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Night Lighting / City Lights


Gumps

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I've flown over Sydney and Melbourne at night with FTX installed, and the cities appear quite dark to me.  Darker than I remember seeing cities when flying in real life.  I've been comparing FTX at night, side by side with FSX default (multiple machines).  While the FSX default looks a little too bright, it seems to more closely resemble the glow of city lights from the air.  I certainly appreciate the 3D lighting effect of FTX, but I wonder if there's a way to increase the overall lighting intensity.  From any distance at night, it's hard for me to see if there's a big city up ahead or not.

Perhaps it's a hardware or software setup issue.  (??)  FSX is running on an E6850 / Geforce 8800 GTX / XP Home / FSX SP1 /19" Samsung LCD

Has anyone else noticed this?

Any thoughts on brightening things up a bit?

Thanks in advance.

Gumps

Australia

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I thought so too. In Adelaide at the top of a hill the city is a sea of bright lights. Very dim in the sim (hmmm dim sim....). I was thinking it might be better if I turned the lights off in the family room where the FSX computer is located but the rest of the family might object :-)

Steven.

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Hi Chris

Yes, I did experiment with the 3D lighting tool.  It is a slick applet...but didn't seem to affect the overall city lighting affect in the sim (I don't think it's really supposed to from what I can tell).  Thanks for the thought though.

I suppose as much as anything else, I'm wondering if others have noticed this as well.  Perhaps it's just me, or a matter of taste.  Dunno.

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the lights item is a personal taste matter as wehave found out when we where testing it, hence the ligts tooly was added to the package.

you need to select a bmp and also the size 4~12

personally I have the 4th bmp from left and size 9 just select one for starters and set it to 12, then set dawn or dusk and have a lil fly around

a lil example attached, it involves a bit of testing and trying till you have found the settings that suit you best as every system is different the result will be differnt as well

post-154-130203874547_thumb.jpg

post-154-13020387456_thumb.jpg

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Ah, there are three possible issues here.

1. The Special Effects setting in FSX is not set to at least medium.

2. We aren't using much/any autogen (the lighting doesn't effect texture brightness)

3. The light setting in FTS Lights needs tweaking (I had tweaked before but not enough...)

Not having any autogen isn't too good at night.

Setting the autogen to Extreme the lights look great. I only get 4FPS though, I can survive on Dense for awhile :-). (must, have, more, power...)

Selecting the 'Holger' lights at site 9 made the city nice an bright.

Steven.

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Taa daaa! great to hear you've found some balance.

Yes we could all do with more power, consider wouldnt it be annoying if you went out and got a more powerful PC tommorow and there was no improvement? FSX and FTX will keep giving for a while yet if you give it more power to use.  ;)

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Guest J van E

I did one night flight so far and I noticed there aren't much lights 'embedded' in the textures themselves, it seems, making things look dark and not too lively (which is okay at 3 o'clocl at night, but not during dawn ;) ). Maybe there is too much light painted into the default FSX textures, making FTX look a bit dark in comparison, but this is the only thing about FTX that didn't blow me away: at night/dawn it's a bit too dark imho. I miss those warm orange lights near houses and so on. But maybe FTX is more realistic in this regard and default 'embedded lights' are over the top...?

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