Thank you Asobo, the taxiway signs are finally readable! I can use the taxiway signs in VATSIM now!

Nope. I found this at default airports too. LFRE in my case. But have to keep flying.

Yeah the signs are 12 feet tall in VR. Liked to scared me to death when I came up on one. LOL

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It is simulating nearsighted-ness. I cannot see clearly beyond about 20m on an Oculus Rift S in VR. Everything is blurry. And in the RW, I am far-sighted. Up close is blurry but I can see an aircraft at 30 miles. Even though the signs are bigger, I cannot read them any easier on this headset. I have to taxi right up on them to see them clearly. I’m upgrading my headset in a month or two. It will be interesting to see the difference.

New signs are ridiculous. I don’t understand how something like this can pass QA/QC.

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Yeah it does, or at least the airports they checked didn’t have any issues.

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Come on Dev’s … take us back to “As Real AS It Gets”

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Yeah they are more readable now but the consequence of that is that they are now unrealistically big…think Godzilla big. Welcome back to the forum after 5 months @StressedDock250 and I agree…the size of the signs needs to be put back to where it was before :smiley:

Personally I think it’s a great quality of life improvement to make them more readable, especially in VR where I can’t really pull up airport charts, not to mention the charts often don’t match the airport in the sim. I think having to zoom in on a taxi sign is way more unrealistic, and actually proves the point that they’re not easily readable while you’re moving. It’s also such a minor thing that I’m surprised people are so upset by it. A slider would be the perfect compromise I guess.

Also it seems that the handcrafted airports, with accurate taxiways, don’t have the bigger signs. Only the autogenerated ones do.

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Yup, I absolutely agree with you. The bigger taxiway signs are an improvement. Of course, a slider would be the most optimal solution because then people can set the size they want.

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My only change, other than placement, would be to give them a matte rather than gloss finish.

Initially, I was pretty happy to be able to finally read signs for a change. They looked a bit bigger than what they should be, but I figured that was an acceptable compromise. I’m all for function over style.

Now that I’ve had the chance to fly to more locations and seeing that some taxiway signs are more like taxiway billboards, I think they may have overdone it. In some areas, signs are clipping through each other making one or both illegible.

They need to work on this.

Why should the devs make something unrealistic so that it becomes readable for some? This is a simulator and should simulate real life signs, which are nowhere as big.

Can’t read it? Zoom in if you need to. If that doesn’t help then you need to see an optometrist.

Can’t read it in VR? Get rid of your janky VR headset and get a G2. Not my problem you have a janky hardware.

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Again though, it’s another example of a solution that hasn’t been thought through.

“People are complaining the taxiway signs aren’t readable so we’ll make them bigger…” and not one person thought “hmmm, some of these signs are already close together, if we make them bigger won’t they clip?”

Not one.

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Because no simulator, regardless of what monitor or headgear one might have, can simulate how things really look to real human eyes looking at them in real physical space. Can’t happen. They have to deal with the realities of the medium. And the fact is, readability is going to be inherently less in game (for a variety of reasons) than it is with the naked eye.

So what happens is not really a tension between what is realistic and what is readable, but a tension between different metrics of realism that may be mutually incompatible. That is, if realistic measurements fail to be realistically readable, then the cause of realism has been failed just as much. So we must choose our priorities. And I’m on the side of realistic readability every time because that’s more important to making the experience feel authentic. There is no flight school in the world that will make you hop out of the plane with a measuring tape to check the signs.

“Zoom in if you need to” is a great example. You can’t very well keep your eye on the road while zooming in on a small portion of it, now can you? There’s no way to maintain spatial awareness not to mention keeping your hand ready at the throttle while fumbling with the mouse and cutting off much of you view. So what do you do in that situation? You have to screech to a halt on the taxiway every time you need to read a sign so you can do so safely. So now a realistically sized object has directly led to taking a distinctly UNrealistic series of actions. So you tell me, which realism is more important to maintain, especially for, not a casual player, but someone interested in carrying this experience into the real world? Realistic operations and traffic flow, or realistic object sizes?

EDIT: I should add before I get jumped on about this that I am speaking to the subject generally. I’m aware there is also the issue that the size of the signs still doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the size of the airports, so taxiways may be marked with huge billboards even at small GA fields. It seems Asobo still doesn’t have the database or machine learning or whatever they need to distinguish different sizes of airports and give them different appropriately-sized signs. And that’s a problem. That needs to be fixed. I fully agree that all airports need signs roughly in the ballpark of what would be believable at that location. Just maybe on the upper end of that ballpark.

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Bravo, well said! People here don’t seem to understand that the simulator is in 3D space. Making the taxiway signs the same size as real life will make them unreadable. It’s amazing how so many people in this thread don’t understand this basic concept.

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How many times do you need to hear it; they are unreadable in real life until you get close! Don’t you want accuracy in your simulator?

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I want the realism that penalizes lack of preparation. Pilots have airport taxiway maps along with the other navigation plates they need. I don’t want my immersion ruined by some lazy gamers who don’t want to do any prep.

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If you have to ‘screech to a halt’ then you’re taxiing too fast.

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No, the point is, you can’t see them even up close!

Don’t people understand a little math? Let’s assume you are using a 15 inch laptop monitor at 1920 x 1080 resolution and the width of the cockpit panel that you see in real life is the width of your 15 inch monitor. In real life, the portion of the A320 cockpit panel that you see in game, may be about 2 meters wide in real life (estimate of 2 meters). 2 meters is about 79 inches. So if you are using a 15 inch monitor, your cockpit panel is effectively 15/79 = 19% the scale of the cockpit panel in real life.

This means if the taxiway signs are the same size in the game as they are in real life, you cannot read them from the same distance in the game! This means the taxiway signs in real life, all things being equal, are 79/15 = 5.3 times more readable in real life than in the game if you are using a 15 inch monitor. This means that if you can barely see the taxiway letters from 40 feet away in real life, you need to be 5.3 times closer in game, which means on a 15 inch monitor at 1920 x 1080 resolution, you can barely make out the taxiway letters at 40/5.3 = 7.54 feet.

But it’s not even equal! Even on a 15 inch monitor, you are constrained by “pixels” or resolution. In real life, the resolution goes down to the atomic level. On a 15 inch monitor, the resolution is down to 1920 x 1080 pixels. Because of the use of pixels, things are more blurry than they are in real life.

Why don’t people understand this concept? Whatever the viewability is in real life for taxiway signs is worse on a smaller monitor, if the taxiway signs are at the same size. The only way you can match real life viewability distance is if your monitor size produces objects on a 1 to 1 size versus real life, which means you need a very, very, large monitor (probably a 79 inch wide monitor in this example since I estimated the portion of the cockpit panel you see in game is 2 meters).

I could see them no problem up close before!

And comparing a cockpit that is 50cm to 1m away from and level with the eye point to an external sign which should at closest be 3 -4m away and well below the eye point is ridiculous.