FSW - playing with sky and clouds

[sightseer]

Today I was playing around with the sky texture and it doesn't operate like FSX/P3D sky does.  Everything seems to be lit by the second pixel mostly.  So I was playing around with yellow sunshine.  I set the first lighting pixel(ambient) to HSB 0 0 30 RGB value 76 76 76 and the second lighting pixel to  RGB 255 247 214.  I also tried a blue sun and Ill have to get back to that

cause it looked OK but needed improvement.  All of theses shots are the yellow sun.  I tried a harder yellow but it was just too much.

 

 

 

 

 

I noticed there was a 'TrueSky' directory in there but its empty.  I wonder what they have in mind.

[renault]

Hi

This article may help as a useful reference.  The concept of color temperature of a light source may give you some insight into how to achieve a better balance

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature

 

Cheers

Renault

[Jack Sawyer]

I'm going to have to see about buying a new SSD asap and downloading this.

 

Will it recognize Saitek gear?  I have the yoke, two throttle quads, rudder pedals, and a TPM.

 

With Flight School I could never get the settings to change, it was a constant battle trying to assign commands.  Hope they fixed that.

 

[Ken Hall]

those look great, the difference between full sunlight and shadow is great.

[Ken Hall]

5 hours ago, Jack Sawyer said:

I'm going to have to see about buying a new SSD asap and downloading this.

 

Will it recognize Saitek gear?  I have the yoke, two throttle quads, rudder pedals, and a TPM.

 

With Flight School I could never get the settings to change, it was a constant battle trying to assign commands.  Hope they fixed that.

pretty sure they will have fixed that Jack, but if not let them know and they will. the price is right at the moment, i can see the business model being changed if 3rd party devs dont accept the steam commissions, therefore they will need to charge more for this sim to balance it out, I think charging more for the sim and not taking a big cut of add on devs profits will work better.

[Mark Abdey]

10 hours ago, sightseer said:

I noticed there was a 'TrueSky' directory in there but its empty.  I wonder what they have in mind.

 

They have stated a few times that they have 'big plans' for the weather environment, so I'll be very interesting to see what fills these blank folders.... In the meantime we can still play around with textures to customise the sim to some degree; I've changed clouds, sky, water and some ground textures to decent effect.

 

Yours are looking great so far SS.

[VH-KDK]

Looks good.

[Jack Sawyer]

4 hours ago, Ken Hall said:

pretty sure they will have fixed that Jack, but if not let them know and they will. the price is right at the moment, i can see the business model being changed if 3rd party devs dont accept the steam commissions, therefore they will need to charge more for this sim to balance it out, I think charging more for the sim and not taking a big cut of add on devs profits will work better.

It'll be interesting to see how this works out.  I don't particularly like Steam, my son and I used to play games through Steam many years ago and I don't like the way they do things.  To me it would be a lot better to have a stand-alone sim like FSX or P3D.  This way you could mod it the way you want and buy what you want.  If I recall correctly they were always updating whatever game we played whether we liked it or not.  I like the new sim, just not Steam in particular.

[Ken Hall]

1 hour ago, Jack Sawyer said:

I like the new sim, just not Steam in particular.

Actually the update thing is very handy, if you change computers after you install steam all you up to date files are there, same idea behind Orbx Direct

[Jack Sawyer]

5 minutes ago, Ken Hall said:

Actually the update thing is very handy, if you change computers after you install steam all you up to date files are there, same idea behind Orbx Direct

Hi Ken, good point, but what I meant was, say you have your sim set the way you want it, in Steam, and then they make changes, you suddenly have to spend a long time readjusting your original settings.  I like FTX in that it only modifies the Orbx stuff, not P3D itself.  It's my choice to tweak P3D.  It was that way with the several games we played.  At times it got frustrating.  I prefer stand-alone programs.  And look what happened to Flight School, they just dumped it, no support, nothing.  So as much as I like what I see I'm wary of Steam itself.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello Jack,

 

I see no reason to be wary of Steam, which is just another way of marketing

and distributing software.

 

A point of fact.

Steam didn't dump anything, Flight School was withdrawn by Dovetail who

were marketing it through Steam.

I don't think there were any updates to it in its short life.

In return for that, anyone who paid the tiny price for Flight School now

has a copy of FSW gratis.

 

It is to be hoped and expected that there will be very many and very large

changes to FSW, early access gives the customer early access and the

developer access to a potentially very large number of testers.

It is certain that all of these updates will be applied through Steam and that

all of them will be provided by the developers, Dovetail.

I imagine the same was true of the games you and your son played.

I am a little surprised that a P3D user should be so averse to updates.

 

There seem to be four schools of thought,

one "it is no good so I will demand my money back

(for a product that I knew wasn't finished when I bought it),

because it isn't finished"

two "It is very good so far and I am willing to support it until it is finished."

three "I have read all the comments and although I have not tried it, I will leave

well alone until it is finished."

and finally, the one that is always there

"I don't have it, I don't want it and I know nothing about it but this will not stop me

from publishing definitive and negative 'facts' about it."

 

All of these (except perhaps four) are valid points of view and as ever make an

objective assessment for anyone without a copy very difficult.

[Jack Sawyer]

Right, I stand corrected Nick, they did indeed just stop supporting it, but I bought it so I'll be getting the new version for sure.

 

Last night I went on Steam and read all the comments.  One thing I don't like is all the negativity towards it as you mentioned.  Another is that everyone thinks this is a game.  This has been a point of contention with me all of my aviation and sim life.  It's not a game, it's a simulation.  I just want to post and ask, okay, if it's a game where's the points scoring system in it?

