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Alberto Zanot

P3Dv4 rain at night

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33 minutes ago, Alberto Zanot said:

Don't you think it is too dark, almost black, don't you?

The rain or the sim? I don’t recall ever being able to really see rain at night unless the landing or taxi light was on, apart from it actually hitting the windscreen.

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Rain at night?  Unless you have a light (or back lit window), you're just not going to see it my friend.

 

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Dave Hodges

 

System Specs:  I9-13900KF, NVIDIA 4070TI, Quest 3, Multiple Displays, Lots of TERRIFIC friends, 3 cats, and a wonderfully stubborn wife.

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1 hour ago, Alberto Zanot said:

Don't you think it is too dark, almost black, don't you?

Mate water is not white :) unless you have some back light its hard to see rain in real live at night!!


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Yup, rain at night isn't great in P3D, but that is not so much because of the colour the raindrops are rather than the overall effect. If you compare it to the real world, all rain tends to do at night, is lower visibility generally and give any lights a bit of a halo effect as the rainfall close to the light source is illuminated. Anywhere away from a light source rain will basically have the same effect as a light fog or mist, since it is essentially the same thing, i.e. moisture in the air blocking the passage of light from distant objects, so at night rain does of course reduce visibility, and that reduced visibility range I agree, is not well depicted in P3D.

To depict rain properly in P3D, or any other 3D sim for that matter, it would need to be an actual 3D particle effect over a large area, with the option of lighting and shadows on particle effects turned on in the P3D options. That's something which has the potential to bring the sim to a standstill on frame rates, since you'd also need the light to be a 3D presence instead of the 2D bitmapped images it often is. When you do add 3D light to P3D and FSX with some of the night environment add-ons out there, it can really make frame rates drop, and you can see that the dynamic lighting and HDR stuff in P3D is already a frame rate hog in P3D and doesn't even work that well when you pan the external camera about, so you can understand why MS didn't - and DTG and LM for that matter haven't - messed with that too much in FSX-SE and P3D and why add-ons such as FSFX PreceptFX limits the radius of the rain and snow effect you get. Having said that, PreceptFX is an improvement over the default stuff, so you might want to look at getting that add-on to improve matters a bit as it's a lot of bang for your bucks since it also adds a lot of other nice effects in the sim.

This is one of the reasons why what DTG are doing with Flight Sim World, by implementing trueSKY, is potentially very exciting in terms of weather depiction, since it actually makes the atmospheric effects a genuine 3D presence in the simulation environment. However, whether they manage to pull that off fully, including the rainfall and snow depiction, without turning the flight simulator into a slideshow is another matter. At present the rain and snow in FSW do look very much better than they do in any other flight simulator, but there are still problems with cloud lighting affecting terrain visibility for them to overcome, and they've gotta get it working to depict realtime weather downloading too, plus the clouds look a bit low res too, although how they form and evolve is very good and a much better depiction of what clouds really behave like. Whilst what they have thus far with the static weather themes looks promising and far surpasses what FSX and P3D offer in general terms if not in high resolution prettiness, it does undeniably take a lot of resources, so they'll have to be doing their best to offload all that to the GPU if they are to make it work well and offer the kind of eye candy many flight simmers appear to be keen on. All credit to them for having a stab at it though.

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Alan Bradbury

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3 minutes ago, Chock said:

This is one of the reasons why what DTG are doing with Flight Sim World, by implementing trueSKY

You are a natural born reviewer my friend, always making long good informative answers.

This sentence made me have the will of installing FSW, that is collecting dust in my steam library(offered because i bought FS)


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Thanks everybody! And Chock for the exhaustive answer.

On my sim the rain at night is black. I just wanted to say i dont like it :)

1NQqvi1.jpg

EDIT: Actually i found out that it flickers :blink:

 

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