FSW AND P3D go head to head...

[Chock 17,769]

9 hours ago, sightseer said:

Chock - are you serious here?  Do you think the appearance of one addons (not made for FSW) blades equates to "the sim is too bright"?  Do you think the addon might need an update?

I know you have the opinion that the sim is too dark, but as far as I can determine from numerous responses to threads on Avsim and other forums, you are literally the only person saying that, everyone else is without exception saying FSW is too bright. This alone ought to tell you something.

In my video, both sims are using the same GPU, same monitor etc, yet the rotor blades appear okay in P3D but are almost completely washed out in FSW. On that same GPU, things looking washed out is not the case ifor any other game or sim run on that machine either, and that's a lot of them, including, Naval Action, Euro Truck Simulator, American Truck Simulator, XPlane 10 and 11, FSX, DCS World, various Train Sims, first person games such as Skyrim, RPGs such as The Secret World etc. Now if literally all of those games and sims look great on the same GPU settings, but one sim doesn't, instead looking like the gamma setting is too high, then that tells me that it is that one sim which needs tweaking, and this is especially true on that machine I used, because it is calibrated to sRGB IEC 6-1966 2-1 regularly because I use it for training people on Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro etc, so it needs to accurately depict colours.

It's nothing to do with the add-on helicopter needing an update, the fact is, everything in FSW is too bright in its current form as evidenced simply looking at it; a good example on that video is the apron and runway 23 compared in both sims at EGCC; it is is dark with visible markings in P3D, but the runway textures in FSW are so washed out by light bloom that you almost cannot even see the markings at all. This is a shame because the runway textures in FSW are pretty good when you look closely at them, but it is a fact that FSW is way too bright at the moment. Now, I understand that it is because it is early access and they have not addressed it yet, so I am sure it will be sorted.

[sightseer 895]

Chock - sim brightness has no bearing on semi transparent textures that Im aware of.  and you are entirely too focused on the runways.  Get up in the air a few hundred feet and look ONLY at the ground textures and then compare that to real life (without haze).  The runways in 170229 are actually brighter than they were with previous lighting and my sky texture lighting change that I proposed.  Those sky textures still have input and they are the cause of some of these issues imo.(like blueish ground)

Like it or not the ground and buildings are all bright and warm and saturated when the sun is shining brightly in real life.  Its cloud shadows and haze that dull and darken the appearance.

 

PS:  I am happy to be all alone in my opinions.  and I am not alone.  The Lord is my Shepherd.

[A32xx 129]

As Chock says, the global lighting is a work in progress - possibly waiting for TrueSky? You can see this very clearly by opening the FSW.cfg file and changing Cloud Shadows=0 to Cloud Shadows=1 as a test.

As to whether you should be able to see rotor or prop blades spinning or not, beauty is in the eye of the beholder! You can usually edit the prop or rotor alpha channel texture to get more or less visibility as required.

[Chock 17,769]

32 minutes ago, sightseer said:

Chock - sim brightness has no bearing on semi transparent textures that Im aware of.  and you are entirely too focused on the runways.

Well, clearly sim brightness does have a bearing on them, since they are virtually invisible in FSW and readily apparent in P3D. The textures files are identical when you open them in an image editor, so it is clearly the sim making them appear how they do in FSW. Yes the grayscale tone on an alpha channel affects transparency, but it is the colour and brightness settings overall which are affecting their visibility in FSW.

With regard to 'being too focused on runways', I'm simply making the observation that they look too bright, which they do. In any case, you are supposed to be focused on the runways when taking off, landing and flying around an airport, that's kind of one of the things they teach you when learning to fly lol.

Seriously though, this picture below is what Manchester airport looks like from the air on a sunny day. The aprons actually have a pinkish tinge to them on this picture, as indeed they do when you are there looking at them in real life, and the runways are anything but a glaring white, they look like that picture, I ought to know, I've been landing and taking off from there for the past thirty years or so. Some of the buildings with painted white hangar doors are very bright when it is sunny, but the tarmac absolutely is as it appears in this picture, even in very bright sunlight:

 

[sightseer 895]

Chock - to start with, that pic has been stopped down to avoid overexposure.  many such shots will be.  It looks different with the naked eye and if you are being honest then you will agree with me.

