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Products Support => Chicago O'Hare V2 for P3D4 => Topic started by: MediumRareBaku on August 15, 2021, 02:46:19 am

Title: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on August 15, 2021, 02:46:19 am
I've recently updated to v5.2 HF1 and KORD appears to no longer have lighting at night. I have uninstalled and reinstalled, with no change, and I have also confirmed that dynamic lighting is on. It seems like maybe there are some lights, but way too few and far too dim? Please advise on what I should try next to troubleshoot. Thanks.

Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on August 15, 2021, 03:00:37 am
Upon some further investigation, there appears to be a general night lighting issue at FSDT airports only? SDF and CLT examples attached. Some lights, but all very dim. I have also run the FSDT updater.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on August 16, 2021, 11:20:41 pm
I tried today to do a full uninstallation of everything FSDT, including GSX and Addon Manager, deleted the folders, and reinstalled. Still no light nights at KORD or other FSDT sceneries.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: virtuali on August 17, 2021, 04:19:04 pm
It's normal that doing a full uninstall/reinstall of "everything FSDT" won't fix your problem since, of course, the problem are not the sceneries. I hope uninstalling/reinstalling them would have proved that to you.

In our sceneries, there are TWO kind of dynamic lights:

- Few ambient lights that are always enabled, which are done in the standard SDK way, which means they will work or not depending if the sim has bugs or not. P3D has a long history of bugs of dynamic lights not always working on arrival, which sometimes gets fixed, and sometimes gets broken again in a hotfix. There's just nothing we can do if these dynamic lights don't work, since we don't have any control over them.

- Many specific apron lights, which are instead turned on/off by OUR SOFTWARE, dynamically, if you move close to their light source. They are typically used on gates and aprons and they are supposed to go on/off depending on your viewpoint distance. Usually, they work better, because we control them with our software.

The reason why our sceneries are made this way, is this way we can have much more lights without killing the fps, which is instead what will happen in other sceneries that use only the "SDK way", which are very limited in the maximum number of lights they can display.

So, it would be useful to know which kind of lights you are missing, the few background ones, which are supposed to be always on, or the many spotlights, that are supposed to turn on/off by the distance ?
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on August 19, 2021, 04:40:14 pm
As I included screenshots of what I am seeing, it would seem to me that you would be best positioned to tell me what kind of lighting I am missing.

Regardless, my guess is that it is the latter kind of lighting that is missing as there does seem to be some baked in light showing on some textures, but no light is being cast on the scenery objects or the aircraft.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: virtuali on August 20, 2021, 10:23:01 am
Regardless, my guess is that it is the latter kind of lighting that is missing as there does seem to be some baked in light showing on some textures, but no light is being cast on the scenery objects or the aircraft.

Looking at your screenshot, it seems to be the opposite: the only lights you see are the ones on the aprons, casting light on the ground and the terminals, which are the ones WE handle in a custom way with our software. The ones you are missing ( outside the terminal it looks quite dark ), are the ones made in standard .BGL/SDK way, which we don't have any control over it, and there are in fact multiple reports of these disappearing randomly, because of a bug in the sim.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on August 26, 2021, 02:54:55 am
Regardless, my guess is that it is the latter kind of lighting that is missing as there does seem to be some baked in light showing on some textures, but no light is being cast on the scenery objects or the aircraft.

Looking at your screenshot, it seems to be the opposite: the only lights you see are the ones on the aprons, casting light on the ground and the terminals, which are the ones WE handle in a custom way with our software. The ones you are missing ( outside the terminal it looks quite dark ), are the ones made in standard .BGL/SDK way, which we don't have any control over it, and there are in fact multiple reports of these disappearing randomly, because of a bug in the sim.
It seems to only be an issue at FSDT airports and only since 5.2.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: virtuali on August 26, 2021, 03:33:04 pm
It seems to only be an issue at FSDT airports and only since 5.2.

In order to show the bug in the sim, which is very well know, and happened way before 5.2, the scenery must have Dynamic lights to begin with.

