58 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Not clear that that is a given.

I'm going to agree with you here. 

As I learn more about the issue, it is starting to appear to me that it is not something they can/will easily change/fix due to design decisions made early on. But who knows, I have no insight into their thinking. Personally, I hope it is changed though.

However, until it is changed, you will continue to hear:

 

52 minutes ago, brinx said:

you will continue to hear:

Ive heard worse,

Personally said much much worse during the XP11 run, especially on discord where I can say whatever the word not allowed hell I want without dumbass word filters word not allowed with my posts. (took me a while to accept that interference as a good choice)

The bigger question is who is "they" - Laminar or Toliss, right now I don't think there is clarity on that issue.

Personally I think it is probably Toliss, based on:

and

But until LR formally confirm XP12 lighting is locked down (likely end of the XP12.0X run) they are fully justified in not taking any action to fix it.

Right now the best option I can suggest is signing onto the XP12 beta, that seems very late in going gold, and talking to their favorite aircraft author about these issues and what has been discussed here - with the same level of mutal respect we have largely had in this thread. 17 pages and no stupidity- its a record!

Edited March 15, 20233 yr by mSparks

"Right now the best option I can suggest is signing onto the XP12 beta, that seems very late in going gold"

12.04 went gold yesterday 🙂

On 3/14/2023 at 9:31 PM, MrBitstFlyer said:

I seriously suggest you check your monitor calibration as the panel never got black on my screen, just darker when the view was aimed outside.  Through most of the video the panel was clearly visible.  When looking inside it was perfect.  Very strange why you decided to take a single frame from that long video when the view was aimed outside. At the point you took the screen shot, the viewer only had to move the view down a few degrees if they wanted a brighter panel.

Again, this isn't a bug, it is working as LR intended.  Many people are saying they find the panels too dark, so LR are looking at the tonemapping again.  If they can improve it, and not negativley impact on the excellent lighting engine, fair enough.

 

On 3/15/2023 at 1:39 AM, MrBitstFlyer said:

It isn't a bug because it is by design.  It sounds like LR is looking again at tonemapping to see if they can tweak for those that find the panels too dark.

In the video you posted, the panel was visible at all times on my monitor (which is why I mentioned monitor calibration).  For those times you suggested the panel was 'black', it in fact wasn't.  In the screenshot you posted, the virtual eyes were looking outside, so to my logic the panel would be a little darker, as the exposure needs changing to preference the outside.  If the panel has to be brighter, I would suggest looking at the panel.

Still, you don't like eye adaption so LR is going to revisit Tone mapping.

 

On 3/15/2023 at 3:06 AM, MrBitstFlyer said:

Good, anything that may degrade the lighting engine in XP12 would be disaster.

I want to highlights a few things as the same factually incorrect points are constantly being made:

It is not by design and it is not working as LR intended. It was implemented in a hurry when their first attempt at exposure fusion during the release candidates ended up being a disaster, so they didn't have time to find the optimal tonemapper. As can be seen from the videos and blog posts from LR, some of which are not older than a month, they are planning to make changes to the tonemapper and they will make changes to the tonemapper when they finally come up with a better solution.

While it is impossible to perfectly recreate the world given the limited dynamic range of a monitor and therefore there will always be some compromise, there are much better compromises than the current implementation. As I mentioned in my previous posts, there are several possible approaches which can reproduce perceptually correct results. It is much easier said than done and LR has currently more important issues to work on like the VRAM management, so it is taking time, but it is possible.

It has nothing to do with monitor calibration. Color calibration has very little effect on perceived brightness, it mostly only affects hue. Therefore, even though a lot of the monitors in the wild don't have accurate colors out of the box, given the issue people are complaining here is large dark-colored cockpits looking too dark, color calibration is pretty much irrelevant. While gamma calibration has a significant effect on perceived brightness, most monitors in the wild have accurate gamma out of the box and a monitor with an inaccurate gamma would look too bad to be usable anyway.

It likely has nothing to do with the rendering / lighting engine of X-Plane 12 either. LR thinks that their rendering engine already produces correct results based on the real-world measurements they made, so changes are expected to only be made to the tonemapper.

It mostly only affects large dark-colored cockpits because the incoming sunlight gets absorbed by the cockpit much more easily, which reduces the amount of ambient lighting quite a bit. This significantly increases the dynamic range of the rendered scene. As the tonemapper used in X-Plane 12 (Narkowicz ACES), unlike our brains, can't handle such a dynamic range, large dark-colored cockpits are much more likely to be perceptually inaccurate. So the issue has nothing to do with aircraft having incorrect albedos, it is a direct result of the tonemapper.

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by Biology

39 minutes ago, Biology said:

and blog posts from LR, some of which are not older than a month

Source? All I've seen is

Quote

 

We may bring back a lighter version of exposure fusion – this will be up to the art team to decide if or how they want to use it.

https://developer.x-plane.com/blog/

February 18, 2023

 

I get the idea behind exposure fusion, it wasn't a bad idea, if you can have a well lit cockpit, and a balanced outside view, why not fuse them together.

