FSX Realistic Night!

[slait 169]

Works fine here too, but I am also seeing a fps hit. More in the neighborhood of 3-5 fps.

[LAdamson 240]

The effects are very subjective, but unfortunatly, do not get to the root of the issues with FSX when displaying night scenes.

 

Namely, FSX, and these external shader modifications, do not simulate the effects of the human eye, and the human's eye's night vision effect.

 

If this is to be done realistically, it requires enhancing and improving the actual FSX shaders, that operate on different parts of the pilot's view, (ie In cockpit, ground, building, sky), to each "independantly" alter as a function of outside cockpit, and within cockpit lighting.

 

Yes, it is better than doing nothing at all, but there is even more potential for significant improvement, with enhansed internal FSX shaders.

 

P3D has already gone a little way in this direction, with improved shaders, which is one of the most significant reason why P3D views, look so different to FSX views.

P3D still lacks any simulation of human "night vision", but hopefully, it will get there one day.

 

I haven't read the complete thread................but do want to make a point about FSX & night scenes. With my old heavy tube monitor, black was black & near perfection. Mountains totally became unseeable on moonless nights. With my flat screen monitor, that all changed, as I can always pick out the topography. Therfore, the "root" issues, aren't exactly what they may seem to be.

[AlexMD11 15]

Just a tip -- if you want to get this to work with Nvidia inspector, make sure you have FXAA turned 'on' within the settings

 

 

Thanks for this! Got it working now!

[duckbilled 310]

Just a tip -- if you want to get this to work with Nvidia inspector, make sure you have FXAA turned 'on' within the settings

 

Works fine here, I've disable everything but bloom (like ENB?) and moved it to the mid-way mark. What settings are you all using?

 

Enabled in FXAATool and in NVIDIA Inspector? If so, there are three options that mention FXAA in NI

 

"NVIDIA Predefined FXAA usage"

"Toggle FXAA Indicator on or off"

"Toggle FXAA on or off"

 

What settings should I use for each option?

[dolph98 24]

I got it working and while it does make the scenery much more pleasing to the eye it makes my video card get pretty hot, like makes the fan go to ludicrous speed and there is a FPS drop too. The FPS drop is not so noticeable when in full screen though. The differences are seen with the pause/break key, not the pause key.

[GimbleRates 2]

Enabled in FXAATool and in NVIDIA Inspector? If so, there are three options that mention FXAA in NI

 

"NVIDIA Predefined FXAA usage"

"Toggle FXAA Indicator on or off"

"Toggle FXAA on or off"

 

What settings should I use for each option?

 

"NVIDIA Predefined FXAA usage" -allowed

"Toggle FXAA Indicator on or off" -off

"Toggle FXAA on or off" -on

 

Hope this helps,

Steve

[DarkstarF16 72]

Don't have inspector as its an ATI card! Has anyone with an ATI card got it to work?

 

[billn53 12]

Got mine working (NVidia card). Absolutely positively must have the in-game anti-aliasing checkbox unchecked. I do use NVIDIA Inspector and guess I'll need to doublecheck its settings based on the above.

[vololiberista 205]

I haven't read the complete thread................but do want to make a point about FSX & night scenes. With my old heavy tube monitor, black was black & near perfection. Mountains totally became unseeable on moonless nights. With my flat screen monitor, that all changed, as I can always pick out the topography. Therfore, the "root" issues, aren't exactly what they may seem to be.

I have recently "had" to acquire a new LCD monitor as my old one, an expensive seven year old 4:3 model started having problems.

The factory settings are always too intense both for colours and brightness. Some screens are quite often set to a gamma of 2.5 which is way too high and can only be used in very brightly lit areas. Half the problems people have are because they don't take the time to readjust their monitors to the domestic lighting enviroment. It took me almost three days of tweaking here and there to get a realistic colour balance and gamma. One must remember the when flying at night you can't in reality see anything except lights. There are some good websites with colour cards that demonstrate the capacity of one's monitor. I run my card at a gamma of 2.0 with a brightness level of 31%,red 95% green 85% and blue 100%. This gives me pure black and pure white and very slight warm colours. Doing this means it is not normally necessary to have to switch between various screen modes like "Standard", "Movie", or "Game": i.e the colour balance is correct right across the board.

Also another very important point with regard to LCD screens is the viewing angle. Your natural viewing position should such that your eyes look directly at the screen centre otherwise colours will often appear washed out or too dark.

[DarkstarF16 72]

Totally agree but even with correct setup FSX needs a little help. I still use test card F from the BBC which to this day is the best test card around.

[FSMP 95]

I have recently "had" to acquire a new LCD monitor as my old one, an expensive seven year old 4:3 model started having problems.

