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Problem with Global night lighting in low vis.


Dr_Watson

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Hi Orbx

I have a major problem with the new night lighting with Global.

Quite often, I look for interesting flights with challenging weather, so with the recent foggy weather I done some flights to Zurich.

The problem is, with vis at 100m, the whole city and surrounding area of the airport are fully lit at all times. The immersion factor is completely lost when you are on full auto land while everything is visible. The airport is not visible so it looks like you are landing on a black blob in the middle of City lights since the approach and runway lights are not visible.

I presume this is maybe an incorrect setting on my install?

Can post pictures if needed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well thats why i asked if it is possible to shut deactivate all the ftx global night lights to use other night lighting. This is surely no permanent solution.


 


For me this is a very annoying problem, and honestly i cant understand why this wasnt recognized prior release of the program. And i am still surprised that there are so few people reacting on this, especially from the orbx users because this problem doesnt seem to be an individual problem of just two users.


 


We need to keep this thread alive Dr. Watson!


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Hi there,


 


the FTXG lights other than those along the road vectors are part of the autogen system and thus included with the respective autogen .agn files (there can only be one of those files for each landclass ground texture tile). Therefore, the only way to deactivate them is to set the autogen density slider to full left.


 


Cheers, Holger


 


P.S.: I can confirm the issue with the FTXG lights being visible in fog conditions. Since the FTXG lights are properly blended out by clouds I assume it's a specific issue with the way FSX renders low-visibility and fog. I'm no expert on either but I doubt there's an easy solution. FTXG lights are different from standard light effects, which apparently is the key to their improved performance (compared to our current region's lighting, the UTX approach, etc.). Thus, this is probably one of the compromises so typical (and annoyingly common) to FSX add-on development. Unless someone comes up with a clever work-around other than deactivating autogen in low-viz conditions...    


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Hello Holger,


 


thank you very much for your reply.


Looks like this is a tough one. Pretty sad i think because other than that, ftx global is awesome. Maybe there will be a fix in the future, or a workaround as you said.


Just to understand this, and please excuse my lack of knowledge. It is not possible to just switch the texture files of the night lighting to get other lights?


 


Thank you very much


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Hi KSandleben,


 


good point about the connection with shaders (of which I know nothing) though I'm using DX9 without mods and see the same behavior as megakles so I suspect it's a more generic issue with the way effects are rendered by the FSX display engine.


 


BTW, I just checked within our FTX regions and its light system shows the same behavior, which points to the approach we're using -- light effects placed as autogen rather than objects -- as the common denominator. Interestingly, in all the years we've been using this approach I don't recall a single discussion about this behavior... 


 


The UTX products place their lights as objects with FS2002/2004 code (which is why they can't be excluded with FSX exclusion code); that's probably why they do fade in low-viz but also why they are much harder on fps.


 


Cheers, Holger

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My fsx is vanilla with dx9 so it has nothing to do with mods.

With global lights working like this, it's quite disappointing that such a large amount of the globe functions like this now. ( I don't own that many areas) And what happens when the lights are upgraded for the existing regions? Then the regions will be like this too?

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Hi Iain,


 


sorry that there doesn't seem to be an easy solution if any. As I mentioned above though the lighting system of the FTX regions already shows the same behavior in low visibility conditions as FTXG so switching them to the FTXG system won't make any difference in that regard.


 


Cheers, Holger


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  • 2 years later...

I just bought and installed ORBX Pacific Northwest.  I use Active Sky Next with FSX and I don't use DX10.  I set the weather to low overcast so that I would have to fly under 3000 feet to see the ground.  I was flying at 5000 feet and things worked fine during the day but when I changed to night, not only could I see the city lights but the runway lights are very bright as well.  As an aside this part of Washington showed up as snow on the ground whereas snow is rarely in this area.  If it does snow, it is gone in a day.  I am disappointed in having spent all this money and getting such poor results. 

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  • 2 months later...
On ‎10‎/‎11‎/‎2013 at 0:11 PM, Holger Sandmann said:

Hi there,

 

 

 

 

 

 

the FTXG lights other than those along the road vectors are part of the autogen system and thus included with the respective autogen .agn files (there can only be one of those files for each landclass ground texture tile). Therefore, the only way to deactivate them is to set the autogen density slider to full left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers, Holger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P.S.: I can confirm the issue with the FTXG lights being visible in fog conditions. Since the FTXG lights are properly blended out by clouds I assume it's a specific issue with the way FSX renders low-visibility and fog. I'm no expert on either but I doubt there's an easy solution. FTXG lights are different from standard light effects, which apparently is the key to their improved performance (compared to our current region's lighting, the UTX approach, etc.). Thus, this is probably one of the compromises so typical (and annoyingly common) to FSX add-on development. Unless someone comes up with a clever work-around other than deactivating autogen in low-viz conditions...    

 

I

On ‎10‎/‎11‎/‎2013 at 0:11 PM, Holger Sandmann said:

Hi there,

 

 

 

 

 

 

the FTXG lights other than those along the road vectors are part of the autogen system and thus included with the respective autogen .agn files (there can only be one of those files for each landclass ground texture tile). Therefore, the only way to deactivate them is to set the autogen density slider to full left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers, Holger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P.S.: I can confirm the issue with the FTXG lights being visible in fog conditions. Since the FTXG lights are properly blended out by clouds I assume it's a specific issue with the way FSX renders low-visibility and fog. I'm no expert on either but I doubt there's an easy solution. FTXG lights are different from standard light effects, which apparently is the key to their improved performance (compared to our current region's lighting, the UTX approach, etc.). Thus, this is probably one of the compromises so typical (and annoyingly common) to FSX add-on development. Unless someone comes up with a clever work-around other than deactivating autogen in low-viz conditions...    

 

 

 

 

Quote

 

 

 

I understand about deactivating autogen by moving the slider to the left which I have been told will revert the scenery to the default FSX scenery.  Since ORBX changes the elevations to make them correct will deactivating scenery cause the original elevations to be displayed or will they remain the same.  I did not get a chance to check this out before my computer crashed a while back. 

Has any one noticed if you would find airport in a valley or up high. 

 

Thanks for any information.

 

IslandBear

Order #:FSS0455848

 

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  • 8 months later...

I have decided to try installing ORBX again.  I found that using the FTX Central 3 solved a lot of problems I had.  I did some more reading and talked to friends at the Virtual Airline I fly with and finally understood what I needed to do.  Sorry for my initial reaction and because things were working so well I purchased some more scenery from you.

 

Thank you,

 

IslandBear

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