But the answer turned out to be, because it made both look washed out and awful, you need the contrast between dark and light areas, else the whole scene just looks like it has no lighting. And outside is very very bright, and inside is very very dark.

No fancy tonemapper algorithm will ever make this outside look normal

The only way you can draw both inside and outside of a scene like that is to tell X-Plane if you are looking inside or outside.

 

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by mSparks

16 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Source? All I've seen is

See page 14 which has a video I posted, addressing "bugs that affect everybody". In the video, Michael Brown says that most people think the cockpits are too dark and it will be fixed.

16 minutes ago, mSparks said:

I get the idea behind exposure fusion, it wasn't a bad idea, if you can have a well lit cockpit, and a balanced outside view, why not fuse them together.

But the answer turned out to be, because it made both look washed out and awful, you need the contrast between dark and light areas, else the whole scene just looks like it has no lighting. And outside is very very bright, and inside is very very dark.

LR's first attempt at implementing exposure fusion was problematic, but this doesn't mean the exposure fusion itself is the issue. Many experiments show that people are much more sensitive to local contrast, so it is possible to have exposure fusion or another form of local tonemapping without taking away from perceived contrast when it is done right. I'm not saying it's easy to implement, but it is certainly possible and certainly not so hard that even NASA can't do it.

16 minutes ago, mSparks said:

No fancy tonemapper algorithm will ever make this outside look normal

Yes, no fancy tonemapping algorithm will make it look perfectly right. But things are not binary and some fancy tonemapping algorithms can perform much better than the current global tonemapper in X-Plane 12, which is pretty much my point.

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by Biology

49 minutes ago, Biology said:

"bugs that affect everybody"

That was on exposure fusion, on 12.01, before look based exposure was GA, and also back before the blog post I just posted from Feb.

49 minutes ago, Biology said:

but this doesn't mean the exposure fusion itself is the issue.

But it was, it takes the image I posted and removes the bright outside, making both inside and outside look dull and lifeless. That was why it was thrown away hopefully never to come back.

49 minutes ago, Biology said:

can perform much better than the current global tonemapper in X-Plane 12

But this is something completely different to what people are complaining about, they are not talking about getting the tones correct, they want to completely remove the hard contrast between 100,000 lux outside and 100 lux inside because:

On 3/13/2023 at 10:23 PM, rjack1282 said:

If I wanted realistic cockpit lighting I would go fly for real. 

 

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by mSparks

4 minutes ago, mSparks said:

That was on exposure fusion, on 12.01, before look based exposure was GA, and also back before the blog post I just posted from Feb.

Exposure fusion was implemented in Release Candidate 3 and was removed in Release Candidate 6, so during the early access and long before 12.01, I'm afraid you're misinformed.

6 minutes ago, mSparks said:

But it was, it takes the image I posted and removes the bright outside, making both inside and outside look dull and lifeless. That was why it was thrown away hopefully never to come back.

Again, people are much more sensitive to local contrast, so the global contrast being lower doesn't mean things would look dull and lifeless, as the local contrast would still be retained in a good implementation. It was an issue with the implementation than the method itself.

7 minutes ago, mSparks said:

But this is something completely different to what people are complaining about, they are not talking about getting the tones correct, they want to completely remove the hard contrast between 100,000 lux outside and 100lux inside because:

Tonemappers are not for "getting the tones correct", they are for mapping the rendered scene which has an enmormous dynamic range into SDR. The tonemapper is always applied to the rendered scene, regardless of eye adaptation, so the contrast is always altered in some way. However, it's not a binary so certainly there is a much better compromise than having perceptually incorrect cockpit lighting or completely losing the contrast. A good local tonemapper would retain the local contrast, so that the perceived contrast wouldn't change, but the brightnesses would look perceptually correct, unlike the case with a global tonemapper like X-Plane 12's Narkowicz ACES. By utilizing other tricks by using the local tonemapper only when the dynamic range of the scene is too high and/or for the cockpit, it is possible to have a much more perceptually correct result without touching the rendering engine whatsoever, which shouldn't be touched anyway if LR's real-world brightness measurements are correct.

18 minutes ago, Biology said:

as the local contrast would still be retained in a good implementation

Then they will still complain the cockpits are to dark, because the real world contrast of white between 100,000 lux and 100 lux on any monitor you can buy is

255,255,255 rgb vs 0,0,0 rgb

18 minutes ago, Biology said:

they are for mapping the rendered scene which has an enmormous dynamic range into SDR.

They want to turn the right hand side we have now into the left hand side because the bottoms of the trees are too dark - in this case the cockpit, which is 1000 times darker than that.

->dull and lifeless.

all because head tracking/VR is to much like effort for them.

Sometimes it is OK to just say "Nahh" tbh.

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by mSparks

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

Then they will still complain the cockpits are to dark, because the real world contrast between 100,000 lux and 100 lux on any monitor you can buy is

255,255,255 rgb vs 0,0,0 rgb

I'm tired of saying this, but things are not binary. No representation of the huge dynamic range of the rendered scene will look perfectly accurate, but there are better representations which can retain local contrast (so things don't look dull and lifeless) while having brightnesses which are much more perceptually correct.

