It's the free night textures on avsim for FS9 mentioned further back.

I think the colouring is pretty good giving a good mix between the sodium and white lights.

Adapted to FSX It would look quite good I think.

OK. you can test my scenery and compare it yourself.

 

I'm unable to test until beginning of next week :(

No problem. test it when you have the time. you always welcome.

 

Cool! In the mean time, here's an aerial photo of Manchester by night: Heading is about 075 from 32000 ft. Lights from Sheffield off to the upper right.

 

 

and here: Downtown Manchester, facing due east from about 2000 ft

 

It is a very nice photo. I wish I could have put that much lights on the ground.

I've finished making the texture , I'm uploading it now. I'll give the details on changes in the next posts.

On this version of Manchester city, I've made a few changes thanks to odourboy and DarkstarF16 and other people.

Please notice that there are some limitations with FSX, so even if we wanted to make a scenery with a lot of lights, like what you've seen on the previous posts. We couldn't.

Here is some detail for people who used the previous version.

1-I have made a setup file for the texture. So you just install it and active it from the shortcut on your desktop. All the necessary files will be copied into FSX folder.

2-I made the 3d light compatible with DX10. DX9 is no longer supported. You need to enable BLOOM in FSX in order to see all the light's effects.

Furthermore, you should set the scenery complexity to be extremely dense in order to see all the lights.

3-you have Autogen building and trees this time,

4-I added the transition effect to the scenery, so you can smoothly move from urban area to the rural area. I've demonstrated it in the following video:

 

and some other changes like" light pools" "the color of the roads", and... you can see these changes in the next video:

 

 

and here is the file for scenery:

http://mohsenfff.dl.rapidpars.com/4780/2614777/hhjafp25wrz/manchester_night.rar

 

I'm waiting to hear your feedback on this new scenery, what other things I can do to make the scenery more realistic.

On this version of Manchester city, I've made a few changes thanks to odourboy and DarkstarF16 and other people.

Please notice that there are some limitations with FSX, so even if we wanted to make a scenery with a lot of lights, like what you've seen on the previous posts. We couldn't.

Here is some detail for people who used the previous version.

1-I have made a setup file for the texture. So you just install it and active it from the shortcut on your desktop. All the necessary files will be copied into FSX folder.

2-I made the 3d light compatible with DX10. DX9 is no longer supported. You need to enable BLOOM in FSX in order to see all the light's effects.

Furthermore, you should set the scenery complexity to be extremely dense in order to see all the lights.

3-you have Autogen building and trees this time,

4-I added the transition effect to the scenery, so you can smoothly move from urban area to the rural area. I've demonstrated it in the following video:

 

and some other changes like" light pools" "the color of the roads", and... you can see these changes in the next video:

 

 

and here is the file for scenery:

http://mohsenfff.dl.rapidpars.com/4780/2614777/hhjafp25wrz/manchester_night.rar

 

I'm waiting to hear your feedback on this new scenery, what other things I can do to make the scenery more realistic.

 

Hmmm.. I'm sorry but I'm not totally comfortable running your install exe without knowing exactly what it's going to try to do and where it's going to put things. At this stage in development, I'd really rather have a zip file.

Hmmm.. I'm sorry but I'm not totally comfortable running your install exe without knowing exactly what it's going to try to do and where it's going to put things. At this stage in development, I'd really rather have a zip file.

I totally understand that  but why you are worried when you were the first one who told me to package things in the exe or installation file? You can still get the files from this setup file. When it asks you where to install the scenery, just give it a folder to extract the files. Then you go to that folder and copy that file to your folder of choice like add-on scenery and...

What this setup file was supposed to do was to make a new folder by the name "RCN" in fsx root and copy all the scenery files to that and moves all the necessary files to Global folder.

By the way, I just noticed my video files from Manchester is missed. So here is the video:

 

and it is transition

I totally understand that  but why you are worried when you were the first one who told me to package things in the exe or installation file? You can still get the files from this setup file. When it asks you where to install the scenery, just give it a folder to extract the files. Then you go to that folder and copy that file to your folder of choice like add-on scenery and...

What this setup file was supposed to do was to make a new folder by the name "RCN" in fsx root and copy all the scenery files to that and moves all the necessary files to Global folder.

 

Yes - you got me there. I did ask for everything together.  :rolleyes:   But I meant that you should include all necessary files rather than releasing increments that build on top of previous releases in order to ensure that we were all running the same software.

 

Anyway, I ran the installer into a folder of my choice and it appears to have worked fine. I'll try it out shortly and expect to have some feedback for you later today. Much appreciated!

 

As an aside, I don't think it's necessary to place files in the Scenery\Global directory that you're doing. If you have a minute, can you try putting them all together with the rest of your texture and scenery files? Seems to work fine for me and helps me to segregate and more easily manage various scenery sets.

As an aside, I don't think it's necessary to place files in the Scenery\Global directory that you're doing. If you have a minute, can you try putting them all together with the rest of your texture and scenery files? Seems to work fine for me and helps me to segregate and more easily manage various scenery sets.

