2 hours ago, GoranM said:

But, seriously, efis, and anyone else going along with his post

Please whoever has got the lighting to where it is now, don't change it!  The method used has led to XP12 lighting embarassing a certain other simulator.  Just one flight in XP12 wiped out my over 2000 hours in it!

5 hours ago, StuSpeed said:

@efis007 has gone quite a field but his histogram analysis is on point

For a start the OP needs to demonstrate the method used to calibrate his monitor.  Also to be considered is the viewpoint in XP12 - just tilting a few degrees up or down will change that histogram.  I think he is being unrealistic to want everything the same brightness when the full dynamic range of reality is being simulated on a monitor. 

Changing the lighting as he suggests will make the display look completely wrong to those of us with head/eye trackers. Seriously, how could the brightness of the panel remain the same if I move my head to fill the view with panel or outside?

Edited March 4, 20233 yr by MrBitstFlyer

2 hours ago, GoranM said:

there's a flight sim I can wreck with that discussion, in about 5 minutes.  And after posting every single fact I have, I’ll still be called a troll.

Only by the minority. Most of us will no doubt completely agree.

In RL, the eyes almost immediately adjust to different light levels, whether the pilot is looking outside or inside the cockpit. This is excellently modeled in XP12 with the autoexposure feature.

The problem is, when using a monitor and a fixed view (like most simmers are currently doing), the sim of course can't auto-adjust the exposure, since it doesn't know if the user eyes are looking at the outside scenery or at the cockpit.

So the solution could be for XP to simulate an "instantaneous" dynamic range that is somewhat higher than that of human eyes. This way, the cockpit would not appear too dark and the scenery too bright at the same time.

Maybe, modifying that dataref is doing something like that.

MSFS has had a very similar issue with cockpits being too dark relative to outside:  the GFE filters essentially resolved this, especially the Detail Filter.  Try it...

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Try it...

Last I heard its horizon was borken and they don't have the resources available to fix it ever.

tbh, if people want lighting more like FSX or XP11, they should probably just go back to FSX or XP11, at least until MSFS finds some more funding and catches up with them in the basic aspects, like having a reasonable horizon to look at.

Because cockpits at very similar brightness to what they are in the real world just isn't a "problem" LR will devote resources to imho, there are pro and cons to LR not catering to xbox gamers, realism could be either depending on whether you want it or not, if you don't XP12 simply isn't the flight sim for you 🤷‍♂️, if you do its light years ahead of the competition.

 

 

Edited March 6, 20233 yr by mSparks

I'm not sure why still all the fuss about dark cockpits. LR said they are working on a slider that will fix the issue, and I'm patient. Still enjoying XP11, no rush, no panic, no dark cockpits and no issues with weather.

I see that XP11 is practically almost forgotten, and most of you are all in XP12, yelling how live weather doesn't work properly, how dark cockpits are, how this how that... Why such a rush? I mean if you want to be a beta tester ok, but don't whine around forums about same issues. XP12 is still a beta, and it will need time to be completely ready for a full fledged flights. I mean even VR is far from optimized. The only thing that amazed me lately, is that I get more or less same FPS as in XP11, and visuals are improved drastically. The fact that volumetric clouds doesn't affect FPS on my system blows my mind, and that feature is enough for me to move to XP12. But, without ASXP or historic weather, the move is not that straightforward as majority thinks.

5 minutes ago, Pe11e said:

yelling how live weather doesn't work properly, how dark cockpits are, how this how that... Why such a rush?

Because in the situations it works perfectly well in (most of them) its absolutely stunning, so much so Ive actually started enjoying 2D again. (I set up a couple of start scripts for VR and 2D settings to get the best of both, VR for always high fps, 2D max everything because occasionally dropping to 45fps doesnt make you physically sick and is barely an inconvenience).

XP11 was more a "labour of love" good for practicing different scenarios to learn and keep current, really good in VR.

XP12 is just rammed with with constant wow moments, and the "meh that could be better" pass so quickly they don't particularly spoil it.

On 3/4/2023 at 11:50 AM, MrBitstFlyer said:

Please whoever has got the lighting to where it is now, don't change it!  The method used has led to XP12 lighting embarassing a certain other simulator.  Just one flight in XP12 wiped out my over 2000 hours in it!

No, just no.

This is a major issue which makes the simulator borderline unusable especially if you are flying an aircraft with a large dark-colored cockpit. I'm genuinely disappointed that Goran and several others here are dismissing a major issue as "making a Mount Everest out of a mole hill" when LR is working hard on it to find a solution and non-Laminar people like me have been trying to find and recommend potential solutions. I get it, people here are tired of the usual X-Plane bashing which led to a highly polarized environment, but it's disappointing that it has come to a point that even the very obvious issues of X-Plane 12 are being defended and even used to bash other flight simulators. I won't be surprised at all if someone calls me a troll just for stating facts about the cockpit lighting issue.

