First FSW update available on Steam

[MadDog 353]

24 minutes ago, Chock said:

so trust me on this one, women are better at that stuff.

My wife and I agree!  I think you're giving us too much credit in being able to differentiate from 11 million colors... I still have a hard time picking out my black socks from my blue socks .

The overexposure is especially bad around noon.  It seems like DTG is trying to use one universal "brightness" setting for every time of the day and it's not working.  It's way too bright at mid-day, way too dark at night; but looks better in the early morning/late evening.

[Chock 17,769]

Just now, MadDog said:

My wife and I agree!  I think you're giving us too much credit in being able to differentiate from 11 million colors... I still have a hard time picking out my black socks from my blue socks .

Reminds me of a joke on the subject:

Two blokes turn up at a party wearing the same black suit, they look at one another and think to themselves: 'cool, I got it right'. Two women turn up to that same party wearing the same red dress, they put their bags down on the table in preparation for the fight that is about to ensue...

[bthiago 8]

I`m running in so many errors and not working buttons.

[sightseer 895]

 

Chock - I don't know how warm the concrete may look there in England but I know how incredibly bright the concrete tarmac looks in the southern US states...places like Houston Hobby for example.  you need sunglasses to look at it.  What I see wrong in that picture you posted is a lack of warmth.  Your aircraft actually seems a little dark to me as do all of the default aircraft when viewed from outside.  Its important to keep the light inside the VC as well as having light for clouds which we now, after the update, do not in my opinion. Inside the VC still seems fine.

There were better ways to deal with apparent brightness then just killing the sims ability to be bright by default.

[Chock 17,769]

Yup, concrete can indeed look incredibly bright, but that is usually a function of when someone has looked at something dark first, causing their pupils to dilate, so that when they then look at something which is brightly lit, the pupil is still dilated and then the newly observed object looks blazingly bright, at least until your pupil contracts to reduce the amount of light going onto your retina (either that or they have conjunctivitus lol). A good example of that phenomena, is coming out of a pub or some such in the afternoon into bright sunlight, intially until your eyes adjust, it will be blindingly bright when one looks at highly reflective surfaces such as pavements and dry tarmac surfaces, the reverse is of course when you go outside at night from out of a lit building, where your eyes do pretty much the opposite and eventually adjust to the dark by massively dilating your pupil to allow as much light as possible in. Essentially that is the same as when one opens up or stops down the iris on a camera to get the correct exposure for a picture.

Combining these phenomena is what High Dynamic Range photographic images attempt to replicate, in that they are created by taking three exposures at the same time (one for light, one for mid and one for dark) which are then combined into one image in an attempt to simulate what an eye can see when it adjusts your pupil size repeatedly as one observes something, but it is somewhat misleading to imagine things really 'look' like that, since an eye effectively takes numerous images as the pupil dilates, the brain then combines these. Thus eyes are never really seeing one image similar to an HDR one, outr brains are merely perceiving that, so one can never really have an HDR image be a true representation of what is seen at one instance, even though HDR can sometimes look quite cool.

Moreover, a pair of eyes does not look at things in a fixed gaze normally, it does something called saccades, which is basically your eyes flicking about all over the place taking in lots of 'snapshots' and combining them into one composite as your brain interprets what the retina cones pick up. Part of that is your brain telling your eyes to search for familiar objects so that it can compare unfamiliar ones with stuff it knows, thus allowing it to determine distance and placement of things unknown to it, aided by the fact that we as humans have stereoscopic vision, which allows our brain to triangulate distances. Lots of people don't understand that and end up talking a load of bollocks about HDR, light levels, and indeed other aspects of imagery, but it is my job to teach people about all that stuff, so I do understand it, because I talk about it often to people I teach (especially on Photoshop courses) and have therefore, to be knowledable on the subject.

Back with FSW, the fact that so many people have complained about the brightness level of the runways in FSW is indicative that it is clearly not emulating most people's perception of the world. In short, whilst concrete undeniably can look bright, when it does, people either squint or their pupils dilate to correct for it, and this corrected appearance should be the average of how the sim appears, since that is the average which human eyes strive for as the pupil dilates and contracts.

