Removing haze in xplane 11

[Murmur 3,941]

9 hours ago, Paraffin said:

Runways are buried in the hazy soup when they should be visible according to the METAR.

That's one of several irritating issues that are a symptom of insufficient quality in several aspects of X-Plane. Along with incorrect visibility distance, also incorrect ambient lighting at dusk/dawn comes to mind. And there are several others. Inaccuracies in the physics model, etc.

XP does some things very well, but it's irritating that several basic features like these are not considered. For some aspects, it's almost like it still retains part of its "amateurish" stance from past versions. Several of its features seem to have been simply made to be "just good enough" since most people won't care, and not how they should have been done.

This contrasts with other features of the sim that have been thought out and tackled in a much more professional manner, e.g. the new G1000, the scenery system, the airports gateway, etc.

It is this lack of quality in a few basic aspects that sometimes is disheartening for people like me or Jcomm, whereas the competition usually has a more consistent quality across its various features (although this doesn't mean that they're perfect either, far from it!).

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

4 hours ago, Murmur said:

That's one of several irritating issues that are a symptom of insufficient quality in several aspects of X-Plane. Along with incorrect visibility distance, also incorrect ambient lighting at dusk/dawn comes to mind. And there are several others. Inaccuracies in the physics model, etc.

And let's not forget the radioactive glowing trees effect, which is still there. I don't know why it's taking so long to fix that. The sim does great tree shadows if you have a strong enough system to have that enabled, but they still haven't fixed that weird constant glowing backlight effect on trees. It's something new in the XP11 rendering engine, because I don't remember that with XP10. 

Still, even with the occasional weirdness, and in spite of a LONG history flying MSFS since the very first days of computer flight sims, this is my home. It's the simulation that ticks all the boxes I care about, starting with frame rate.

I've always valued frame rate over everything else in a flight sim, because I can't do a smooth landing if I don't have liquid smooth frames, and I can feel (or imagine I feel) the ground effect and the tires touching the runway after flaring on touchdown. X-Plane has always delivered that, from the very first version I tried. Even with older versions and less powerful computers than I fly with now.

[Janov 2,383]

On 4/17/2018 at 3:56 PM, Paraffin said:

Another issue with the haze isn't just the aesthetics, but a practical matter of runway visibility.  

If the METAR says visibility is 10 miles, and the slider in X-Plane's weather menu is set to 10 miles, then I expect to see the runway when I'm 10 miles away (allowing for statute/nautical conversion and angle of height above ground). 

Last time I tested this, which wasn't recently, the haze doesn't correspond that way. Runways are buried in the hazy soup when they should be visible according to the METAR. Unless this has been changed recently, that's the main indicator that the haze effect is overdone. At least Laminar did finally expose the art dataref so we can adjust it with a LUA script, or several of the available anti-haze plugins available.

I recently did some trials setting up low RVR´s to test the visibility, and for the daylight conditions, found them to be very precise (i.e. at 500m RVR you can count about 10 edge lights).

For night conditions, the RVR is twice the indicated amount - which "somehow" is correct, because at night you can see high-intensity runway lights about twice as far through the fog than during the day.

Nevertheless, if the RVR at night is indicated as "500m" it SHOULD be 500m... not 1000m. RVR day = 0.5 * RVR night

This is for very low visibility conditions - for the OP´s problem (visibility in the range of 50+ miles) my opinion is also that XP11 has it "mostly right" for most everyday conditions - however there are some conditions in the real world, where visibility is MUCH better than the maximum you can set in X-Plane (several 100 kms), and that should be selectable in X-Plane, too. This is especially true for the thin, dry air at altitude.

Jan

 

[Murmur 3,941]

39 minutes ago, Janov said:

I recently did some trials setting up low RVR´s to test the visibility, and for the daylight conditions, found them to be very precise (i.e. at 500m RVR you can count about 10 edge lights).

For night conditions, the RVR is twice the indicated amount - which "somehow" is correct, because at night you can see high-intensity runway lights about twice as far through the fog than during the day.

Nevertheless, if the RVR at night is indicated as "500m" it SHOULD be 500m... not 1000m. RVR day = 0.5 * RVR night

This is for very low visibility conditions - for the OP´s problem (visibility in the range of 50+ miles) my opinion is also that XP11 has it "mostly right" for most everyday conditions - however there are some conditions in the real world, where visibility is MUCH better than the maximum you can set in X-Plane (several 100 kms), and that should be selectable in X-Plane, too. This is especially true for the thin, dry air at altitude.

Jan

 

Interesting post as always, thanks Jan! :-)

I think the easier thing to do would be to take out the RVR slider in the weather screen, and just leave the visibility slider. Otherwise, XP should translate the RVR value into a corresponding visibility factor depending on time of day, etc.

On the other hand, METARs can report RVR values instead of visibility, so not having this automatic translation from reported RVR to effective visibility, could produce incorrect RVR values when fetching METARs from live weather.

In any case, the problem explained by Paraffin seems to be present mainly for medium visibility values of a few miles.

 

[RXP 2,338]

On April 18, 2018 at 1:32 AM, Paraffin said:

I've always valued frame rate over everything else in a flight sim ... X-Plane has always delivered that, from the very first version I tried.

I'd think what contributes to 'fluidity' a lot is the X-Plane rendering engine running nearly stutter free. Even at 25FPS I find it still delivers and this contributes a lot to the immersion, and the enjoyment factor.

