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FTX Global Night Lighting Question


rdg44

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Hi,


I'm seeing a distinctive outer radius of lights on as I'm flying.  In other words, at 2000 ft , I see night lighting, but only so far out. So I'm flying along, I see the lights popping on as I get nearer to the area.  When I get to 10,000 feet I don't see the night lighting 'spheres', if you will, but I do see some small areas that still show this.  I have some  images, but can't  figure out how to attach them.


 


I have Global Radius set to max in FSX.  My system is win7 64, I7 2600 oc 4.0Ghz, GTX 680 4gig, 8gig ram.


 


I'm not sure if this is just the way FSX works or not. Thanks.


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This is indeed the way FSX works...

The FTX Global night lighting is actually small "lit" autogen models that are placed on the textures just like buildings and trees, so just like autogen forests, they are only loaded to a maximum radius around the aircraft... The larger the radius, obviously the more objects are loaded and thus the harder FSX has to work (resulting in lpower FPS or even crashes to desktop if the system becomes overloaded).

The FSX menu can only push it so far... It's "maximum" radius setting changes a line in the FSX.cfg file to a value of 4.5 (4.5km radius I believe). So your lights are only loaded if within 4.5km of your aircraft.

A lot of FSX users open the FSX.cfg file in Notepad and manually edit this number to something higher... Most of us use 6.5 as this is a good balance between view distance and performance... Anything higher may look great, but FPS will suffer and crashes to desktop become more likely.

I won't go into the details here, but if this is something you wish to try, do a search for "MAX_LOD_RADIUS" and that should point you in the right direction.

Just one final thing to note, FSX has a "feature" so that when you make any changes to the settings within FSX, it will always adjust the radius back to 4.5... Make sure you make your manual edit after making any changes to settings in FSX :)

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Thanks Rob for the detailed explanation ! I seem to recall now adjusting this along time ago, but must have forgotten about it :wacko:. Recent changes must have reset it, causing me to see the smaller radius. I'll try a larger radius and see how performance is.


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  • 3 weeks later...

I was also wondering what affects the range of the FTX Global lighting... If it is controlled by LOD radius, that would explain perhaps some of the screenshots...


 


Remember that any edits to the fsx.cfg via the settings menu of FSX will cause any manually set MAX_LOD_RADIUS to default back to 4.5


 


A


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