FSX City of Light

[Chock 17,769]

Paris certainly earning the famous nickname of The City of Light in this shot of my VC10 departing from Le Bourget and turning over the city at 4,000 feet...

 

[rightseat 277]

I hope you omitted the noise abatement procedure and kept the flaps hanging out there for the neighbors... :-) 

More 727 action, please! 

[Chock 17,769]

Well, theoretically, since the Rolls Royce Conway was the first bypass turbofan jet engine to make it onto an airliner, it was a bit quieter than the contemporary P&W JTs on most other jets at the time (apart from a few 707s and DC-8s which also had Conways), but it's still pretty loud in comparison to modern turbofans, especially with four of them wound up to full throttle on a VC10, not that I care anyway, there are no noise abatement laws in my flight sims!

But on the subject of laws in the City of Light, here's a curious one concerning lighting in Paris...

If this screenshot was a photograph, rather than from P3D, it would actually have been illegal to take it, and illegal to reproduce it as well. In the European Union, the law states that anything which can be considered an artistic work, is protected by copyright for 70 years after its creator is dead, however this law is usually overridden by the general freedom of panorama clause in the law which allows one to take photographs of skylines which include buildings which are copyright, this is why you can cheerfully take pics of places such as the London Eye, even though its design is still within copyright. But in the EU, individual countries can choose to opt out of the freedom of panorama clause covering copyright, and one or two did choose that option, including France and Italy. Since the creator of the Eiffel Tower died in 1923, this means the Eiffel Tower itself went out of copyright in 1993, so you are fine taking photographs of it in the daytime, but the lights on the Eiffel Tower were installed in 1985, so they are still subject to copyright since they are considered an artistic work, thus well within the time period where they are protected, making it illegal to photograph the Eiffel Tower at night when it is illuminated, which it pretty much always is.

That's not the only fun fact about lighting in Paris either. If you go to the Champs-Élysées, you'll see that there is a McDonalds on it (don't buy a coffee there by the way, it's well expensive, like everything else on the Champs-Élysées and the cups are smaller than the normal sized ones in Macca-Dees too, so it's a right rip off ), but you don't even have to go in it to notice something weird about it: It's the only McDonalds in the entire world where the Golden Arches sign is not yellow, it's white, and that's because it's illegal to have anything other than white lighting on the Champs-Élysées in order to preserve the artistic appearance of the street, so they had to make the Golden Arches sign comply with that law, and trust me, I've done artwork for McDonalds in the past, and they are really picky about the colour of the Golden Arches (it has to be Pantone 109C), so that must have really got on their nerves to be told 'Non!' by the Frenchies lol. Another bizarre thing about that McDonalds is that it actually has security guards on the entrance who will search bags and stuff when you go in, which is a bit weird for a glorified burger stand although I think the reasoning behind it is to keep beggars out of the place, of which there are quite a few on the Champs-Élysées sadly.

[Victoroos 205]

What lighting do you use? Is this all ftx global :O

 

And btw. I love the copyright explanation. Went onto the forum as a learning break...and I still learned something.. oh those French :P

[Chock 17,769]

4 hours ago, Victoroos said:

What lighting do you use? Is this all ftx global :O

The lighting is Taburet Night 3D France, the buildings are VFR France Isle de France.

I don't use FTX Global, in fact I don't use any Orbx products at all (unless you count the one that is in FSW by default), because I don't like Orbx stuff. Don't get me wrong, I think looks great, but it's an expensive solution if one starts getting into it and with the amount of stuff Orbx make, it's a slippery slope of expense and I already spend a bloody fortune on flight sims lol, so I prefer cheaper overall solutions such as Ultimate Terrain, or Photoreal providing I can get autogen sitting over it, and usually only in areas I fly to a lot.

Thus I normally I use Ultimate Terrain Europe X V2, which is inexpensive and covers all of Europe, but I tweak the light textures myself in Photoshop to give them a bit more glow. However, that doesn't work over Paris in my sims because the scenery in that pic is VFR France's Isle de France, which is phototerrain covering about 5,000 sq miles around Paris with custom autogen over it, which looks great in daylight and again is inexpensive when you consider all that it does. But the problem is VFR France (obviously being VFR scenery) is not lit up at all at night, because Photoreal stuff trumps landclasses when it comes to what P3D and FSX will display, so it blows out the lights of UTX which normally look pretty good.

So to solve that problem, the lighting for anywhere I have photoreal scenery or custom airports in my sim, is Taburet since I think it looks really great in FSX and P3D and works in both sims, in this case Taburet Night 3D France, which as you can see is pretty realistic. It has the advantage of being cheap too, i.e. less than ten quid to light up the whole of France and about the same price for most equivalent sized regions, which is worth it to me for the appearance it gives since I can't stand rubbish night lighting and I do a lot of night flights in Europe. It can be a bit of a frame rate hog to have all that stuff running when going into an out of Paris airports, since three major airports are all in close proximity to one another and I do like having AI airliners going into them too, and they are all somewhat tarted up by VFR France Isle de France scenery as well. But since I'm a big Francophile, and I especially like Paris, which is my favourite city to visit in real life as well as in a flight sim, I want it to look as much like the real thing as it can, even if that means sacrificing some FPS. It can be a VAs issue in FSX, but in P3D it only affects FPS, since P3D is 64 bit, and with an eye to the future, Taburet stuff also works in Flight Sim World as well, so I'll be good to go on that when I start using FSW more, which I probably will when it gets finished.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Very beautiful night shot.  One pic can go a long way.

[HighBypass 2,339]

Gorgeous pic, Alan! ..and thank you for the educational post.

I initially read "freedom of panorama" as "freedom of paranoia"