Sure the tarmac may have a pink tint to it and the runway may be dark(ish) asphalt at Manchester airport.  That has no bearing on anything as far as Im concerned.  FSW uses one runway texture in many places.  It cant be all things to all airports.  That's what Orbx is for.

Theres a good amount of haze in that shot and it appears to be city smog due to its color.  In cleaner air it will look different - bluer.  and the camera settings also affect that appearance.

reality is bright and warm.  You can find a lot of pictures out there and they will all be different.  the eye tells a different story.

feel free to post more pics. Id love to see them.  maybe you could check out some from reuniontower.com like I mentioned earlier.  That will show a fair enough representation of what Dallas looks like.

[Chock 17,769]

Unless you either took that picture yourself and know what camera it was taken on, and what lens was used, and what film/CCD/CMOS plate/sensor was in that camera, and know the wet film's ISO rating/digital equivalent setting for the camera used, or read the info on the digital file's metadata, camera data, IPTC data etc to determine that, providing that was present on the file (which it isn't, I know because it was me who saved that file), then there is no way you can know if it was shot with the lens stopped down. Sure, you will have to close down the aperture with certain film speeds, or camera settings such as the shutter, but not with all of them, which is just as well since with many compact digital cameras (i.e. not a more complex DSLR) there actually is no way to stop the lens down manually. The best you can manage on some lesser digital cameras is to half press the shutter button to get it to take a light reading, otherwise you are completely reliant on the camera's automatic sensor. Automatic sensors on DCs generally go for an appearance to reduce chromatic aberrations and to create an image suitable for viewing on equipment which can reproduce an IEC 61966-2-1:1999, or occasionally Adobe RGB1998 colour space, since both these have gamut ranges which are broadly similar (though technically not identical in terms of how they work) to at least the gamut range of an average human being's eye cone receptors, in that they can reproduce about 12 million different colours, which is around what a typical IEC 61966-2-1:1999 profiled monitor can do. In other words, they try to reproduce what the average human eye sees, and then perceives, so that it can be displayed in the most common way images are displayed these days, that is to say, online on mobile phones, tablets and computer monitors, most of which are on that same sRGB profile.

The blue of the distance in that pic is more likely to be caused by an inversion layer and rayleigh scattering than much smog, since heavy smog (of which there generally isn't much in the UK since it has bugger all heavy industry left these days, fewer coal-fired power stations, and very strict emissions laws for vehicles - I know this because my 16 year old sports car failed its MOT on exhaust emissions a couple of weeks back and it ended up with me spending 750 quid to get all kinds of stuff fitted to it, such as a Lambda Sensor in order for it to pass the retest lol) i.e. the hydrocarbons and other pollutants from vehicular exhausts and industrial chimneys etc typically gives the air a beige tint (more likely to be seen in a city in China these days), invariably assisted by being trapped under an inversion layer. Inversion layers on the other hand, are very common in the UK, and on a day like the one in that picture, that'd typically be up at around 3,000 feet AGL and will present a very noticable line in the sky where the atmospheric visibility changes, and I daresay you would see it in the area above that which was visible in the picture and even notice climbing through it in an aeroplane, where the ground's visibility would be considerably reduced when above the layer, and especially so with slant ranges.

 

[bonchie 2,305]

I'll throw my cheap 2 cents in. I'm a pilot. I've literally never encountered a runway, even in the brightest southern and tropical areas, that appears overexposed and blindingly blown out like runways in FSW. I'll also be fair and point out that HDR being too high in P3D can produce the same effect.

It's a work in progress. I think they've already improved it somewhat (it was even worse at release), but there's still work to be done.

If you think FSW is too dark, I'd suggest your monitor's settings are not of the normal range to cause such a result when literally everyone else sees it as being way too bright.