 

That's what I did and it seemed OK.

 

IAN

 

 

As an aside, I don't think it's necessary to place files in the Scenery\Global directory that you're doing. If you have a minute, can you try putting them all together with the rest of your texture and scenery files? Seems to work fine for me and helps me to segregate and more easily manage various scenery sets.

Yes, I did that. However, it didn't work for me. The reason it worked for you may be is because you had the necessary files in the global folder already. Try to remove them from your global folder and test it again.

Installation went without a hitch and I've done some flying and taken some screen shots for discussion purposes.

 

First thing I did was fly the area in the daytime to understand the extent of the scenery and the objects and placement you added. First thing I noticed was the performance - excellent! I noticed no FPS impact from my target 30FPS. The trees look really nice! The buildings look great as well. Actually, the scenery is almost good enough for daytime use. The way it blended into my default scenery (FTXGlowball), is extremely smooth and natural looking - if it wasn't for a slight colour shift or discontinuity sighting down the 'seam', you could miss the transition. Great Job! Unfortunately, the transition did not hold up as well for night flying, but more on that in a separate post. I only have a few comments, so I was thinking I'd table each in a separate post. Here's the first one:

 

Night flying: The major roadways/highway brightness looks about right. You've put more splashes of white and colour into the neighbourhoods and I also like that. My biggest criticism is still regarding the balance between the neighbourhood areas between the major roads and the roads themselves. I still think the intensity is low and should have less contrast to the highways. To illustrate this, I reduced the brightness and saturation of the Manchester aerial photo I posted earlier (in an attempt to make it more realistic) and compared it to the approximately the same location in your scenery. Look beyond the downtown area in each picture. I think you can see how the brightness is more uniform in the photo, where as your scenery is quite dark between the major roads. This was also my feeling with the Toronto scenery. I think if you could brighten this up it would improve the realism of your scenery.

The next item I want to mention is the transition between your scenery and the default. I've attached a screenshot  from high altitude with Manchester to the lower left, and default countryside to the upper right. I think it speaks for itself. Whatever technique you applied to smooth out the boundary between your scenery and the default, although it looks great in the day, it appears to completely fail when it came to transitioning the lighting elements. Rather than a smooth (or even sudden transition as with Bristol), the lighting seems to be completely removed in the 'transition region'. :(

 

Note that I cranked up the brightness of the screenshot a bit in Photoshop before I posted it so you could see it more clearly.

 

My third (and final) remark is regarding the 3D lights. WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL YOUR LIGHTS!   Seriously though, I realize that you need to trade off the amount of 3D lighting against performance. In my case, I'd like see more lights than you've given us with this release. I thought the density in Bristol or perhaps the last Toronto release was a good compromise. I don't know if it's practical for you, but Orbx uses the Scenery Density slider to control the amount of lighting applied to help those guys with lesser machines. Just for comparison, I've attached a photo of your scenery and FTX GlowBall taken from the exact same location.

 

So, those are my main points. I hope you find this helpful. It's really nice stuff! (PS - thanks for the DX10 support! I've done a bit of Scenery Fixer testing for SteveP so I'm quite invested in the whole DX10 thing.)

Thank you so much odourboy for your helpful feedback. As always,
let me start with you third point. I can't see 3D lights either. Make sure you have the following texture and bgl in the  global folder. It is for 3d lights
http://www.mediafire.com/?7vgm72un2uj0as4
you need also to enable bloom and DX10 in fsx to see the lights.
I'm totally agreed with your first and second mentions. I'll make the change you mentioned to the scenery, and I will upload a new scenery in one or two days. You put more stress on lights distributions through the city. I think. I can do that.
By the way, are you sure that's all? I mean they are all things I need to do for more realistic night?
So in the following days, if you spot anything else, good or bad, please let me know.

I did forget to enable bloom. I'll also double check that texture and bgl and try in the global folder. Thanks!

 

Those were my main points. Anything else would really be knit-picking. I want to do more flying before further comments (if any). One thing I'll be looking at closely is the hue of the major road colour. You want to nail that.

I've been studying the screen shots that odourboy posted so can only comment on those and agree with what's been said so far. With luck, by the time I'm back, I can fly Manchester with your new files. I do love what you've done so far and its funny because I've passed through Bristol this afternoon and whilst plodding through the rain on the m4 was thinking about your night lights. At present I'm in the depths of the Brecon Beacons where their are almost no lights at all (why do I want to end up living here?) but, the night sky more than makes up for it.

Ok before I make any change to my scenery,odourboyI would recommend you to see the following link:

http://www.expressandstar.com/picture-galleries/news-pictures/2013/05/19/bright-lights-second-city-aerial-photos-of-birmingham-at-night/lights1-2/
it is five photos of Birmingham at night. I could see the pattern of bright lights and dark area, there are just some 3d lights among those dark areas. So how do you compare this photo to my scenery?
And Brian I'm waiting for your return to try my scenery and make those very good comments.