Extended night lights are here, finally.

[Colonel X]

After all these years, some guy just did it. Free, flawless, no performance impact. TK light mod also very recommended.

Europe:
https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/50130-extended-night-lighting-europe-edition/

US:
https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/50456-extended-night-lighting-north-america/

 

[Bjoern]

Note that each state or country uses its own scenery folder, which means you'll end up with a whole friggin' lot of folders.

I'm still waiting for the global, "all in one folder" release.

[Murmur]

X-Plane is that thing where Ben and Austin explain for years why some feature is not feasible because it would require too much time, too much money, too much performance degradation, until some day a single developer publishes that very feature freeware and with no performance impact. 😁

[ZKOKQ]

I see an app on Org store called MVP Real Lights, wondering if I should buy it to use with Extd lights. Anybody using Real Lights, and worth buying ?

[KBUR]

This Extended-Thing has been done by only one man , really ????

Laminar should hire him immediately !

[Paraffin]

1 hour ago, KBUR said:

This Extended-Thing has been done by only one man , really ????

Laminar should hire him immediately !

Sure, for the future perhaps. Remember that XP11 is still distributed on 8 physical disks as an option, and they're already crammed full with data. It sounds like this requires extra files, and nothing like that will make it into the XP11 distribution. It might be the reason we haven't seen a Laminar version of extended night lighting to this extent yet (although there has been progress).

Maybe they'll incorporate something like this for XP12, which I suspect will be the first version that is digital download only.

[Colonel X]

12 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Note that each state or country uses its own scenery folder, which means you'll end up with a whole friggin' lot of folders.

I'm still waiting for the global, "all in one folder" release.

8 years of waiting for this and you complain about having folders?

 

[Paraffin]

3 minutes ago, Colonel X said:

8 years of waiting for this and you complain about having folders?

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but aren't those distant lights a little too bright?

The Inverse square law should attenuate lights in the distance compared to those seen closer to the plane. when they're the same type of lighting. This looks amazing in a Hollywood movie SFX sense, but I'm not sure those distant lights should be that bright. 

[jt8d9a]

yep, it looks strange.

[Colonel X]

Yes, the attentuation is a variable yet to be finetuned by me using X-Vision.

[Bjoern]

15 hours ago, Colonel X said:

8 years of waiting for this and you complain about having folders?

Absolutely.

 

- Edit:

Just to clarify...it's not the folders themselves irking me, but the crass inefficiency of the author's "one package per country" approach. If you have a scenery tile that contains a political border between three countries, that scenery tile's DSF file will be present thrice. And there is no way to overwrite one DSF file with another as each copy of said file only contains the night lights for ONE of those three countries. So in effect, you will have to keep three copies of the same file in three different layers, cluttering the "Custom Scenery" folder and wasting hard drive space.

 

Case in point: Europe alone requires four layers. Can't determine how many MB of disk space that wastes because I always screw up trying to merge all those folders at one point, overwriting files that must not be overwritten.

[1st fltsimguy]

Its free, nuff said.

[greggerm]

On 3/10/2019 at 2:20 PM, Bjoern said:

Just to clarify...it's not the folders themselves irking me, but the crass inefficiency of the author's "one package per country" approach

In the states, it's even more interesting. From any point in my home state, at 2,000' I can see at least 2 other states easily.

I very much appreciate the work that went into the scenery, and have no idea how it was made - but a more regional packaging method may have been more efficient, considering most people downloading would probably not opt for just a single country or state.

Like others, I hesitate to look a gift horse in the mouth. This scenery enhancement's mere existence outweighs any "woulda coulda shoulda" commentary, but if ever there's a v2.0, perhaps this can be considered the next time around.

[ryanbatc]

This is a pretty awesome mod.  The best part is that it drowns far away airports in city lights so it's difficult to find them (like real world).  Now if someone could figure out how to tone down the taxiway and taxiway centerline lighting we'd be in great shape!

[CarlosF]

I took me 10min to setup and configure, no complaints here and there should be none...really??, having many folders is not an issue now days, we aren't limited to HD space like we used to.

Awesome mod indeed!!!