 

As for your statements, well, those people will never like it, they want insanely fast action multiplayer shooters, games which I personally have no desire to play.

 

This is what I mean about Steam, I know they sell some "regular" software but overall it's a gaming platform and most people will look at it as a game and the actual simmers who like it may get stranded by Dovetail if there's not a large enough payoff for them.  That's why I would have preferred a stand alone sim.

 

Personally I like what I see for many reasons.  I like that it's 64 bit, goodbye OOM's, I like that Orbx is supporting it, the rain effects are terrific, the cockpits from what I've seen are extremely detailed.  I know it's still a work in progress and if I had the room I'd download it right now.  And it would take about ten seconds since I went with fiber.  I looked at SSD's last night, will be buying one soon.  I'll support it and hope it succeeds but I just don't trust Steam.  As I said above, if Dovetail doesn't see a nice return on their investment will they drop it?  How do they feel about all the negativity about it on Steam's comments section?  What is their threshold for dropping it?  Popularity, money?

 

 

 

[sightseer]

Nick - You are sure right about that.  I cant believe how many posts Ive seen that fall in that last category.

 

Jack -  in Steam there is a way to disable automatic updates for a game and it wont change until you want it to.  I count on that for some games.

 

Mark, Martyn, Ken and Renault -  thanks for the comments...although, Renault, Im not sure how to take yours.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello Jack, 

all very good points and it will be interesting to see it pan out.

Almost worth the maximum spend of £19.99 just to see, £12.99 to us wasn't it?

[Jack Sawyer]

Just now, Nick Cooper said:

Hello Jack, 

all very good points and it will be interesting to see it pan out.

Almost worth the maximum spend of £19.99 just to see, £12.99 to us wasn't it?

Thanks Nick.  I actually liked the first one, but I just got so frustrated because no matter how many time I tried I could never get the buttons to stay configured for my hardware.  I saw in that video here they changed it but when he changed some settings I saw a little of the problems I had.  I'm sure they'll get fixed.

 

One thing I liked about Flight School was you were forced to fly correctly in order to progress to the next level of training.  What flight school is going to let you go from a J3 to a 747?  So that was good.  I haven't seen enough of it yet though, are those lessons still incorporated in the new version?

 

And I find it amazing that people like us who bought it are getting it gratis.  I guess they hope to make money by DLC's.

[Bermuda425]

Great to have such diversity of sims here on the forum!

[Nick Cooper]

Hello Jack, 

 

Here are a couple of pictures.

England's green and pleasant land in autumn apparently.

 

 

[Jack Sawyer]

Looks good on my iPhone!

[Nick Cooper]

and a few more, FSW but not default.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[renault]

8 hours ago, sightseer said:

Nick - You are sure right about that.  I cant believe how many posts Ive seen that fall in that last category.

 

Jack -  in Steam there is a way to disable automatic updates for a game and it wont change until you want it to.  I count on that for some games.

 

Mark, Martyn, Ken and Renault -  thanks for the comments...although, Renault, Im not sure how to take yours.

 

Hi sightseer

 

I apologize -- my comment was purely for information.

 

 I have found from my own experimentation with Look Up Tables to set color rendering for FSX that getting a realistic looking sunlight was incredibly difficult. As I researched the subject more I discovered a great deal of information of such things as white balancing, the effect of color temperature on coloring and how even with the same color values the color temperature will change the image etc. To me, it was fascinating to begin to understand that rendering of "simple sunlight" was much harder than I thought.

 

I was really impressed with what you have done and thought that perhaps the struggles I had might help someone else if I mentioned a good reference I had found.

 

The two images below, may help to illustrate what I mean. The actual color rendering in the Look Up Table(s) (LUT) that I created is the same in each screenshot. The only difference is that I used different color temperatures in each of the two luts. This was an experiment -- personally I like the first one (lower temperature) much better.

 

I'm sorry if my comment came across in any other fashion -- it certainly was never intended to be anything other than supportive.

 

Cheers

R

 

LUT with 5000K color temperature

 

LUT with 6000K color temperature

[sightseer]

 

Thanks for that, Renault.  I wasn't really offended by what you said.  I just wasn't sure where you were coming from and I made a joke about it.

 

Im not a graphics expert and I've never heard about look up tables for color temperature.  When I design a sky I just try to make it look good to me in the sim and I compare what I see in sim to what I have seen on the many flights Ive taken.  I don't really trust photographs because they tend to lie.  They are stopped down in order to not have overblown clouds or perhaps a concrete runway but the resulting photo doesn't look like what the eye actually sees.  The concept of what color sunshine is is almost an impossible concept because we don't see the sunshine directly but only indirectly as it has its modified effects on everything we see.  and it is greatly modified by everything that is in our atmosphere and that is also always changing.  Its modified by angles as well.

 

neither FSX nor P3D are technically accurate enough for anyone to claim perfection and so I don't take it too seriously.  I create and I hope I do a good job.

 

I do hope that those many voices crying out that FSW is too bright will realize that what it really is is too uniformly bright.  It has no cloud shadows and the runway textures just seem too flat - and they weren't made for FSW so they could be much better Im sure.  If people complain about brightness too much then well end up with another  sim where you fight to achieve sunshine.

 

and just a note - that yellow color sunshine I posted in the first post is too bright so...back to the drawing board.  I do like the warm effect it gives though.