Night time darkness levels

[Voodoo]

I wanted to know if there is a simple configuration setting in FSX that can be altered to universally raise the darkness level at night. I would like to be able to create a lighter sky at night, after the dusk effects are finished but before the start of the dawn effects.

Can this actually be achieved, or am I looking in vain?

Just to explain a bit further in case anyone can help. I want to be able to create night time missions, flying up-country, away from city lights. I'm finding it impossible to do any of this sort of mission because the darkness of the ground and sky merge into one black nothingness, even on fully moonlit nights. If I could only raise the lightness of the sky just a little it would make missions of this sort feasible (and even just ordinary night time bush flying).

I hope someone can help?

(Sorry if I'm posting in the wrong forum - I'm just not sure where this would be addressable - I'm happy for moderator to suggest a move if this isn't an "effects" question).

 

[Voodoo]

I have tried experimenting with anything that looks relevant. I'll probably end up trashing my FSX installation doing this, but in the absence of anything better...

I've found that editing the "sky_midnight_#.bmp" files in the main Textures folder and making them grey rather than black, lightens up the sky. Admittedly, this is pretty rubbish, but while I was doing this I did notice that the moon does seem to act as a light source, albeit very, very faint - I could see the effect on one side of my plane being very slightly illuminated when facing the moon.

Can anyone tell me what file controls that particular effect, since I feel I'll probably have more luck investigating that rather than faffing around with textures?

Anyone?

 

[Horst18519]

I guess lightning of the aircraft is something hardcoded in fsx. The color of the sky should be controlled by the BMPs you found though. Not sure if they are darkened an an also hardcoded way like the textures of scenery objects are, I guess so. But it may anyway be possible to lighten up the night if you mess around with those BMPs.
Actually I find the night in FSX too bright to be honest. I'd like to do exactly the opposite you want to do: make a mission at pitch black night, but even with no moon and bad weather you can still see quite a lot in FSX. Maybe your screen setting is a bit too dark.

 

[BASys]

Hi Folks

I also had this issue when flying "Bud Run".

I run on dual monitors, an LCD & CRT.
The LCD displayed too little diff between terrain & night sky.
Adusting your monitor's brightness/contrast ratio should help.

There's also an official tweak you apply to your fsx.CFG
which may possibly also assist.

From Phil's blog -

For the dusk/dawn textures some people feel, subjectively, the result is too dark or too light.
There are 2 items that allow the transition time to be changed:

[GRAPHICS]
DAY_THRESHOLD
NIGHT_THRESHOLD

acceptible values are 0 to 65535.

Defaults:
DAY: 32768
NIGHT: 4096

These represent the amount of 'ambient' light at the ends of the day/night blend threshold.
Zero is perfect dark,
65535 is full day sun at noon in the summer.

i.e. set NIGHT_THRESHOLD > 4096

HTH
ATB
Paul

 

[Horst18519]

Hey, hadn't seen that before. Thanks, Paul!

 

[Voodoo]

Thanks Thorsten, I'd not thought of simple monitor adjustments (maybe we should just swap over our equipment, LOL). I'll also have a root around and see if there are any gamma settings in the program anywhere, since my monitor is already setup reasonably bright for my other applications.

Playing around with recolouring the textures actually makes quite a mess of the sky depending on plane altitude so I don't think I'll go too far down that path.

Thanks too, Paul. I had seen these DAY and NIGHT THRESHOLDS settings before somewhere. I'm playing around with them as I write but can't quite see what the effect is. I will plug away at it some more.

Your help is appreciated, chaps.

 

[Horst18519]

I tried to mess around with monitor settings before because I wanted to do a black and white mission.
But it doesn't seem to be able controlling monitor settings from within FS. And even if I did it - people would kill me because they'd think something would be seriously wrong with their PC.

 

[Torgo3000]

Actually, all of the lighting values should be controlled by the Sky bitmaps. They shouldn't be hard coded anywhere. So you can create additional skies (with different lighting values) or edit the existing skies.

You'll notice that the top row of the Sky bitmaps have some weird color pixels. These are actually parsed and used as the directional and ambient light for the 3d objects and the clouds.

The first two pixels are Ambient Light 3d Objects, Directional Light 3d Objects.
The next two pixels are Ambient Light Clouds, Directional Light Clouds.
I have no idea what the 5th pixel is for.
I think the last pixel has something to do with the fog color (or that may be the bottom row of pixels).

You'll notice that the midnight textures have the directional and ambient light almost black for everything. Adjusting those first four pixels should allow you to make everything much brighter (or green, or whatever).

 

[Horst18519]

Thanks for this information. Sounds like something worth trying if you can control all that with these bitmaps.

And good to know that even you do not entirely know how FSX works.

 

[Voodoo]

Thanks for the various pointers there folks. I have experimented widely with those suggestions. Sadly I couldn't get the realistic looking moonlit night effect that I was looking for.

In the end, cranking the brightness up on the monitor did actually turn out to be the simplest way of seeing what was going on at night, albeit a bit unrealistic.

Guess I'll give up on the moonlit missions and stick to daytime flying, but thanks again for the help.