[sightseer 895]

please stop with the runways.  this is not about runways. its about the warmth and brightness of the ground scenery.

 

thanks, bonchie for your .02 but its not about runways.  Just go look at XP11.  that what I want to see.  If they can do it, its not my monitor.  and there are plenty of photos that I see as right so again its not my monitor.

 

have you ever flown in Texas?  have you landed at Houston Hobby or Dallas love on a bright sunny day?  its bright.  its warm.  the ground is brighter and a totally different tone than in FSW.

In addition to views from reunion tower, you can also look up Chase tower.  some of those have a realistic look (what the eye sees)

 

bonchie - does your aircraft have tinted windows?  do you wear sunglasses while flying?  and why exactly would being a pilot matter?

[rtodepart 761]

Im also out there in the real world flying ... in my personal opinion i dont think we are ever gona get a real accurate representation of what i see out the front window .. it may be close but not the exact same ... 

[A32xx 129]

It's going to be better when the finished weather engine is up and running, and better still if there is built-in real weather or a compatible weather add-on. I also think the Graphics options would really benefit from a brightness, contrast and saturation adjustment section so that everyone can set their own preference, because it's highly unlikely that a fixed global setting is going to represent rainy Manchester UK, and sunny Houston Tx, to anyone's satisfaction. That should also make the screenshot forums a LOT more interesting too...

[sightseer 895]

 there was a guy on this website with a username of Geofa and he would post lots of real life pics and I used some of them to model my skies after and I had created a quite good one for P3d1.4.  It worked in FSX as well.

 

His pictures seem to no longer be available here at avsim but I found this one video by him on youtube.

 there are better videos that Ive seen (clearer) but it shows that FSW isn't right as this is in Michigan and its bright and warm.  Ive seen videos posted by developers over at Orbx and they look bright and warm.  there was a younger guy who posted many videos at Orbx.  Ill try and find one. look up RedDevilSquadron on youtube.  He's got a wide variety of real flight videos showing bright and dark looks.

 

here is a comparison shot showing FSW update2 (previous update) using lighting I created versus a real life pic on the right.  Look at where the pics meet and compare the grass and other things.  I did pretty good.

 

 

[Chock 17,769]

5 hours ago, sightseer said:

please stop with the runways.  this is not about runways. its about the warmth and brightness of the ground scenery.

have you ever flown in Texas?  have you landed at Houston Hobby or Dallas love on a bright sunny day?  its bright. 

Erm it was me who started this thread by posting a vid, of taking off flying low over a runway and landing by flying low over another runway, so if I say the thread is about runways, then it is about runways lol.

And no, I have.never flown over Texas, I fly mainly gliders in the UK (in real life that is), where my comparison vid in those sims was also located, so ithis thread and my comparison video was not about what it looks like over Texas but good old Blighty lol. Trust me, when I fly for real over those airports and ones nearby for real, it looks like the photo I posted. FSW will presumably know that too, since they are in the UK.

 

[SmokeDiddy 262]

I'll have to side with Chock in this debate.  I think FSW is still washed out for the most part.  I'm not a RL pilot, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express a while back.

[HighBypass 2,339]

First thing I thought when watching the comparison vid was ruddy hell , that Blackhawk is blindingly bright in FSW, Even in blue sky conditions it shouldn't be that bright surely?

If I may add a couple of links to videos in the real world. The first one is a takeoff of a coast guard (bright white & red heli) in high-sun blue sky conditions - it sure doesn't look as washed out to me.

 

The second is possibly more telling: It does look quite like FSW bright scenery...... from inside the cockpit! Look at how the instrument panel is relatively dark and clear, yet look at the scenery - all washed out and bright - because the camera cannot react to the highly different lighting conditions.

Now OK I MAY have to concede that the FSW scenery is pretty much as bright as can be seen in the video. BUT when selecting an outside view it should definitely be toned down quite a bit!

[n4gix 4,947]

9 hours ago, sightseer said:

and why exactly would being a pilot matter?

Presumably pilots see things from the air much more frequently than us grounded birds...