• Hey guys,

    I'm writing about something that's puzzled me almost since the release of Aerofly; and that's about the lack of dynamic lighting in such an otherwise modern sim. At night, the absence of runway illumination by the planes headlights, navigation lights, strobes etc, is very very noticeable, and while this deficit has been mentioned several times in various threads, the standard response that the issue is "on the radar" or "is known" etc grows only more puzzling as time continues to pass with no notice of impending action on the issue.

    Now today, Jarred Marshal of Orbx/Innsbruck fame and more, has previewed the use of P3dv4 dynamic lighting on the airport, and I note the locations where those lights are active closely corresponds to places where lights are conspicuously dark/inactive in the Aerofly version, highlighting the lack of illumination even further.

    So the question occurs...... Does Ipacs have some plans (not previously divulged) to address this issue in the near term?

    Can we expect that an Innsbruck update will coincide in any way with dynamic lighting arriving for Aerofly?

    Is there some technical reason that makes it particularly hard to do so at this time?

    I'm very curious!

    http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/13…comment-1232125

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/GcWV9lI.jpg]

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    Edited once, last by HiFlyer (August 4, 2017 at 6:53 PM).

  • IPACS is looking for ways to better the night lighting scene and will investigate more before committing to a total solution.

    There have been some talks about adding a general night light layer but it may be too generic for the quality that is expected. There is also the autogen solution that once added to scenery it will have its own lighting, then maybe add some hand placed streetlights.

    As for the illuminated runways/tarmac, this has also been discussed a few times already. We will be sure to let you know when/if it will come in a future update but now there are a lot of other things with a higher priority to be worked on.

    Please give this some time to develop, we all agree that night lighting has to be improved.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • sounds like a plan.

    Once "Lighting" pops up on your priority list - and i am talking to the whole IPACS team -

    don't just copy paste existing solutions. ("generic" kind of squeekes my ears)

    Lighting is a core element in computing (and of course simming) and deserves full focus.

    Since no roads are implemented, you will need to dedicate to "within aerodrome" lighting,

    or it won't happen in this century :)

  • don't just copy paste existing solutions. ("generic" kind of squeekes my ears)

    If things were that easy... You can't just copy paste stuff like night lighting.

    Knowing Torsten and Marc it is safe to assume they will create their own night lighting code. Probably outstanding as usual...

    With overlapping light beams, shadows per light source, moving light source relative to some of the illuminated parts... this is not an easy task.

    It's not just adding an extra layer over the ground, that doesn't actually light up the ground. This is cheap in terms of performance but looks wrong on so many levels.

  • Night lighting in all of its forms has moved past ATC as a "must have" for me. I can always imagine that my co-pilot is handling the radios, but I can't just imagine that there are lights on the ground at night. I'm sure the solution will be both elegant and revolutionary as always.

  • Night lighting in all of its forms has moved past ATC as a "must have" for me.

    I'm sure the solution will be both elegant and revolutionary as always.

    my words.

    they shouldn't and won't go the easy way. Leaps, not steps.

    ipacs's strobe and nav lights already show.

    Done pretty well.

    We expect flud light coming with the same advancement of course.

  • jan, you quoted me correctly but argued in contrary to what i said? .. re-check my earlier post.

    my point was to not use the legacy or generic solutions.

    Yes I got that. And I said that this would be unlikely if not even impossible, because such a thing can't just be copy pasted. You can use existing things and try to embed them into your program, that's the way the current clouds work. And they're not as good in performance as everyone knows :)

  • these scripts and techniques exist, and yes they can indeed be copy pasted :)

    and no, we don't want old techniques, we want revolution :))


    Speaking of techniques: Billboarding (clouds) seems to have problems here and then with turning.

    Just to let the devs know.

  • these scripts and techniques exist, and yes they can indeed be copy pasted :)

    Why are you so sure about this? You haven't seen any Aerofly code, I have.... Anyway, yeah maybe, I don't want to go into this too much, just saying that it is safe to say IPACS won't copy paste something and you don't have to be worried that we'll do.