[sightseer 895]

Chock - should the sun be bright when you look at it in the sim?

 

and in all seriousness, Chock - go to any US Gulf Coast beach during the day without sunglasses and no other shade and tell me the eye can cut the light on its own. just not true. im sorry.

[Chock 17,769]

Nope, it should be a black hole...

 

[Chock 17,769]

15 minutes ago, sightseer said:

Chock - should the sun be bright when you look at it in the sim?

 

and in all seriousness, Chock - go to any US Gulf Coast beach during the day without sunglasses and no other shade and tell me the eye can cut the light on its own. just not true. im sorry.

Yes, it can, this is why we all have the involuntary ability to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squint

[Paraffin 2,197]

It's not rocket science to get a believable looking gamma and  sky/cloud colors in a simulation. I assume they're just continuing to get a handle on the code here. 

Look at DTG's train sim, for example. If someone in that company knows what it looks like in the real world for that product, they should be able to do it here.

[Chock 17,769]

1 hour ago, Paraffin said:

It's not rocket science to get a believable looking gamma and  sky/cloud colors in a simulation. I assume they're just continuing to get a handle on the code here. 

Look at DTG's train sim, for example. If someone in that company knows what it looks like in the real world for that product, they should be able to do it here.

True, but unfortunately part of what makes their train sim look good is that it uses Unreal Engine 4, which has vastly superior rendering capabilities to the core engine which FS uses to create its look, so it's not so much their development skills which give their train sim a nice appearance so much as the tool they picked in order to create it. Of course one can tweak any software to do anything providing one has the skill and time to do it, so technically at least it is not, like anything else, an insurmountable problem, but that doesn't mean it is easy to accomplish or even financially viable if it would take a long time to develop such a thing.

The real problem is that if one was really wanting to have a flight simulator which looked like the absolute dog's bollocks, it would be far easier to do that by having something which one had started from scratch in terms of the underlying things it could support with regard to what graphics cards are capable of these days. But to do that would be inordinately expensive and time-consuming, and you can tell that is the case because even Lockheed Martin went for buying ESP rather than deciding to go that route and Microsoft never attempted to do that either, instead sticking with what they had and souping it up, and if MS and Lockheed are shying away from a cost, then you know it's not an inconsiderable amount of money and work we're talking about and no less of a problem for DTG. So unfortunately, in souping the old code up, it is essentially the equivalent of welding jato rockets to the side of a 1962 Morris Minor. Sure, it will get it running very fast and it wouldn't be too expensive to do or require a massive amount of knowledge, but it certainly isn't the most elegant or practical way of creating a fast car and you couldn't guarantee that the wheels wouldn't fall off at some point if you pushed it too far.

[scotchegg 4,186]

8 hours ago, Chock said:

women generally have the ability to see a broader range of colours than men (typically, the average woman can differentiate about 17 million different shades and hues, whereas blokes on average see about 11 million or so and it is also almost unheard of for a woman to be colourblind, whereas of the three different types of colourblindness - protanopia, dueteranopia and tritanopia, almost ten percent of the male population are affected by one of those in some way). 

That's literally the most interesting thing I've read this week.

[warbirds 555]

Is this only available on Steam?

[Chock 17,769]

3 minutes ago, warbirds said:

Is this only available on Steam?

Nope, you can buy it from Just Flight, but since it functions through Steam, you will still need a Steam account anyway, which means one might just as well buy it through Steam.

https://www.justflight.com/product/flight-sim-world

[A32xx 129]

P3D has a saturation slider which is a brilliant idea, perhaps FSW could add a similar feature? Everyone's colour/color perception is different, and not everyone knows how to tune their monitor/graphics card's colour/color balance properly. Most, if not all, have a built-in bias as demonstrated by the F@cebook "is this dress blue or gold" viral debate.

[Chock 17,769]

Yup, I think FSW (and indeed XPlane 11 too for that matter) need more of an ability to tweek things.