Your screenshot is not very clear so, I can't say for sure if the lights you are missing are the ones we generate with our software, or the ones generated by the sim automatically in which we don't have any control over ( so we are possibly affected by the known disappearing DL bug if the sim ). A sure way to check this, is to start on a parking, and then taxi away from it ( use Spot view ). At a certain distance, the apron lights should disappear. If they do, it means the DL we create with our software are working, because they are supposed to disappear in the distance.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on September 03, 2021, 02:54:55 am
Here's a video showing the problem as best I can, let me know what you think:
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: virtuali on September 03, 2021, 10:58:55 am
Your video shows the lights are working as they are supposed to.

I said in order to verify if they switch on the distance, you had to "taxi away from it", but instead you kept the airplane in the same place and only moved the camera. The lights switch based on the airplane position so, it's normal that moving the camera only won't change anything.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on September 04, 2021, 03:21:05 am
Your video shows the lights are working as they are supposed to.

I said in order to verify if they switch on the distance, you had to "taxi away from it", but instead you kept the airplane in the same place and only moved the camera. The lights switch based on the airplane position so, it's normal that moving the camera only won't change anything.

I'm not worried about what the lights do when I taxi away, I'm worried about the fact that the lighting is clearly too dark when I'm at the gate! I showed you a video of the night lighting at your product not being correct and instead you're lecturing me on not showing you something different from what I'm talking about. Look at this video from when v2 released:
=327 -- my lighting doesn't look anything like this! It didn't look this dark before the update, and it doesn't look this dark at other airports after the updated to v5.2. The ONLY sceneries that have changed in this regard are FSDT sceneries.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on September 04, 2021, 03:58:35 am
Here are two more videos.

Taxiing away from terminals:

I don't see any lights changing or turning off as I taxi away from the terminal, I taxied out beyond the airport boundary

Flying Overhead:

Flying quickly over the airport, the lights on the ground appear to be the same lights that you could see at the gate, and the lights you could see taxing away which did not turn off.

Compare this promo image from the store:
https://i.imgur.com/Lm5BuPj.jpg

With this image from my sim parked at a gate:
https://i.imgur.com/mZhFypJ.png
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: virtuali on September 04, 2021, 10:23:38 am
I don't see any lights changing or turning off as I taxi away from the terminal, I taxied out beyond the airport boundary

This video starts when you were already outside the normal loading range of the apron lights, and along your path, you never went anywhere close to another terminal which was supposed to have dynamic on/off lights based on distance so, it's completely useless to me to understand if those lights are correctly switching on/off.

Quote
Flying quickly over the airport, the lights on the ground appear to be the same lights that you could see at the gate, and the lights you could see taxing away which did not turn off.

That shows the "SDK lights", which are fixed, are working. The dynamic switching lights are not supposed to turn on when flying, they work only on ground and on a very low altitude.

Quote
Compare this promo image from the store:
https://i.imgur.com/Lm5BuPj.jpg

With this image from my sim parked at a gate:
https://i.imgur.com/mZhFypJ.png

Those images were taken in P3D4, which was what was available when the scenery was released. P3D5 DL don't look the same, they are usually darker. One of the main problem with P3D in general, is that during its lifetime, rendering of colors and lighting keeps changing. Even during the P3D 4 lifecycle, rendering and lighting changed *dramatically* between releases, if you do a scenery based on, let's say, 4.1 rendering, it would look very different in 4.5, and even more different in P3D V5.

This is something that has driven scenery developers mad trying to keep up with all those changes and, they seem to affect "proper" PBR scenery MORE than legacy non-PBR, which is weird, since the whole point of PBR is that you create realistic materials and lights, and they should look basically the same regardless of the rendering engine. This doesn't seem to work consistently with P3D, because each version seems to have its own style and the problem is, users don't seem to agree which one is best, which is why many use shader tweaks to change the rendering to their liking.

