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

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.

You, and others in this thread, seem very angry about how other people enjoy the game friend. Taxiway maps are pretty much useless right now because most of the taxi signs do not represent real life to begin with, I’d say that’s a bigger issue than their size regarding realism. Also calling people lazy for playing the game the way they like it is just silly. Some people prefer playing differently than you and that’s fine. Some people also don’t have big monitors, or the fanciest VR gear, and that’s also fine. None of this is lazy. People enjoy things in different ways.

Also people keep bringing up the zooming in but I think zooming in is a much bigger immersion killer personally, since that’s not a skill I posess in real life.

Obviously the only real solution would be a simple slider in the Navigation Aids panel to set the size to your preference, otherwise people on both sides of the argument are just gonna keep arguing in circles about this.

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It doesn’t matter. If my math is correct, and the cockpit panel that is viewable from the sim is 2 meters in width in real life, then compared to a 15 inch monitor running 1920 x 1080 resolution, real life taxiway signs are 5.3 times more readable than they are in the game.

Math is math. It’s objective, not subjective.

And again, if you can barely make out the taxiway letters from 40 feet in real life, then you can barely make out the taxiway letters at 40/5.3 = 7.54 feet away, on a 15 inch monitor at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Since you seem to be bad at math and you don’t understand this concept, let me explain this another way.

Let’s say the cockpit panel that is viewable in the sim is 2 meters wide in real life. We want to duplicate this exactly with a monitor 1 for 1 in size. To duplicate this 1 for 1 in size with a monitor, we would need a monitor that is 2 meters wide, or 79 inches. A 79 inch wide monitor is a very big monitor and may not even exist on the market at this point.

With a 79 inch monitor though, the taxiway signs may be as readable as real life taxiway signs from 40 feet away from the taxiway sign (in reality, a monitor is still not as readable as real life because a monitor uses pixels whereas in real life, resolution is down to the atom).

Now instead of a 79 inch monitor, we shrink the screen size. And then we shrink the screen size again. And then we finally shrink the screen size down to the width of an tilted IPhone 12. Yes, you are now playing MSFS on an IPhone 12. If you tilt the IPhone 12, the width of the screen is 5.78 inches.

So on the 79 inch monitor, you can read the taxiway letters from 40 feet away. On the screen of an IPhone 12 that is 5.78 inches wide, do you still think you can read the taxiway letters from 40 feet away? Of course not! Because an IPhone 12 screen is only 5.78 inches wide, which means the taxiway signs are many times smaller than they are on a 79 inch monitor, and remember, the 79 inch monitor is the closest in size to real life.

Get it? I know you are bad at math, but if you don’t understand the math, the best way I can explain it you is by emphasizing that in general, the smaller the screen size, the less readable the taxiway signs are, compared to real life.

Great, well done guys. Looks like we’re gonna have to put up with taxiway signs twice the size of planes coz you’re too lazy to zoom in when you get near the real-sized ones.

Personally I don’t like the sim vs game nonsense, but this is just daft. Real-life signs don’t even come up to an adults waist but you guys want them taller than a Cessna just to get over the minor inconvenience of zooming.

Sheesh…

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So there are two types of realism at play here:

#1 The realism of taxiway signs being the same size in the sim as they are in real life

#2 The realism of being able to read a taxiway sign from 40 feet away in real life versus 40 feet away in the simulator.

If you want realism #1, then taxiway signs will not be as readable from 40 feet out in the sim, even though you may be able to read them from 40 feet away in real life.

If you want realism #2, which means you want to be able to read the taxiway signs from 40 feet out in the simulator just like you can in real life, then the taxiway signs need to be bigger, especially on a 15 inch monitor.

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Real life doesn’t zoom though, why is that solution okay for you, and not immersion breaking, but not larger taxi signs? And again calling people lazy for not playing the game your way, why so hostile? I mean I don’t actually disagree with you that this issue needs to be addressed better, but I think it should be a slider setting and not a forced thing.

Sheesh indeed :slight_smile:

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I’ve never needed to zoom to read them in game and frankly I’m baffled by this whole idea. Are you playing on an iPhone? If you want to resize all world objects for your own comfort and eliminate life’s inconveniences by having a world full of fantasy-sized signs…wow.

Agree a slider is the best compromise because I want nothing to do with the Willy Wonka airports you’re trying to create and clearly you have no truck with the tiresome clinging to detail from our side so hopefully Asobo will be able to put one in.

But this depends on how far away you are from the taxiway sign. In my example, if you can barely read a taxiway sign from 40 feet away in real life, then you need to be much closer than 40 feet in the game, depending on your monitor size and resolution.

In the example that I used with a 15 inch monitor running at 1920x1080 resolution (assuming the viewable cockpit panel is 2 meters wide), you need to be 7.54 feet away to just barely read the taxiway letters.

So should the rest of us have to suffer signs taller than a Cessna for the convenience of people playing on tiny screens who don’t want to zoom?

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Lol okay we’re going in circles at this point so I’m gonna bow out. Have fun being angry at the lazy people not playing the game right :smiley:

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Not angry at the play style, angry at having my experience impacted by signs 4 or 5 times too big dotted around my airports.

Your mathematical approach fails as underscored that in your logic, the instruments of every panel in the sim would be unreadable on a FullHD 15 inch monitor. Or do you also want all the gauges and the text on them being double the size than in real life? Use your maths once for this, I wonder if you still come to the same result. The mistake you do: it is all depending on the ppi and the distance of the player from the monitor, nothing else. Besides the fact that simmers using a 15 inch monitor are probably such a small minority, Asobo should not really care about them, sorry to say…

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My math is right though. Sorry, it’s simple scaling.

On a 15 inch monitor, of course the gauges are smaller than real life! It doesn’t mean you can’t read the gauges on a 15 inch monitor. Are you saying if MSFS was played on an IPhone 12 with a 5.78 inches wide screen, the gauges on an IPhone 12 would be just as big as real life? Nonsense. Your logic is a big failure.

You don’t understand how scaling works? On a 15 inch monitor or an IPhone 12, the scale is smaller. Gauges are smaller. Taixway signs are smaller. Everything is smaller. But while gauges may be readable on a 15 inch monitor, taxiway signs may not be readable if the distances to the taxiway signs are the same in the sim and real life.

I’m fine with making the signs a bit bigger to make them legible. The first couple of airfields I noticed the increased sign sizes at, I was fine with. A good compromise IMHO.

It’s when I started seeing other airports with giant billboards as signs that can be read from the opposite side of the apron, and big signs clipping through each other rendering all of them illegible that I started taking issue with what had been done.

I’m not against signs being bigger than they should be in real life. I’m against the lazy, half-■■■■■ solution Asobo implemented without testing.

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This is fair. I’m in favor of signs being say 20-50% larger than real life to compensate for being inherently more difficult to read in-game (on ANY size monitor). But yeah, some of what people are reporting is ridiculous.

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For the sake of all that is holy, please let us set the size in the options if needed.

This is going to be a giant mess when third-party developers use their own size of signs for their airports. It will look like Lego Land, bricks of every form and size.

I don’t want bigger signs, let me keep the old ones.

I play in 1080p and have no problem reading the signs at a normal FOV setting. If some of you want to fly their plane from the jumpseat because they feel that is realistic, fine.

But please make the larger signs OPTIONAL! :neutral_face:

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