[anitelite 41]

Read through the threads regarding haze and FlyWithLua.  But when I create the script and run it in Xplane, it shows FlywithLua stopped in red lettering at the top right of the screen.  I interpret that as something wrong with the script since it goes away if I delete the script.  So here is the one and only exact line that I have in the file

set("sim/private/controls/fog/fog_be_gone", 0.2)

Should the line be in quotes like this  -->    "set("sim/private/controls/fog/fog_be_gone", 0.2)"  or should there be other lines or code to make the script work ??

Thanks !

 

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

The line I'm using has a space ahead of the first quotation mark like this, but I'm not sure that matters:

set( "sim/private/controls/fog/fog_be_gone", 0.5)

The other thing to check, is make sure you're using the "FlyWithLua Complete Edition" and not the "Core Edition," which I think is the only one that works with these art settings. Someone correct me if I'm wrong about that.

[anitelite 41]

Thanks Paraffin

No Joy.  Tried your version with exact same results.  So here's what i've done

Downloaded latest Lua complete package, unzipped, and placed in plugins folder.  Created the fog_be_gone.lua script and pasted into the scripts folder.  Started xplane and iimmediately get the lua stopped message.   Do you have any other ideas I might try ?

Thanks.

 

[anitelite 41]

hmmm.....here's a clue i missed....this message appears at the top left of the screen in green letters

Resources/Plugins/FlywithLua/Scripts/fog_be_gone.lua:1: "=" expected

and I'm pretty sure that when that message pops, thats when lua stops as well.

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

That should work, but I'm far from being a Lua expert, so I hope someone else can jump in here with an answer. Ask about this in the .org forums too, where there might be more LUA-specific info.

[allergiecheck 14]

You may try this:

It changes the color settings of Windows (assuming you are using Windows as your OS). Improves the visual appearance IMO a lot.

[Old_As_Dirt 160]

On 4/27/2018 at 8:13 PM, Paraffin said:

The line I'm using has a space ahead of the first quotation mark like this, but I'm not sure that matters:

set( "sim/private/controls/fog/fog_be_gone", 0.5)

That's the script I use and it works great.  I don't think I have the space, but I'd have to check.  You can easily reset the value to anything from .01 to 1.0, which is the default.  I like the 0.5 setting as well.

I had one aircraft that produced the "Fly_With_Lua has stopped working", or something like that, but can't remember which one.  It was a free download and I just quit using it.  I think it was something in the aircraft design as opposed to LUA.

I also will say that that is about the only script I use, so there may be a script conflict if others are used.

John

EDIT - There IS a space in my script.  Don't know if it's necessary or not.

Edited April 29, 2018 by Old_As_Dirt

[dtrjones 356]

On 4/9/2018 at 6:09 PM, soaring_penguin said:

Personally I think you are biased by FSX/P3D’s clear weather, IMO XP11 depicts it much more true to reality. But if this is not to your taste, try “fog be gone” , a flywithlua script you can download from the .org . 

LOL this is so funny. I agree X-Plane 11 visuals are realistic. But it wouldn't be remiss of me to suggest this is akin to the time being correct twice a day on a broken watch.

IRL I've probably more often than not looked out of an airplane window and seen an X-Plane styled view with the haze, it's certainly very common especially more during the winter months here in the UK. But it's also true that you can get beautiful clear views you know the ones which don't deminish the colours from altitude as well on certain days which you can't get in X-Plane (without some form of moddification or add-on).

If you are still not conviced then why does nearly every youtuber simmer, scenery or airplane publisher use Reshade or XVision in there X-Plane videos? It's because X-Plane itself has this dullness to the scene which sometimes you just wish wasn't there. Look at Orbx products for X-Plane, nearly all the screenshots use Reshade or X-Vision or something similar, now why do you think that is?

Edited December 30, 2018 by dtrjones

[soaring_penguin 428]

1 hour ago, dtrjones said:

f you are still not conviced then why does nearly every youtuber simmer, scenery or airplane publisher use Reshade or XVision in there X-Plane videos?

Same reason why a photographer is using post effects in Photoshop?  Useless discussion. Beauty lays on the eye of the beholder.

[roadrabbit149 10]

Here is my own personal take on this issue: perhaps I might clear some of the foggy thinking  😉

I use all three platforms (don't ask!) so I don't have any axe to grind, but I did find the reported haziness on XPlane 11. I have an NVidia Graphics card, so have the NVidia Control Panel app. I opened it up and by 'playing' with the five controls [brightness, contrast, gamma, digital vibrance and hue] I was able to reproduce what I think reflects real-world visuals on all three platforms. Not only did I remove the excessive haze on my XPlane11 platform, but I also was able to radically improve the P3Dv5 visuals [no more 'electric' blues and greens!]. It does mean using slightly different settings for each platform. The biggest difference maker was the brightness control.

I was then able to take a digital photo from a nereby hilltop. I then flew each platform and navigated to the defined hill and took screen shots from each platform. I am really pleased with the results and all four pictures look remarkably similar with 'aerosol haziness' increasing realistically with distance from viewpoint.

What this suggests to me is that each platform developer has set slightly differing default values for the above parameters. There is also the individual users own monitor characteristics and set up. Combine all these factors and you will get differing results [so different folk will get different results using the same platform, never mind comparing different platforms!]. I think it is then up to the user to adjust her system to obtain the picture they prefer. There is no point in me giving you my own settings unless you have exactly the same set-up and monitor that I use, but I was able to radically change my visuals for the better without recourse to LUA scripts or other third party apps.

Edited September 20, 2021 by roadrabbit149
clarity