    The nature of Billboards is that they turn to face the camera... They should probably not take the Z axis of the camera and apply that but instead each billboard should be rotated to face the camera's position. But that even more expensive and might make the clouds laggier than they already are.

    We're aware of this and the current clouds are probably not the end solution for the Aerofly.

  • Why are you so sure about this? You haven't seen any Aerofly code, I have.... Anyway, yeah maybe, I don't want to go into this too much, just saying that it is safe to say IPACS won't copy paste something and you don't have to be worried that we'll do.

    The nature of Billboards is that they turn to face the camera... They should probably not take the Z axis of the camera and apply that but instead each billboard should be rotated to face the camera's position. But that even more expensive and might make the clouds laggier than they already are.

    We're aware of this and the current clouds are probably not the end solution

    i dont think almdudl is in need for lessons. i perfectly understand what he was trying say, why dont you Jet?

  • Speaking of techniques: Billboarding (clouds) seems to have problems here and then with turning.

    Just to let the devs know.

    Billboards always rotate, even in AAA titles it's a hazard of the tech, which is why it's a shame that truly volumetric solutions that could avoid the issue are so hardware intensive.

    On the other hand, TrueSky, which has been seen in various venues including recently in DTG's Flightsim world, must be pretty darn fast to be useable in an FSX-based engine without slowing FPS to a crawl, so maybe volumetric isn't completely out of the question.......

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  • i dont think almdudl is in need for lessons. i perfectly understand what he was trying say, why dont you Jet?

    To me it sounded like he thought you could just copy paste code into Aerofly (even if it is old technology and he doesn't want that) and it would work like plug and play. And I doubt that you even could. The rendering engine of Aerofly is quite unique (hence the crazy performance) so even if you could add something on to it from external it would probably ruin the platform.

    That is all I wanted to say.

    Yes we want new technology and breathtaking night lighting and clouds and clouds with landing lights on them and cities that illuminate clouds from below or a thin fog layer over the city that you can see though that washes out everything, street lights, taxiway lights, apron flood lights, all of that :)

  • First post here so a big ANDI's room Hi to everyone, ok so I like Toy story, even at 60

    I developed a set of aircraft landing lights for Prosim737 and Sim Avionics, they took me nearly 2 years to perfect and reduced what hair I had left to a few strands, so I guess what I'm saying is, these things take time, lots of it and I only worked on one thing, so patience is essential in flight simming. Volume/dynamic lighting looks great I admit but it will come with a cost, FPS will suffer

    Steve

  • I admit but it will come with a cost, FPS will suffer

    Succumbing to curiosity, I purchased Innsbruck (and a few other Orbx sceneries) for P3D yesterday.

    Obviously I could see the places where they were the sceneries were same, but I was also intrigued about the differences, and of course, one of the huge differences is the framerates.

    Frankly speaking, unless you lower several settings, you end up with about 30fps on the P3D rendition of Innsbruck, and even less than that with Dynamic lighting enabled.

    Realtime lighting really seems to drain the heck out of P3D, yet we know that 100's of real time lights are possible on other platforms like X-plane so...........

    It going to be interesting to see where Aerofly ends up between those two poles when/if realtime lights ever arrive from Ipacs.

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  • What I miss most regarding night lighting:

    - Landing and taxi lights (which enlights the RWY and the taxiways)

    - taxiway lights (green spots)

    Land in Zurich at 11pm and you are completely lost in the darkness although the airport buildings themselves look very nice.

    Regards,

    Thomas

    i7-14700KF @ 5.6 GHz, Geforce RTX 4090, 32MB RAM, 1TB SSD M.2, 1TB SSD M.2, 2TB SSD M.2, 32" Monitor 4K, Pimax Crystal

  • TomB,

    +1 but I would also like any static aircraft to have tail logos lit and maybe the passenger/cockpit windows lit. All buildings should have a nighttime appearance. The tarmac should have "lit" areas near light stanchions. This is simply a modeling issue - not an "additional technology" issue like the landing/taxi lights. Each texture can already have a nighttime version ( xxx_light.ttx) that is activated at night.