A potential fix for the Aircraft visibility problems?

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by SlipBall

OK, from 1200m sun high, aircraft can still be spotted, but its more of a particular one that glitters and gets your attention. Moving mid size ground vehicles are easy to spot and track, but you would need to drop down to be able to identify exactly what it is.

perfect slipball, that one suits our purposes well with no low sun, the glare caused by the reflecting sunlight plays much less of an issue, and we can (try) to just make out the stationary single engine aircraft or moving vehicles.

i basically cant see ANY aircraft on that airfield from that altitude and distance on my screen (a corectly calibrated 27' 8-bit color screen). what i can occasionally see is a few little specs that briefly glitter a little and then disappear from view. i cant make out if its a latrine, a lunch soup van, or an enemy fighter, or potentially even a person holding a little survival mirror and reflecting the sun back at me to attract my attention. from some angles i can occasionally see a dark dot in the same spot where there was glitter before, and that presumably is the same object, but then whatever it was is invisible again a few sec later and no black dot or glitter at all.

if we game-the-game, then knowing something glitters on an open enemy airfield i can safely presume it is going to be an enemy fighter/plane, but i cant SEE it is. eg if there were a few vehicles/planes parked in fields somewhere on the map, with other glittering house/objects spread throughout the map, i have no way to identify one of these objects might be a tank or a parked enemy plane. you can then further use our artificial zoom method (narrowest FoV setting) to scan the ground and look for objects, but that is the same as a real pilot using a pair of binoculars (which obviously wasnt used historically).

now compare this lack of visibility with what you can see from a small modern prop plane at the same altitude, looking either at vehicles or roads, or parked aircraft at your local airfield, the visibility is completely different (and much better, allowing you to identify the individual planes shapes and silhouettes, even color often). and that gentlemen, just about sums up our current problem in CoD. from the multiple threads on this topic over previous years, most experienced pilots of small aircraft will concur with that last "visibility summary" of what it looks like in real life in comparison to the visibility problem we have right now in CoD.

it would be helpful if other people could comment on the airfield object visibility in that last slipball track (so see how much it varies from person to person), and if those with real life flying experience in small aircraft at a similar altitude/speed could comment on what they can specifically make out on the ground compared to what they see in that track (IvanK ?)

note: i suspect the slipball scenery detail is set to medium ? it can obviously be another variable if the scenery is set to very high or low, since in a very bland and sparsely drawn scenery these plane/truck objects will stand out more. but at least we are now all looking at the same tracks and can compare apples with apples

the good news is that CoD now runs well enough for most people, that we can actually start to worry about these types of issues and focus on creating a SIMULATOR rather then a "game".