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RioPilot

Spinnings Clouds and Oversized Stars in P3D v4

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Hi everyone,

Using Oculus VR with P3D v4 is a pretty amazing experience, but it's not without its faults.

First in particular are the spinning clouds that orient depending on your head positions. I'm sure this has been brought up before, but is there a way to configure P3D to orient the clouds to the plane, rather than your camera position? I believe this was achievable in FlyInside, but I don't use that anymore, as I find native VR to be of higher quality for me at this point in time.

Furthermore, I find that during the night, stars tend to look rather exaggerated in the sky while using VR. Instead of subtle pinpoints of light, they tend to appear like relatively large blobs, which ends up making the night sky look rather unrealistic and cartoony. For what it's worth, I have REX Sky Force and Texture Direct. I also find the Milky Way texture along the night skybox to be not only too bright and obvious, but also a tad too blurry.

 

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On 9/2/2018 at 1:14 PM, RioPilot said:

Hi everyone,

Using Oculus VR with P3D v4 is a pretty amazing experience, but it's not without its faults.

First in particular are the spinning clouds that orient depending on your head positions. I'm sure this has been brought up before, but is there a way to configure P3D to orient the clouds to the plane, rather than your camera position? I believe this was achievable in FlyInside, but I don't use that anymore, as I find native VR to be of higher quality for me at this point in time.

Furthermore, I find that during the night, stars tend to look rather exaggerated in the sky while using VR. Instead of subtle pinpoints of light, they tend to appear like relatively large blobs, which ends up making the night sky look rather unrealistic and cartoony. For what it's worth, I have REX Sky Force and Texture Direct. I also find the Milky Way texture along the night skybox to be not only too bright and obvious, but also a tad too blurry.

 

Yes you are right but you can fix it with autostarx freeware. It takes a bit to learn but it works in P3D I use it to fix the night sky in VR.

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On 9/5/2018 at 4:43 PM, glider1 said:

Yes you are right but you can fix it with autostarx freeware. It takes a bit to learn but it works in P3D I use it to fix the night sky in VR.

Is that even compatible with P3D v4? When I try to run the AutoStarX installer, I get a system error...

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Hi,

You can reduce the distance at which the clouds turn by altering a value in cloud.fx file in ShaderHLS.

float blendDistance=3000;// Clouds will be fully volumize from 3000 meters, reducing to 0 at 6000

If you change that blendDistance=3000 for something lower (I have mine at 500) the spinning is much much bearable (almost like flyinside). Remember to rebuild your shaders after making the change to take effect.

With that they still spin, but not so agressively and not that far. I use to prepare my flight plan in a GTN750 all in VR, with the plane in parking and I could see the clouds above the airport spinning.

To have a great night sky in P3Dv4 VR and not have watermelons hanging in the sky I greatly recommend Stargazer. It fully recreates a real nightsky with all the stars (you can recognize costellations) in the right place and with the right size.

 

Cheers

 

Carlos

 

 

Edited by chass32

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8 hours ago, RioPilot said:

Is that even compatible with P3D v4? When I try to run the AutoStarX installer, I get a system error...

Yes many some have used it in v4 so have I. Takes a bit of work to understand how to use it but it works great. It can control the brightness of stars and adds a huge database of stars in accurate locations without any performance hit. I could walk you through it but am not at my flightsim computer. The readme is a good start. Basically it just mods the stars.dat file which is the exact same format in P3D as it was in FSX. You could also try Stargazer which is payware but should do a simiilar job. In VR the night sky is very good now. Even saw a a couple of shooting stars which look spectacular in VR truly I mean that.

Edited by glider1

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I edited the cloud file and the spinning effect is much reduced.

Also decided to go ahead and get stargazer. I'm pretty satisfied with it so far. Still plan to go through the different star magnitudes to see what looks best!

Edited by RioPilot

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14 hours ago, RioPilot said:

I edited the cloud file and the spinning effect is much reduced.

Also decided to go ahead and get stargazer. I'm pretty satisfied with it so far. Still plan to go through the different star magnitudes to see what looks best!

What exactly have you edited, the spinning is really anoying...


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6 hours ago, Chandler said:

What exactly have you edited, the spinning is really anoying...

As chass32 kindly pointed out:

On 9/8/2018 at 5:15 AM, chass32 said:

You can reduce the distance at which the clouds turn by altering a value in cloud.fx file in ShaderHLS.

float blendDistance=3000;// Clouds will be fully volumize from 3000 meters, reducing to 0 at 6000

If you change that blendDistance=3000 for something lower (I have mine at 500) the spinning is much much bearable (almost like flyinside). Remember to rebuild your shaders after making the change to take effect.

The cloud.fx file is under the ShaderHLSL folder in the Prepar3d folder. I simply opened the cloud.fx file as a notepad document, edited the float blendDistance to 500, and saved the file.

As far as I can tell from the brief amount of testing I did, the clouds did not seem to spin as much.

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13 hours ago, RioPilot said:

As chass32 kindly pointed out:

The cloud.fx file is under the ShaderHLSL folder in the Prepar3d folder. I simply opened the cloud.fx file as a notepad document, edited the float blendDistance to 500, and saved the file.

As far as I can tell from the brief amount of testing I did, the clouds did not seem to spin as much.

Ah great, thanks for the heads up, missed this one...

Edited by Chandler

Intel Core i9-9900K - ASUS ROG Maximus XI Formula | Intel Z390 - 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-3200 - EVGA RTX3090 FTW3  -2x1TB Samsung 970 PRO - 1000W Corsair HXi Platinum Series  - Corsair H150i Pro RGB 

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Here is the other fix for the spinning clouds. In you Prepar3d.cfg look for the CLOUD_FACING_MODE=0 and change that to 1. That with change how the clouds rotate. For instance set to 0 the clouds rotate based on you Head position witch is set by default. Set it to 1 on now the clouds rotate on you aircraft position. Flyinside once had this option for P3Dv3 but since removed it. On the setting of 1 you still get the barn door effect but the spinning is 100 times better than default. 

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