Night Lighting visibility distance

[forostar]

Hi Umberto

This isn't a show-stopper for me, I love your sceneries close-up: but is there a reason why all night lighting disappears and the airport area detail goes completely dark when flying approx 10nm+ away from the airport?

This happens with all 3 FSDT sceneries I own, LSGG, KJFKv2 and CYVR.

Is this intentional on your part, to ensure good performance on low-end systems? And if so, is there a setting I can change to improve the distance at which night lighting is visible? Happy to play around with config files etc.

Just to confirm, the scenery and lighting do all re-appear when I fly back within this invisible "boundary", for all 3 airports. All my registration details are installed and up-to-date, and so is Couatl, so this isn't the same issue as people who haven't installed their registration code properly.

Maybe it's because I'm using DX10. Would be good to get your opinion.

As I said, the issue doesn't stop me enjoying your scenery, but it does impair the experience, especially when trying to line up the approach. I'd appreciate any help/advice you can give. But if it's built-in and can't be changed, so be it, no problem.

My setup is as follows:
FSX+FTX Global+REX with DX10 Fixer applied
1366x768x32
4xAA
Scenery Dense
Autogen Dense

Let me know if there's anything else you need.

Thanks in advance.

Chris

[virtuali]

This isn't a show-stopper for me, I love your sceneries close-up: but is there a reason why all night lighting disappears and the airport area detail goes completely dark when flying approx 10nm+ away from the airport?

That's not just the night lighting, it's the whole airport that is not loaded until you get around about 10 NM out.

The exact number changes a bit depending on the scenery. JFK, for example, has been carefully tuned to be sure it won't get loaded together with KLGA/KEWR or the densest parts of Manhattan, other sceneries like KDFW have larger loading ranges, because the airport area is bigger and the surrounding area is not as dense as JFK or CYVR.

There's no way for the user to change this, and I don't think it would be a good idea if we allowed it, because people will start playing with settings and will tend to use higher settings that necessary, resulting in increased chances of OOMs, which will turn into more and more support requests for us, so we set that value to be what we tested to be ok considering the overall memory load in that area and the scenery size.

[forostar]

Thanks Umberto - understood re: the scenery overall, and yes, I can see now that it's all the scenery that switches on or off, not just the night lighting. I guess it's just less noticeable in the daytime.

Would you consider allowing just the lighting itself to appear from further away? Can that be done - can the lighting viz parameter be separated from the rest of the airport scenery? Perhaps as part of a future patch?

If that's also not possible, then no worries, and thanks for your really quick response.

Chris

[virtuali]

can the lighting viz parameter be separated from the rest of the airport scenery?

No, it can't, not for the sceneries that have fully custom lights, like CYVR, KLAS, KDFW and JFK V2

[forostar]

Ok - thanks anyway!

[Intridia]

If the next version of P3d comes out to be 64bit, would this change things for OOM and what you could load?

[virtuali]

If the next version of P3d comes out to be 64bit, would this change things for OOM and what you could load?

The next version will not be 64 bit, but we hope the one after that will be. Of course, it will change *everything* about OOMs, since the available memory can go up from 4GB to 8TB. Of course, with all this memory available, users will be free to install all kind of stuff at the same time so, they will have to be careful about fps then...