Settings to improve aircraft visibility in external 'spot' view

[33LIMA 972]

I fly in the external, 'spot' view pre- and post-combat. Looks good and I reckon it compensates for sitting in a cockpit with no peripheral vision. Do this in shooters too, ie use 3rd person view and switch to gunsight view when shooting, for much the same reason; one reason I dislike shooters with no 3rd person view.

 

Anyway maybe it's my setup (now have a respectable 512MB DDR3 8800GT in place of the 256Mb DDR2 9300GS) but in external view, planes are rendered significantly smaller and much harder to see when in external view. If I swicth to un-zoomed, cockpit view, they look much 'closer' and are easier to see. I tried Olham's FOV tweak but didn't get a noticeable improvement in the external view anyway.

 

So I edited my working viewui.xml file (in [username]/Appdata/Roaming/Microsoft/CFS1 Over Flanders Fields) to replace my stock settings for the Spotview, here:

 

<SpotView ViewDist="10.625" ViewVerticalOffset="0.0" NominalAngles_x="20.0003693993873" NominalAngles_y="-50.0651212984645" VerticalDelta="80.0" LateralDelta="80.0" ZoomDelta="10.0"/>

 

 

...with these, which are the ones from the CFS3 ETO Expansion, except that I have kept the horizontal/vertical delta at 80 for a faster pan rate:

 

<SpotView FovScale="1.0" ViewDist="16.875" ViewVerticalOffset="0.0" NominalAngles_x="-11.5640145232585" NominalAngles_y="-105.305504107789" VerticalDelta="80" LateralDelta="80" ZoomDelta="5.00" ZoomMin="5" ZoomMax="300"/>

 

What this seems to have done is that planes now look the same size in the spot view as they do in cockpit view ie the former look closer/less zoomed out and are easier to see.

 

I found I had to re-enter this edit after playing around with other settings in Workshop changed it and lost the desired effect.

 

Early days yet but if the effect holds it will improve one of my main issues with OFF, ie poor aircraft visibility when flying in external view without use of labels/TAC (I fly with TAC set to 1 mile but at aircraft, and turn labels on rarely, hate to have to do either purely to see before it's too late planes I know are there eg in Archie bursts).

 

Have also reduced the size of the TAC and have just grabbed Olham's viewui.xml mod which I see already did this plus softened the labels nocely.