I started playing around with the "Show sky colors" option under the "Special" pulldown menu.

There are several choices and I dont know if using real weather uses these or if its just user preference. I love sunset and Sunrise in X-plane 10, but for my area (New York) the sky is rarely such a beautiful orage hue, but more like muddled polution and smog with a hint of orange. ( I can say that cause i live here, lol).

Anyhow, In playing with these presets, I found "Hazy" to be a lot closer to reality for a big US city, even though its not as pretty. It goes back to default whenever I re-start XP which is fine. Just wanted to know if anyone else uses this feature.

 

Where are some shots showing the differences:

 

Default settings

 

Using Hazy preset

 

Default

 

Hazy

Very nice screen shots !

Hi Comanche! :)

 

Here's how lighting/skycolors work in X-Plane 10.

 

There are 10 textures for ambient light/skycolors. X-Plane chooses or mixes the textures based on three factors:

 

-visibility

-altitude

-clouds coverage/precipitations

 

At zero altitude, with no more than scattered clouds, you have:

 

-100% "mount" texture if visibility is greater than 80 SM

-100% "clean" texture between 40 and 20 SM

-100% "hazy" texture between 8 and 6 SM

-100% "foggy" texture between 4 and 2 SM

-100% "socked" texture for zero visibility

 

In the intermediate visibility range, textures are mixed, e.g. at 60 SM visibility you have 50% "mount" and 50% "clean".

 

Regarding clouds:

 

-If you have broken clouds, the pre-calculated textures is mixed 50% with the "overcast" texture

-if you have overcast clouds, you have 80% "overcast" and 20% "stratus" textures.

-if there's snow, you have 30% "stratus" and 70% "snowy" textures.

 

Finally, skycolors depend on altitude:

 

-between 0 and 40.000 ft, "hialt" texture is mixed with the pre-calculated texture.

-at 40.000 ft you have 100% "hialt" texture.

-above 40.000 ft, "orbit" texture is mixed with "hialt" texture: 25% "orbit" at 52.000 ft, 50% "orbit" at 69.000 ft and 75% "orbit" at 98500 ft.

 

The "show sky colors" feature is there exclusively as a tool for developers experimenting with skycolors textures, so they can quickly change lighting/skycolors without having to change visibility/clouds/altitude. For example, you can load and test the "hazy" skycolors without the need to lower the visibility.

 

In your New York example, if you e.g. use real weather, and METARs in New York report low visibility (less than 10 SM), you should automatically get "hazy" skycolors and not that orange sunset. In reality, in a day with high visibility, you should get orange sunsets in New York as well. :)

 

 

 

Finally, you can try the freeware SkyMaxx skycolors, they're very nice:

 

http://maxx-xp.hiking-pa.com/?page_id=205

 

Marco

Cool, Thanks for the info Marco. That clears up my understanding of how this works.

 

 

Rob

Whow! Looking fwd to get it installed here!!!! They look awesome!

keep in mind, the buildings in the background of his screenshots are NOT default XPlane buildings, but are more likely ManhattanX from FSX converted for use with XP. The rest appears default, though.