Meerkat Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 Hi folks, I'm running FSX in DX10 mode with Steve's fixer, and from the very beginning the overly large and obtrusive ORBX Global street lights (which look OK in DX9 mode) were quite annoying. In some forum post some ORBX guy (maybe JV himself) stated, that they might have a look at that issue some time. I didn't want to wait, fired up imagetool and (the very nice freeware) Real World Paint, and resized the texture sheets. The trick with mipmapped light textures seems to be (at least I think so) not to use the autogenerated mip maps which reduce the image size by 50% for each mip level. This leads to very faint lights in the greater distance (say 20 km), which is not realistic (I once saw a car headlight in the Mongolian steppe, where the nights are really dark, over some 150 km!). The other way round, if you make the lights in the highest mip level bigger (as with ORBX Global), they are well visible in the distance, but look overly large and bright when nearer than 1 km. So what I did was extracting the mip levels from the relevant textures (as 32 bit bmp), reduced the size of the first mip level to 30% and added transparent pixels to restore the 128 px size; the second mip level to 45% and the third to 67%. The other mip levels remained untouched, and at last, all mip levels were united again and converged back to DXT-5. The result is as follws: Foreground lights seem ok now while the distant ones are the same as before. The tweak was tested in Germany (pure Global), FTX-PNW (new lights) and FTX-SA (old style lights) with no adverse effects. Now I ask JV: if you like the tweak, how can I provide the altered texture files for other simmers? I could send the textures to you for publishing them, or, if you agree, I may upload them on Avsim (just the textures with some readme). Best regards Markus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GregJ Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 Man... I tell you some people are too smart... The results look great... even though there was a description of how they were adjusted it started like this for me...."So what I did was extracting the mip levels" .... and then basically the little monkey in my brain started clashing his cymbals.... Thanks to all who spend time solving the problems that make my sim experience better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrrbolkin Posted February 20, 2014 Share Posted February 20, 2014 Great work hopefully you will get the go ahead for this.Will keep an eye on it until ratified. Cheers. Gary Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Holger Sandmann Posted February 21, 2014 Share Posted February 21, 2014 Hi Markus, thanks for sharing your ideas about night lighting alterations. I agree that improving the long-distance display of the 3D lights would make a nice difference; in fact I've made similar mipmap changes for the marine light signals a while back. Our lead lighting developer lives in the Ukraine and, due to the current political crisis, has very unreliable Internet access. If you send me a PM, perhaps along with a couple of files to look at, I can be the intermediary until conditions improve. Cheers, Holger Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meerkat Posted February 21, 2014 Author Share Posted February 21, 2014 Hi Holger, I sent you a message. The news from Ukraine are quite scary - I hope your collegue is well. That's much more important than some tweaked lights. Best regards Markus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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