weird night textures

[miragecy64 0]

Hi, I have these strange night textures for a long time now, although my daytime textures are ok. And sky is not true black but rather dark rose... My LCD monitor is a 27' samsung. Any help please?

 

https://app.box.com/s/mjp8cyitap9qusqmqayk

 

https://app.box.com/s/2alugwy82sienbd0bh2p

 

Thanks,

Andy

[meshman 109]

Looks like normal FSX to me. What's the problem again?

[miragecy64 0]

Ok, on my 27' monitor is more obvious but at the first link look at the landing lights illuminating the ground... Looks like 256 colors and not 32 bit. Clouds also look like this but you can't tell from these shots

 

Andy

[Tiger_Walts 4]

This is a limitation of the lighting engine in FSX coupled with there being no separate textures for night-time.

 

What you are looking at are daytime textures that have been darkened in a manner that results in a banding effect. Similar colours have been darkened into the same colour, The landing lights then lighten those colours in the same fashion (in a separate pass) and the banding gets even worse. The ENB Series mod can also worsen (or improve) the result depending on the settings you use.

 

FSX may be rendering at a 32 bit colour depth, but the textures it is working with don't have the fidelity to withstand the colour manipulation, Games from the same era as FSX would just have used different textures for different lighting conditions to minimize this as most don't have day-night cycles. Today, lighting engines are much better. Take ARMA 3 for example, a far cry from ARMA 2 which also suffers from colour banding.

[miragecy64 0]

Thanks Tiger_Walts, I also suspect LCD monitors limitation as well? Because with previous CRT monitors I didn't have this problem. I wonder what monitors some guys use, their nighttime screenshots are perfect...

 

Andy