I have noticed lately (mainly because I am just starting to fly at night) that when approaching a city with an airport that I can see the lights for the airport well in advance of the lights of the city instead of intermingled.   In fact the lights in the city do appear they appear in two "stages",  the first circle is bright like the airport and the next ring is barely there but seems pretty dim.

 

I am flying in ORBX FTX regions (PNW, CRM) and have Vector lights turned on.  All scenery settings are to the right (including LOD) and I'm flying in and around PASCO in the CRM region (so not a very heavy area) with decent frame rates (40+).  10+ visibility on ASN.

 

System is a 4790K with a GTX 970

 

Is this how it is supposed to be?   How can I fix it?

 

Thanks,

 

Brett

Researched some pit more and I am 90% certain what I am seeing is a combination of P3Ds hardcoded LOD radial limit for autogen buildings and a slightly shorter one for autogen trees (Althought adjustable slightly).  Since ORBX's vector lights are actually trees this explains why the texture lights could be seen further away than the bright lights of the ORBX vector lights.  Will test later on

Night lighting has always been an issue for me.  I stopped using FTX Global since the night textures were barley visible (3D lighting was ok but was not visible very far out).  I think the default P3D night lighting is actually very nice with an orange glow and you can see it from a distance but you miss out on 3D lights. The other downside is that the default day textures are not great so I had to use some kind of ground textures (now using GE P3D).  One thing you can try is to dim the runway lighting as it is way too bright by default.  You can add the following to the 'Display' section of the main P3D .cfg file:

 

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_APPROACH_SCALAR=.9
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_STROBE_SCALAR=.8
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_SURFACE_SCALAR=.9
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_VASI_SCALAR=.9

 

These work well for me but I am using a set of REX runway lights.  You may have to adjust those numbers lower for the default runway lights.  Runway lights are surprisingly hard to see at night when the airport is in an urban area in the real world.

Thanks!  I might give that a shot as well

After applying the ORBX Global light configurator and selecting small lights and altering the LOD range for Autogen trees to the max....I really like the outcome

After applying the ORBX Global light configurator and selecting small lights and altering the LOD range for Autogen trees to the max....I really like the outcome

 

Thats the problem with FTX Night Lightning - they are dependent on your LOD range for autogen. But increasing this however will drastically consume VAS as well, so be aware. 

Thanks!

 

I will definitely have to keep a close eye on it

 

 

and altering the LOD range for Autogen trees to the max

 

I have this line in the cfg:

[sCENERY]

AUTOGEN_TREE_MAX_DRAW_DISTANCE=9500.000000

 

Is this what you changed, if so , what to?

thanks

I believe it was to 12000. Saw it on a post in this forum or one in orbx