Altering the sky colors

[BaronKen 144]

I purchased Flight School to support DTG's efforts in the upcoming new Flight Sim, and to "play" with it out of curiosity.

 

I will be watching DTGFS's development, and hope it is going to be a success. But like many others, I can't get used to the sky/haze colors nor the current visibility distance setting, and hence I've stopped using Flight School. I thought I could tolerate it, but the more I used it the worse it got. If the visibility distance setting could be increased it would help a great deal, but that's not possible so you're kind of stuck with it.

 

The sky/haze/visibility must be corrected in DTGFS, or the sim will not "get off the ground". I'm not sure they realize how bad it is and how much the flight sim community in general seems to dislike it. Creative/artistic license or not, it's bad, and in locations around the equator such as Hawaii, it's downright atrocious. A pea green ocean color? I don't even know what to say about that...

 

I don't like to get on forums and bash something like this, but I think Martin needs to really be aware of how bad this is and what the sim community as a whole really thinks about it, and will do something to have it changed.

 

I hope...

[Paraffin 2,197]

They are changing the color of the trees, maybe they will look to the skies next, just keep giving feedback to them:

 

 

The trees look a lot better in the After image, but now the plane looks purple instead of white... ugh!

 

The first plane has a touch of purple fringing in the shadowed areas too, but that second one is a definite violet. I'm viewing on a calibrated BenQ PG2401 monitor where it's obvious, but all you have to do is load that image in Photoshop or any editor and look at the color on the wings -- RGB 202, 206, 254. Obviously related to the sky color, and it's still terrible.

 

The purple sky isn't helping to get a good green color for the trees either, since anything close to a magenta tint will dull whatever you try to do with green colors. 

 

It's screen shots like this, that make me wonder if these are actually "artistic" decisions or if they just don't have complete control of the FSX rendering engine yet. 

[sightseer 895]

 

I tried to make a better sky but what Ive encountered has made me just stop. The lighting pixels have some control but the daytime texture can be solid black and you still get a blue sky. I had to delete the shader cache to make sure I was seeing correctly. The colors are coming from somewhere else.

 

What I noticed though is that the brightness of the first three pixels can be reduced to eliminate the bloom but this also darkens everything else.

 

Something to try:

create an all black texture or something like RGB 0 35 51

set the first two pixels to R189 G190 B191. third pixel can be black (or 0 1 2).

fourth pixel can be RGB 0 2 3 (or 0 1 2) and the fifth pixel RGB 32 128 217

 

set the bottom two rows of the texture to RGB 207 218 229 -- it may help - Im not sure.

 

you can brighten pixel5 to make the clouds more overall bright and you can add color to pixel2 (for example yellow RGB 199 198 195)) to lessen the brightness of the clouds. I think its the best I can do.

 

nothing gets rid of the brownish haze that Ive discovered. In P3D, changing cirrus overcast3 can affect haze. maybe that works here too?? or maybe its part of an environment .dds. or maybe its shader code or other code. whatever...FWIW...my .02

[BaronKen 144]

Not totally sure, but it appears the new update released yesterday for Flight School may include some improvements in the haze/sky color. Also, the sea/ocean color in the tropics areas I looked at (Virgin Islands, Hawaii) now looks blue (as it should) vs. the pea green color I was seeing. Anyone else notice any improvements?

[HiFlyer 9,343]

Strangely enough, after ignoring it for quite a while, I tried FS again yesterday and noticed a few improvements with FPS and color, though the clouds appeared as frightening as ever.

 

So at least it seems they are still trying, but its still not an attractive package yet, visually, for me.