decide which one is friendly or foe your awareness will help your back gumner or pilot give call outs of enemy 090 low half meter or your keen vision will do the same but for targets infront of your pilot when you look at them he will call out their altitude and speed and heading,the higher they crews skill the more accurate the callouts will be and the more frequent the callouts for awareness
That would probably make more sense as a radio message for teammates. Like, if you see a dot, you can call it out for your teammates relatively precise, instead of guessing yourself
We also can’t forget to keep pressing them into improving the LOD switching. Currently many aircraft basically disappear when transitioning from Dot to 3D model, specially in VR.
To add a bit to this, i think the following should be done:
If it is possible to change vehicle render distance per map/map size, then for the render distance r the equation π*r^2 should equal anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 of the map area. If not, then it should equal somehting in-between half of the area of the smallest maps (64x64, about 25km render distance) and half of the area of the biggest maps (128x128, about 51km render distance). Something around 40-45 kilometers.
Also, every aircraft should be forced to render under this distance, without any crew skill dependence or factors like sun and obstacles, as sometimes aircraft can disappear even in plain sight due to bugged/incorrect calculations.
IIRC, years ago when it had unlimited spotting (or so it would seem, but I was playing props), the issue was that the distant dot, with all the AA thrown onto it was ultra large and easily visible, to the point that it was far easier for me to spot the furthest planes, regardless of background than someone close hugging the ground for instance. Now this has been rectified over the years, but this pop in/out system is also as bad in reverse.
Maybe a middle ground would be to have the old way of always rendering, but reducing the dot to 1 transparent pixel that gets more opaque until it turns black and then starts growing proportionally to the size/orientation of the plane. Keen vision and awareness would still apply, but change the transparency at a faster rate so someone with 0 level would see the dot fully black at 10km, one with maxed aced crew would see it at 8km, for instance (random numbers). The only issue I see is AA making the small pixels fuzzy, and we have gone full circle.
The render distance is even worse in VR mode. Planes render in at about the same, I believe, but there is so little VR support that the fidelity makes it so you can’t see them until about 7km. My headset is capable of 5k at 120 fps, but in-game it’s limited to most certainly not 5k and 90fps.
But what is most egregious is the ground vehicle render distance in VR.
All photos are taken in realistic settings, one frame before and after rendering. The last one has three, including the partial rendering of the vehicle in the middle photo at 2.98km, since it takes time to render after what seems like its render distance of 3km.
The evidence clearly shows that there is a disparity between the render distance in first and third person modes, and most egregiously in VR mode. I can understand the difference between first and third person render distances, but I cannot understand why the first person render distance in and out of VR mode is different.
This directly limits how the player can play in VR mode and makes it nearly impossible for aircraft without targeting pods to have an immersive and effective ground strike experience. Targeting pods in VR also have problems, but that is for another thread.