Night light is even more subjective, because some users want to see the scenery as it was a picture taken with a camera ( which blows up the lights due to automatic exposure ), when in fact, to the naked eye, the visual should be way darker.

So, please, try to provide some better video so I can AT LEAST check if the dynamic on/off Apron lights are working as expected, because that's the only thing that really matters to see if the scenery is working as expected.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on September 04, 2021, 08:11:07 pm
I don't see any lights changing or turning off as I taxi away from the terminal, I taxied out beyond the airport boundary

This video starts when you were already outside the normal loading range of the apron lights, and along your path, you never went anywhere close to another terminal which was supposed to have dynamic on/off lights based on distance so, it's completely useless to me to understand if those lights are correctly switching on/off.

I will record as many videos as it takes:


You can see in this video that there are some lights switching on and off, but they are switching on and off at weird times, and the ones that pop on are dim enough, and irregular enough, that it seems clear to me that there is something wrong. At several locations in the video I stop as close to the gates as I can, sitting among the ramp equipment, and wait, and it takes maybe 10 seconds for lights to pop on, and the lights that pop on are dim, and sometimes pop off immediately after moving away a few feet -- or nothing pops on at all.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: virtuali on September 05, 2021, 10:49:57 am
There are two separate issues in your video:

1) You were taxiing continuously, without ever stopping. The evaluation of your position and the switching of the light on/off is NOT done at every frame, because if we tried to do that, those checks will cause stuttering and fps slowdowns so, there's some inertia in the check, meaning you need to wait a couple of seconds before you can see the light switching on or off. But, if you are taxiing continuously, it's possible you entered and exited in the area that would trigger a light during updates.

The additional dynamic lights has been designed mostly as an increase in lighting when you park, and this method is the only way to have hundreds of lights working without killing the fps, because no more than 8-10 are ever active at the same time.

2 ) Your image is generally too dark. Find below a video of how KORD V2 REALLY looks like. Of course, I using 100% default light settings and no shader tweaks or changes. If you changed the default brightness/saturation values to anything other than the defaults of 1.00, or applied any kind of shader modifications, then all bets are off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLKIYF_5Fto (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLKIYF_5Fto)
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: MediumRareBaku on September 05, 2021, 11:56:41 pm
There are two separate issues in your video:

1) You were taxiing continuously, without ever stopping. The evaluation of your position and the switching of the light on/off is NOT done at every frame, because if we tried to do that, those checks will cause stuttering and fps slowdowns so, there's some inertia in the check, meaning you need to wait a couple of seconds before you can see the light switching on or off. But, if you are taxiing continuously, it's possible you entered and exited in the area that would trigger a light during updates.

The additional dynamic lights has been designed mostly as an increase in lighting when you park, and this method is the only way to have hundreds of lights working without killing the fps, because no more than 8-10 are ever active at the same time.

OK, but what explains the lights not being on when I load in at a gate? I sit there, it's dark, no lights pop on.

2 ) Your image is generally too dark. Find below a video of how KORD V2 REALLY looks like. Of course, I using 100% default light settings and no shader tweaks or changes. If you changed the default brightness/saturation values to anything other than the defaults of 1.00, or applied any kind of shader modifications, then all bets are off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLKIYF_5Fto (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLKIYF_5Fto)

My lighting is 100% default, 1.0 for every value. I use no shaders, I use no post-processing, what you see in that video is 100% out of the box default.
Title: Re: No night lights when loading flight at night
Post by: virtuali on September 06, 2021, 09:09:33 am
OK, but what explains the lights not being on when I load in at a gate? I sit there, it's dark, no lights pop on.

Doesn't happen here, as you can see in my video, which shows DL switch on when parked.

Quote
My lighting is 100% default, 1.0 for every value. I use no shaders, I use no post-processing, what you see in that video is 100% out of the box default.

Yet, DL in my video, which is surely default ( clean P3D V5 install, no other add-ons other than FSDT sceneries ), is considerably brighter than yours so, something must be different in your setup.