The factory settings are always too intense both for colours and brightness. Some screens are quite often set to a gamma of 2.5 which is way too high and can only be used in very brightly lit areas. Half the problems people have are because they don't take the time to readjust their monitors to the domestic lighting enviroment. It took me almost three days of tweaking here and there to get a realistic colour balance and gamma. One must remember the when flying at night you can't in reality see anything except lights. There are some good websites with colour cards that demonstrate the capacity of one's monitor. I run my card at a gamma of 2.0 with a brightness level of 31%,red 95% green 85% and blue 100%. This gives me pure black and pure white and very slight warm colours. Doing this means it is not normally necessary to have to switch between various screen modes like "Standard", "Movie", or "Game": i.e the colour balance is correct right across the board.

 

Warning: Long, technically reference response

 

I don't know about LCD monitors, but it has was a practice of TV manufactureres, to ship their sets with the color & conrast set up unnaturally HIGH, so that the set appeared to have a DRAMATIC appearance, when running on display in a store.

 

However, as the previous poster has already said, there are many excellent procedures, and test software, to allow one to "Calibrate" one's Computer Monitor, to a reasonably standardize state.

 

But, even when that is done, the Fundimental situation always exists .. the MS Flight Simulator does NOT simulate Human eye "Night Vision", and the dynamic range of the monitor, comes no where near that the Human eye, in varying real world conditions.

 

====================

 

References included, ( I am not making this stuff up !! )

 

 

Ref:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_%28eye%29

 

Efficacy

 

The human eye can function from very dark to very bright levels of light; its sensing capabilities reach across nine orders of magnitude. This means that the brightest and the darkest light signal that the eye can sense are a factor of roughly 1,000,000,000 apart. However, in any given moment of time, the eye can only sense a contrast ratio of one thousand. What enables the wider reach is that the eye adapts its definition of what is black. The light level that is interpreted as "black" can be shifted across six orders of magnitude—a factor of one million.

 

The eye takes approximately 20–30 minutes to fully adapt from bright sunlight to complete darkness and become ten thousand to one million times more sensitive than at full daylight. In this process, the eye's perception of color changes as well (this is called the Purkinje effect). However, it takes approximately five minutes for the eye to adapt to bright sunlight from darkness. This is due to cones obtaining more sensitivity when first entering the dark for the first five minutes but the rods take over after five or more minutes,

 

===================================

 

Ref:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range

 

A good quality LCD display has a dynamic range of around 1000:1 (commercially the dynamic range is often called the "contrast ratio" meaning the full-on/full-off luminance ratio).

 

 

===================

 

So, at any particular time, the dynamic range of the Human eye, can match the 1000:1 dynamic range of the Monitor, but the Human eye can shift its dynamic range over a 1,000,000,000:1 range, which it does between Daylight and Night. The Monitor cannot (without adjusting gama, brightnmess & contrast dynamically)

 

Therefore, to effectively allow the FS Simulator to match this effect, there has to be a significant "night Vision" effect, programmed into the sim, that is a factor of many things, including of the scene's ambient lighting. (and ideally that past "20-30 minutes" history of the scene's ambient lighting).

 

The good news is that it is possible to go a significant way to simulte this effect, within Flight Sim, if it was in fact, the sim was programmed to do so.

 

Processing the Direct X video, outside the sim, can help a little in a particular lighting condition, but as the external processing, is not aware of what the sim is trying to simulate, (night, day, overcast day, blinding Landing lights at night etc), it cannot do a very satisfactory job.

 

However, within the sim, potentailly all the necessary information is available, to allow the sim itself, through Shader Processing, to give a realistic represenation of the this Human eye "Hight Vision / Efficany effect, onto the monitor.

Some work has already been done by a few developers on this, and the prelininary results indicate that this is both possible to do, and also very effective.

[FSMP 95]

Totally agree but even with correct setup FSX needs a little help. I still use test card F from the BBC which to this day is the best test card around.

 

Take your pick :-

 

http://www.google.co...c.1._KKc3GZbI-g

 

However, fo more precise setup, you might want to check out such sites as

 

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

 

Warning:

 

One can spend HOURS, calibrating one's monitor, using fancy software and color measuring hardware.

Then, after all that work, one looks at the results and while your Monitor Might be well Calibrated to a Standard, it does not "LOOK" right to YOUR eyes, and you end up tweeking it "off" calibration, so it looks how you want it to look.

 

EVERYONE's eyes are different !!! So it really becomes very personal choice as to what "Looks good".

[MatzeH84 81]

Got it to work now, FSX internal AA has to be turned off.. :rolleyes:

[DarkstarF16 72]

 

EVERYONE's eyes are different !!! So it really becomes very personal choice as to what "Looks good".

 

Everyone's lighting conditions are different and everyone's eyes prefer slightly different saturation colour balance levels etc. the important thing to do is get your blacks black and whites white. The two tittle dots on the greyscale bar on the left of test card F are important. Adjust so that you just see the grey dots on the black and white squares. In the days of old CRT's you could spend a couple of hours getting the optimum balances.

 

During production, monitors are set up to a mean level and DO need finishing off in your lighting conditions. I agree that it's best to just spend about 10min otherwise you can just get into a never ending loop.

 

A bit like tweaking FSX for the best FPS !

 

Still want the injector to work though :(

[Boeing or not going 578]

You should never have been using the internal AA in the first place