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Like a remake of Strike Commander?
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Like strike fighters or battletech yeah would be great 
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Nonono, Strike Commander it is.
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I dont think this DCS visibility problem is only subjective thing of what can be seen IRL and ingame.
I think DCS (engine) has serious problem of ‘physicaly’ drawing distant objects. I have noticed this already in 1.5 and my tests in early 2.5 OB confirmed the persistance of this problem.
I will post later some pics of what I am talking about. In short I call it ‘disapearing pixels’ isue.
Yeah…or even Strike Fighters had a Mercenary Mode that was kind of cool…
Yeah, but without the '80s Fighter jocks cheesy cutscenes and whatnot…
My vote still goes to Strike Commander.
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From my testing of early 2.5 OB. I have noticed this problem already in 1.5
Resolution 1920x1080 (plus zoomed in detail)
MSAA OFF
Other settings IRELEVANT iirc
Pics1-2 : MiG21, F2 default view, front hemisfere, same distance, different angle
Pic3 : MiG21, F2 default view, from below
Pics4-5 : L39, F2 default view, front hemisfere, same distance, different angle
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those planes are HUGE
Series of pics with MiG21, resolution 1600x900 (plus zoomed in detail), F2 default view, same distance, same angle
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Hmm, image 4 has something in the woods. Enhance!
Bigfoot! I knew it!
Seriously though, a good test and good images. It looks like some floating point scaling math is making things come and go, which doesn’t help for ID’ing stuff?
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From the above I would say that we have quite significant visibility problem in DCS.
First pack of pictures depicts the problem of spoting aircrafts. It is hard to spot another aircraft when the parts of it are not drawn.
Second pack of pictures depicts the problem of tracking aircrafts. Even from same distance and angle the aircraft represented by single pixel is disapearing and apareaing again (on the last pic it is sudenly represented by 2 pixels).
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For this one
…it looks like there may be a LOD issue for that model maybe? It seems unlucky that half the aircraft is just out of range etc.
yes, that MiG10.5 
is the only one with this problem.
but the missing wings, vertical stabilizers etc. when looking from front/rear hemisfere is problem of all DCS aircrafts. I have somewhere also pic of MiG31 without wings.
Actually I decided not to make a big(foot)deal out of it iirc I posted some pics from 1.5 on ED forums in the past but didnt posted the 2.5 yet.
hope @NineLine is reading here and the devs are already working on it 
There may very well be a «problem» with the visibility in DCS… I don’t know.
My take on this is that I think spotting aircraft in DCS is hard.
I know for a fact that spotting aircraft for real, is hard.
Like @BeachAV8R writes, I too spot small general aviation aircraft, fighters and other airliners, in flight.
I’m aided by TCAS or ATC, that gives me range, bearing and altitude of other traffic.
Sometimes I spot them from far away. Sometimes when I’m very close and sometimes not at all.
Sometimes I follow behind traffic, and suddenly just lose them from sight… Like, there one moment, gone the next.
This makes me feel that spotting aircraft in DCS is quite realistic, flawed or not.
Reality is often very random and chaotic. DCS may not simulate this intentionally, but that’s how it looks…
Edited. When I went back to check the thread, I re-read my post, and OMG! The post had several sentences written twice, and was totally incoherent.
I have no idea what happened. I’m not drunk, nor have I suffered a stroke…
I also found this image, from a paper on dogfighting. I think I have posted it before, but it’s relevant to this thread.
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Well, a model that does things intentionally is usually far easier to tune than one that does things that you don’t know about, so that’s a big + for fixing it if something is indeed broken with visibility. Interesting test images. If you can reproduce this, then that would be a good bug report.
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What I’m saying is that I feel that the visual spotting in DCS is very realistic. That doesn’t mean that smarter people than me shouldn’t find the faults and fix them
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That’s an interesting read (the paper you linked). Yesterday I had an SR-22 go by me at less than a mile, 1000’ below me, pointed out by ATC and spotted by my FO, but never did see him. Which just shows how highly variable individual spotting techniques and some luck can make things.
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Just to look at it from another perspective, we should ask ourselves if our own encounters with other aircraft match written accounts of similar engagements.
For example, the Red Baron reports from Vietnam include detailed narratives of many encounters. The only question, to me at least, is whether my experience in the sim resembles the experiences I read about.
Here is a link to the full text:
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/c003627.pdf
…and here is an example:
I’m not talking about exact distances they describe making visual contact (those are probably way off anyway) but the overall feel of the engagement. The only time I even came close to experiencing anything like what I read about in these reports was when I was recording missions every week and really tuned into the simulation. I could look in a direction and almost sense that something was wrong and out of place. That let me pick up on aircraft in a way I feel was ‘about right’. I really felt like I was gaining insight into what these guys went through. That, to me, is the core gameplay function and the only reason I am really here.
I am nowhere near that level now and have to rely on labels to get that same feeling. Unfortunately, that takes it too far in the other direction and makes it a little too easy.
The point is that whatever system they come up with has to be adjustable to match the experience level and needs of the player. Getting pixels, draw distances, and all that programming jazz squared away is great in that it establishes a baseline, but it will never be that simple. The ‘sweet spot’ is going to be different for everybody depending on how in tune they are with the simulation environment.
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