35 minutes ago, Chock said:

 

I will never not click on that video.

I didn't even know taxiway sign size was an issue, they looked fine to me.  Asobo has made them the right size.

I don't see any issues.  I'm not seeing large signs like those anywhere I go. Let me check Heathrow. UPDATE, yeah it looks like its just EGLL Heathrow.  I wonder if the uk update did something.  Maybe try uninstalling the uk update and seeing if the taxi way signs are normal.  In the USA update a large swath of photogrammetry was lost in my town Tucson AZ because the exclude for the boneyard scenery was too big, so I had to find that one file and get rid of it.  They did a poor job anyway. I thought it actually looked worse.

LAX bespoke Asobo custom

Long Beach (stock, non-bespoke Asobo)

Edited February 17, 20215 yr by aniiran
pics

One could argue those bigger signs are more realistic. Just ask yourself: if readability of those signs would be as bad as in the sim in real life, how big would they actually be?

Or what is more realistic: being able to read them or not? 

How would pilots in a real plane feel if it would be impossible to read those? I think the first think would be to complain that they should be bigger.

A slider for those things would be great. In VR stuff like that is even harder to read so that makes it a lot more bearable.

The whole point of making the taxiway signs bigger was so that we can read them.  On VATSIM, the old taxiway signs were useless because they were too small to read.  

People need to remember that because this is a 3D generated world and things are pixelated from a distance, the readability of letters goes down in a 3D generated world versus real life.  In real life, you can read the taxiway signs from further out.  With the old taxiway signs, you could not read them from the same distance in the simulator.

Finally, the taxiway signs were huge in FSX.  Nobody seemed to complain about the size of them in FSX.  It’s silly that people complain of them now, especially when the change was made to help the readability so that taxiway signs in MSFS are actually useful now and not a novelty.

They should use whatever their real world size is. Any problems with readability in the sim could be solved by either additional markers that popup or perhaps zooming in whenever the game detects you are "staring" at a sign, or pressing a button.

3 minutes ago, orchestra_nl said:

They should use whatever their real world size is. Any problems with readability in the sim could be solved by either additional markers that popup or perhaps zooming in whenever the game detects you are "staring" at a sign, or pressing a button.

How can the game detect that you are staring at the sign?  

The point is, you can’t use real world size because then it’s not readable in the game!

People in this thread need to understand that if you use real world size taxiway signs, they aren’t readable in the game, which makes them useless! 

And again, I repeat that taxiway signs were also huge in FSX but nobody complained about the size in FSX.

When you build or modify an airport in the scenery editor, there is a “size” parameter associated with each taxiway sign that can be set from “1” (smallest) to “5” (largest). Up until now, this was ignored. No matter what you set the size parameter to, the signs always rendered as the smallest size “1”. 

I am assuming that the “huge” signs that are now appearing had their size parameter set to something higher than “1” in the original compiled airport files, and only now are rendering with the assigned size.

I will try changing the size parameter of the taxiway signs of a project I have been working on to each size from “1” to “5” to see if this parameter is indeed now fully functional. If so, it’s good news for airport developers.

Unfortunately, if the size was set to “5” by default in all the stock airports, now all the signs will be too big, where before they were too small. 

 

Sometimes some facts are nice

NOT TOO BIG.

https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/150-5345-44K.pdf

11 minutes ago, harrry said:

Sometimes some facts are nice

NOT TOO BIG.

https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/150-5345-44K.pdf

Yeah....4-5 feet with posts vs what we are seeing at some of these airports now is a pretty big difference. They are 6-8 feet tall at these locations we have posted

Edited February 17, 20215 yr by CaptainNick

23 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

How can the game detect that you are staring at the sign?  

The point is, you can’t use real world size because then it’s not readable in the game!

It is just one of the options. The game could detect whenever a particular sign is for a number of seconds at the center of your screen. One could also have to squeeze a button to tell the game to zoom in at whatever is at the center of the screen. Or the game could have popup markers to help with readability.

I am aggerating here, but the thing is, someone with 20/20 vision and a 120" 8K screen probably doesn't need enlarged taxiway signs, while someone else with bad eyes and a tinye screen would probably not be able to read the signs if they were 10 times as large. I'd rather have to use a button or other method to enlarge the signs momentarily when I need them, than have them always enlarged, ruining the feeling of immersion.

There are several ways the game could supply the information you need without making everything twice as large. We don't want to end up with oversized avionics in the cockpit, just to be able to read label. There must be better ways than that.

 

 

So with all the complaints about the new taxiway signs, I booted up FSX to check the taxiway signs at Renton airport:

 

I did the same thing also at Renton airport in MSFS:

 

You can see in FSX, the taxiway letters were also big.  The difference is, there is practically no padding around the FSX taxiway signs, which makes the signs unrealistic.  There is padding around the taxiway signs in MSFS so they are more realistic, but the padding also makes the signs bigger, to keep the letter size roughly the same. The important thing is, because we are in a 3D simulated world in MSFS, the letters cannot be smaller or else the taxiway signs will be unreadable and therefore, unusable in MSFS.  The taxiway signs were practically unreadable and unusable in the previous versions of MSFS.  Now, the taxiway signs are readable and usable in MSFS with this new patch.

At the end of the day, the letter size as they are now in MSFS is much better, making the taxiway signs readable.  The letter size should not be made smaller or else the taxiway signs will be unreadable and unusable again in MSFS.  So, we are left with 2 options, if we want to keep the letter size the same in MSFS:

1. Leave taxiway signs as they are now in MSFS

2. Remove the padding around the letters of the taxiway signs so that the taxiways signs are like the FSX taxiway signs.  This will keep the letters the same size so that the letters are large enough to be readable.  However, the taxiways signs now look awkward without the padding because that's not what they look like in real life.

Remember, we are in a 3D world.  The letters themselves have to be bigger in the simulator than in real life or else it's unreadable from the same distance (ie. you may be able to read a taxiway sign from 20 feet away in real life, but you can't read it in the simulator from 20 feet away). It's either option 1 or 2 if we want taxiway signs to be readable (and they are finally readable after this update).

 

 

Edited February 17, 20215 yr by abrams_tank

8 minutes ago, orchestra_nl said:

I am aggerating here, but the thing is, someone with 20/20 vision and a 120" 8K screen probably doesn't need enlarged taxiway signs, while someone else with bad eyes and a tinye screen would probably not be able to read the signs if they were 10 times as large.

I'm not using an 8K screen and my vision is fine.  I'm using a 1920 x 1080 monitor and the taxiway signs were unreadable and absolutely useless in the previous version of MSFS.  Asobo did a good thing by fixing the taxiway signs.

1 minute ago, abrams_tank said:

I'm not using an 8K screen and my vision is fine.  I'm using a 1920 x 1080 monitor and the taxiway signs were unreadable and absolutely useless in the previous version of MSFS.  Asobo did a good thing by fixing the taxiway signs.

I am using a 3440x1440 screen, and had no problems to read taxiways signs, If they were a bit further away I would just move my head with TrackIR to read them properly.

8 minutes ago, orchestra_nl said:

I am using a 3440x1440 screen, and had no problems to read taxiways signs, If they were a bit further away I would just move my head with TrackIR to read them properly.

And you realize a lot of people play MSFS on their laptops, where the monitor size is even smaller for laptops?  So if the taxiway signs are already unreadable and unusable on my 1920 x 1080 monitor which I use for my PC, it's even worse for people that play MSFS on their laptops? 

Maybe a sensible solution would just be to ask Asobo to tweak them back down a bit - an easy fix.  We should give them feedback on how much.  Reduce by 50%?  33%?