I'm going to repeat what I've said in Slack - the current cockpit lighting in X-Plane 12 is accurate, only if it's trying to simulate a photograph taken with a camera rather than human perception. I think spending just a few minutes in an aircraft cockpit or even a car is enough to see how wrong the current implementation is. Cockpits never look that dark and the outside never looks that bright in real life, thanks to our brains dynamically processing the signal coming from our eyes. I know someone will say something along the lines of "then why do we use sunglasses", so let me answer that beforehand - no, we do not use them because the cockpits look so dark without them, we use them to be able to look outside the cockpit without our eyes hurting. Just to be absolutely sure I did several real-life tests and things were indeed exactly as I recall - even when looking directly at the setting sun (which I do NOT recommend anyone else to try, my eyes were hurting after doing that) the cockpit was perfectly visible and nothing like X-Plane 12. Both the cockpit and the outside are always perfectly visible at the same time when I was not directly looking at the sun, which is again nothing like X-Plane 12. So I'm sorry, X-Plane 12 is certainly is not "embarassing a certain other simulator" in this aspect. If anything, that "certain other simulator" does a much better job at representing the cockpit lighting.

Here are a few screenshots in various aircraft with large dark-colored cockpits to show how bad this issue can get. These are not rare occurences either, it is the case almost all the time with the aircraft I used:

I genuinely hope this finally convinces people who think the current implementation okay. They all look like photographs, but they certainly do not reflect human experience.

So what is the issue and why is it happening? It is likely caused by the tonemapping and I believe LR also thinks the same way. In short, X-Plane uses physically based rendering equations which means the dynamic range of the rendered scene is very high. Tonemappers are used to map the HDR values of the scene into a range monitors can display. A lot of the tonemappers, including the one used by X-Plane 12 (Narkowicz ACES), are global tonemappers - they apply the same curve to all of the pixels in a frame. This behavior is similar to a camera and does not represent human experience. In order to capture human perception more accurately, local tonemappers were developed - their behavior change based on the surroundings of the pixel which is being tonemapped. You can read this article for more information: https://bartwronski.com/2016/08/29/localized-tonemapping/

In short, the issue is likely caused by X-Plane 12's tonemapper not being able to cope with the very high dynamic range of the scene due to it being a global tonemapper. Therefore, usage of local tonemappers might be needed. As a fun fact, LR tried exactly that with a method called exposure fusion for a short period of time during the release candidate period, however their implementation had many issues and they decided to roll back to a different global tonemapper. They are planning to bring a significantly more improved version of exposure fusion back to finally fix the cockpit lighting issue.

Edited March 9, 20233 yr by Biology

On 3/4/2023 at 11:55 AM, MrBitstFlyer said:

For a start the OP needs to demonstrate the method used to calibrate his monitor.  Also to be considered is the viewpoint in XP12 - just tilting a few degrees up or down will change that histogram.  I think he is being unrealistic to want everything the same brightness when the full dynamic range of reality is being simulated on a monitor.

Nope, this has nothing to do with color calibration. Indeed monitors in the wild have significantly different colors, but the issue here is about brightnesses and therefore luminance, not color. While gamma calibration could have an effect, most monitors in the wild are calibrated to a correct gamma out of the box. And if they weren't, they would look so bad that the user would be aware of the calibration issue anyway. Regardless given that the issue is there in any monitor I've tried everything from graphics-design-grade monitors to cheap monitors, it is safe to ignore this possibility.

On 3/4/2023 at 11:55 AM, MrBitstFlyer said:

Changing the lighting as he suggests will make the display look completely wrong to those of us with head/eye trackers. Seriously, how could the brightness of the panel remain the same if I move my head to fill the view with panel or outside?

No, it won't. Changing the tonemapper will simply make both the cockpit and the outside look roughly the way it looks when you're focusing on each separately. Given that you are focusing on only one at the same time when using an head/eye tracker, things will be exactly the same for you, while the cockpit exposure issue will be fixed for us.

Regardless, as I have mentioned LR is working on a solution, so it will very likely be changed. Many developers in Slack including me expressed discontent with the current implementation, so the people who want it to change are certainly not a minority.

Edited March 9, 20233 yr by Biology

15 minutes ago, Biology said:

They all look like photographs

Really? you think they look like...

not really tbh.

24 minutes ago, Biology said:

I genuinely hope this finally convinces people who think the current implementation okay.

