Increase distance threshold to see other aircraft navigation and strobe lights at night

Brief description of the issue:

The actual minimum distance is about 5nm which is too short when flying during the night and making the sky empty.

Furthermore, other aircraft lights are vanishing all of a sudden instead of disappearing gradually (dimming intensity and/or diminishing size).

Please change the minimum threshold to at least 25nm and make the other aircraft lights gradually appearing and disappearing over the distance.

Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:

n/a (see below)

Detail steps to reproduce the issue encountered:

Just fly FS2020 at night with MP traffic around you: the sky is empty unless you’re 5nm from another player and you can start seeing the other player aircraft nav lights.

I’m quite surprised this is not getting more votes and this is making me wondering whether we’re not much flying VR at night, or this is only happening on my system?!

In early alpha versions this already got upped to around 20 NM?

In early VR alpha versions?

Not sure what the distance was but yesterday i noticed Multiplayer Planes were invisible with only their lights showing, this was in the daytime. Wonder if it’s a graphical setting buried in a file somewhere.

2 Likes

Bloom affects this. You cant turn it off, else airport beacon lights are too dim at night, but at daytime I guess it is it overpowering on planes.

Why is bloom affecting the LOD of the Plane? That doesn’t make sense to me

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It affects the lights. But given what you said, they probably dont become visible at the same draw distance. It could be on purpose or a bug.

Yeah I’m wanting the lights & body to appear/disappear at the same time. Currently it looks silly and it’s clearly an issue/bug, ergo hoping for a setting or something that could fix it, if not then a proper fix needs to be made and as the thread suggests a better LOD Distance for both items.

1 Like

Good morning,

Whilst in VR, when flying in formation (close proximity within 1nm) of other aircraft on the server, I cannot see exterior lights of other aircraft. This makes it very easy to lose sight of other aircraft whilst in close proximity.

I also believe there’s an issue with seeing your own exterior lighting in the cockpit view when in VR.

Using an HP Reverb G1.

Has anyone experienced this?

I’m fine with the body disappearing before the lights, I mean you’re not gonna see it before the lights.

Is there already a rationale behind the light draw distance? I mean there should be some kind of logic behind the lights’ intensity. It shouldn’t be an on-off switch.

I agree, body disappearing before the lights is normal and actually expected, but the point of this topic is:

  • In VR, the lights vanishes at a very close distance I estimate no more than 5nm.
  • In 2D, the lights are vanishing much further away (still not further away enough in my opinion).

You’re also raising a valid point: they’re just vanishing all of a sudden without dimming with the distance first, and I’ll amend the OP with this now.

Hi,
Can we add increase contrails distance view too to the topic ?
Regards

3 Likes

I agree, it needs to be much further than present.

1 Like

Its also an issue during the day … planes lights pop up at 5nm, but the actual plane has to get significantly closer, till the rest of the plane starts to appear.
And then the Wheels only appear, at the last moment, typically as the plane touches down – even in FIXED GEAR planes !!

2 Likes

My impression is that in VR the LoD range is deliberately reduced in order to enable the most fluid representation possible in the movement. Apparently, no distinction is made here between the type of objects that are generated in a radius around the observer. When flying low - e.g. in a helicopter - I observe a similar effect on the ground, which can be seen particularly well on roads and rivers.

After the last (memorable …!) update, I was able to improve the situation a bit by modifying the config.toml (found under Official \ OneStore \ bf-pgg \ PGG ) by adding
lod_override = false
changed to
lod_override = true

However - be careful with the value “lod_override_with_lod = 2”. A value of 3 results in a better LoD, but the display is already beginning to slightly stutter. The higher you get thereafter, the worse the stutter becomes. Less disturbing in flight, but most embarrassing when taxiing on ground. (FYI, I’m flying on a RTX 2080 S)

So without without prioritizing the objects in the generation, which should represent a considerable effort in programming, I might consider the problem not solvable.

Voted, so disappointing to see planes in the Live Map/Garmin but not see them in the skies until they’re very close.

I concur. This is particularly apparent during community fly-ins.

I’m currently on SU10 beta, but they’re still good 20-30 aircraft on Fridays. Still, when flying along in VR, you usually see only around 5-10. As soon as you get separated from the group, on touch and goes etc., you suddenly fly “alone”. You can’t see others even though the live map is still full of planes.

This makes multiplayer (and not just mp) skies rather lonely in VR :frowning:

Please devote some dev time for fixing small annoyances. I know getting the sim in order has the priority but things like these then end up unaddressed for years.