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

They are want to turn the right hand side we have now into the left hand side because the bottoms of the trees are too dark - in this case the cockpit, which is 1000 times darker than that.

->dull and lifeless.

What you did on the left is not local tonemapping, it's reducing both local and global contrast. Local tonemapping doesn't work like that.

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

all because head tracking/VR is to much like effort for them.

I'm sorry but neither VR nor eye/head tracking is the perfect solution like you make them out to be. I have an HP Reverb G2, one of the best VR headsets in terms of clarity, and it still doesn't come anywhere close to the clarity, sharpness and usability of 2D, especially for airliners. Eye/head tracking has its own issues, so I still often find myself going back to 2D.

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

Sometimes it is OK to just say "Nahh" tbh.

I agree, we could have a much more productive discussion if you tried to read or understand my points, didn't constantly make factually inaccurate claims or misrepresented what I say. No one has to have the technical knowledge about these things, but one should either accept factual points with source or have enough technical knowledge to have a productive discussion. Sadly, based on what you said, it's clear that you didn't bother to check any of the sources I've sent about local tonemapping. I don't think we have a productive discussion this way and there is no point in continuing it.

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by Biology

On 3/14/2023 at 5:21 AM, GoranM said:

I'm all for getting it done as "right" as possible, but within reason.  Some things simply are not achievable to the lengths some people think they can be.  

I agree with you, so if that was the case for the tonemapper issue, I wouldn't bother to post so many things here and spend hours experimenting with different tonemapper implementations myself. As I've said before, it is not easy at all and no implementation will look perfect, but I'm certain that there is a better compromise. I can't say I'm an expert in this subject, but I believe I have a reasonably well technical knowledge about it, given it's literally my job. I already managed to have some success with my tonemapper implementations, so I believe that LR with its much more skilled developers will be able to find a solution.

On 3/14/2023 at 5:21 AM, GoranM said:

Imagine I start a topic like this in the other forum.  And I point out everything wrong with it.  I'll be crucified within the first 2 posts.  Here, it's "constructive criticism" and an "opinion".

This is the problem with differing opinions.  The one's who are criticizing it, have the opinion that, "It's a bug.  It needs to be fixed.  Laminar are incompetent because it's a bug that has existed for 7 years..." resort to veiled insults directed toward those who say, "It's perfectly fine for me..."

Why does it bother people who insist it's a bug, when people who are fine with it, tell them they are fine with it?  I mean, 15 pages of discussion about a dark panel bug, that affects some people?  

It should have ended with "submit a bug report with as much information as possible, and hopefully they fix it."

DONE.

Instead, this thread has been constant "I know better than you..." with some insults thrown in.  

This is indeed the problem with differing opinions, but why does it have to be that way? It's fine to have opinions and discuss them. What's not fine and ruins such discussions is people ignoring facts and evidence, throwing around insults, assuming bad faith, misquoting people, ignoring context and so on. A lot of people here are fans of X-Plane, so am I. While I don't mind talking about something I find is wrong and can be improved with an effort within reason but this doesn't the change the fact that I still very much enjoy X-Plane. But the truth is that regardless of how much evidence I show and how much I try to explain technical details, what I said will be assumed as bad faith by some people here just because it's critical of a single aspect of X-Plane. If "the other forum" is the same like you said, well, then it's unfortunate for them too.

So I probably should've listened to your advice, I could've spent my time on finishing my atmosphere coefficient calculator instead of posting here.

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by Biology

1 hour ago, Biology said:

global contrast

It is just the contrast, it is from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_(vision)

1 hour ago, Biology said:

is the perfect solution

The perfect solution is a monitor capable of 100,000 lux instead of 400 and probably 64bit color.

Until then there are simply two options.

Crush the contrast so that 100,000 lux and 100 lux fit into a range multiple orders of magnitude smaller than real life, or track where you are looking and wash out the really bright stuff, or make the really dark stuff nearly black.

They already do the first to a significant degree, else it would render like a real world photo

any more will wash it out further for us in VR/with head tracking, and still not make them happy.

The only way (I am aware of) you are lighting a 100lux cockpit to not be black against a 100,000 lux background, is (to do the equivalent of) shining a 20,000 lux light on it - let them do that if it really means that much to them - but suggesting making that default is just completely silly.

Edited March 16, 20233 yr by mSparks

Thank you @Biology for bringing some sanity into this topic. 

47 minutes ago, peroni said:

Thank you @Biology for bringing some sanity into this topic. 

Some of us have one opinion on brightness/contrast issue and others differ - I'm not sure where sanity comes into it.  If LR can tweak the tone mapper to please more people then great, but if that comes at the expense of reducing contrast I would be unhappy.  The XP12 lighting engine is the biggest reason I stopped using MSFS after 2,106 hours of use.

1 hour ago, Biology said:

Eye/head tracking has its own issues,

It would be interesting to hear what these issues are in your opinion.