Same question as the previous page

On 3/4/2023 at 6:38 AM, mSparks said:

Do you agree that the darkness of the cockpit and "washout" of outside should change depending upon if you are looking outside vs inside?

because tbh, this matches the experience I have almost exactly:

and I've never known a photograph change like that depending on where you look at it.

15 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Really? you think they look like...

not really tbh.

Did you really use a badly taken photograph to "show" that the screenshots I sent do not look like photographs? You know that not all photographs look like that, right?

15 minutes ago, mSparks said:

because tbh, this matches the experience I have almost exactly:

As I've mentioned in my post, the issue is so much worse in large and dark-colored cockpits due to the X-Plane 12's tonemapper having a toe which crushes blacks. A Cessna 172 certainly does not classify as a large and dark-colored cockpit.

15 minutes ago, mSparks said:

and I've never known a photograph change like that depending on where you look at it.

I think you misunderstood my point about local tonemapping. The point of local tonemapping is that all pixels will be processed differently to give a consistent look in all lighting conditions. For human experience this means our brains process the signals coming from the neurons of the eyes differently so that everything will look consistent in all lighting conditions, so that things won't change depending on where you look at it, not the other way around.

Edited March 9, 20233 yr by Biology

14 minutes ago, Biology said:

dark-colored cockpits due

to the artist basing the texture on the old to bright lighting, not the fault of the current photmetrically correct lighting.

The default Airbus has this problem last time I tried it.

14 minutes ago, Biology said:

The point of local tonemapping is that all pixels will be processed differently to give a consistent look in all lighting conditions.

that is how a camera works.

I repeat:

29 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Do you agree that the darkness of the cockpit and "washout" of outside should change depending upon if you are looking outside vs inside?

Because that's how my eyes work....

Edited March 9, 20233 yr by mSparks

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

to the artist basing the texture on the old to bright lighting, not the fault of the current photmetrically correct lighting.

Nope, it is a universal issue with aircraft with large dark-colored cockpits. If you check the textures of the aircraft I used, you will see that they are not artificially darkened or processed in any other way which could cause this issue. Regardless, as you can see from the screenshots I posted, even LR's own default A330 designed for X-Plane 12 has this issue. I assume at least they know how to texture for their own rendering engine.

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

that is how a camera works.

No, it's not. I'm not talking about a phone camera which applies a ton of post-processing, I'm talking about a photography camera which captures RAW photographs or cameras that use film, which is in fact what many global tonemappers are based off of. This is also why they are called filmic tonemappers. Regardless, as its name suggests, post-processing is applied to the unprocessed photograph captured from the camera, so they don't have anything to do with how a camera works. If anything, one of the reasons for applying post-processing is to make photographs represent human experience better. The article I mentioned in my first post (the one from Bart Wronski, who works as the principal research scientist for NVIDIA) goes into a lot of detail, including methods like dodging and burning.

To answer your question, yes, but only to a very small degree thanks to our brains doing local processing to make our visual experience as consistent in all conditions, so nothing like X-Plane 12's current implementation. If my brightness perception changed like it does in X-Plane 12 when I looked away from the pedestal to the outside I would think I'm about to pass out. So again, X-Plane 12 acts like a camera and does not represent human experience. Human eye adaptation is never drastic like that, so that you don't even consciously notice the change in brightness. It is also almost instantaneous (except the dark night adaptation which is very slow) while you can feel a significant delay in X-Plane 12.

Sure, it's never possible to exactly represent human experience and there will always be some compromise, but it's clear that there is a much better compromise than what's there in X-Plane 12. Thankfully LR agrees with that too and therefore they are working on a solution, despite the people who still don't accept that this is an issue.

Edited March 9, 20233 yr by Biology

7 minutes ago, Biology said:

Nope, it is a universal issue with aircraft with large dark-colored cockpits.

This is not to dark tho, its pretty much perfect.

15 minutes ago, Biology said:

I'm talking about a photography camera which captures RAW photographs or uses film,

Cameras flatten the image in the way you describe, making it look like

that's completely false lighting, the real world looks nothing like that. lots of last gen simulators do....

17 minutes ago, Biology said:

If anything, one of the reasons for applying post-processing is to make photographs represent the human experience better.

they are trying to recreate the effect the iris/pupil has on the light getting into the eye.

what you suggest would make the lighting more like a photograph (second picture) and less like what you see sat in an actual cockpit (first picture).

It seems to me, what you want is simultaneously your pupil open this much

and this much

eyes cannot do that, pupils have 1 diameter, and it changes depending on what you are looking at.

Which I guess is why you keep avoiding the fundamental question

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

Do you agree that the darkness of the cockpit and "washout" of outside should change depending upon if you are looking outside vs inside?