I only see benefits so where can we vote?😁

If this can work with MSFS then that will be very welcome.

In the meantime I use MV Freestyle filters and that can be used to change sky colors also a little.

7 hours ago, Biology said:

Using the coefficients from my approach:

So neat! Thank you very much for progressing our hobby further toward simulating reality! 

BTW how did you get the screenshots in MSFS using your algorithm? I looked at the GITHUB files but it appears to be a python script file, Can we run this alongside MSFS to test it or?

Edited August 31, 20232 yr by KERNEL32

43 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

So neat! Thank you very much for progressing our hobby further toward simulating reality! 

BTW how did you get the screenshots in MSFS using your algorithm? I looked at the GITHUB files but it appears to be a python script file, Can we run this alongside MSFS to test it or?

question of the month, would like to know also if you would like to share?

40 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

BTW how did you get the screenshots in MSFS using your algorithm?

Just guessing, but I assume @Biology found the shader file that computes the atmospheric effects and replaced the coefficients in it.

41 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

I looked at the GITHUB files but it appears to be a python script file, Can we run this alongside MSFS to test it or?

No, that won't work. That Python program only computes the correct coefficients -- just a set of numbers. It doesn't do anything to make MSFS actually use these coefficients.

@Biology This is an awesome discovery! The nice thing is that you don't need to increase spectral resolution (which would be a lot harder) -- you can just change the coefficients because IIUC, the computation of the atmospheric effects and conversion to sRGB are essentially commutative. IOW, instead of computing the atmospheric effect in high spectral resolution, then converting to sRGB, you can apply the sRGB response curves to the scattering and absorption coefficients, then compute the atmospheric effect in sRGB, and get similar or identical results -- correct?

@jcomm has already suggested contacting MSFS's developer support. Another option might be to contact the Working Title folks, who are usually quite approachable, and ask them for an appropriate contact at Asobo. @MattNischan is quite active here -- maybe just PM him?

It sounds as if X-Plane is also using the wrong coefficients from the paper? IOW, I assume your corrected X-Plane screenshot was also made by hacking your coefficients into X-Plane's shader? Or has X-Plane already corrected the coefficients? If not, are you planning to approach Laminar Research about this as well? I expect they would be pretty open to this, particularly as it's such a simple change to implement. I'm guessing Ben Supnik would be a good point of contact -- I believe he's responsible for a lot of the PBR work in X-Plane.

6 hours ago, SAS443 said:

Fantastic news.

XP12 is in my opinion, truly the benchmark at the moment when it comes to realistic sky colors. Happy to hear the same mathematics are finding it's way to MSFS, thanks to you.

🙂

I agree...and I know both you and I have a lot of experience in both sims and this isn't some crazy attack on MSFS.  It's just a strength of XP and not of MSFS at the moment.

Thank you so much OP - impressive work and knowledge of how light works.  (You basically spoke Greek to me lol).

6 hours ago, SAS443 said:

Fantastic news.

XP12 is in my opinion, truly the benchmark at the moment when it comes to realistic sky colors. Happy to hear the same mathematics are finding it's way to MSFS, thanks to you.

🙂

Now if only they could get their  scenery to look like something. 

30 minutes ago, martinboehme said:

It sounds as if X-Plane is also using the wrong coefficients from the paper? IOW, I assume your corrected X-Plane screenshot was also made by hacking your coefficients into X-Plane's shader? Or has X-Plane already corrected the coefficients? If not, are you planning to approach Laminar Research about this as well? I expect they would be pretty open to this, particularly as it's such a simple change to implement. I'm guessing Ben Supnik would be a good point of contact -- I believe he's responsible for a lot of the PBR work in X-Plane.

I believe it was updated in one of the recent beta updates of X-Plane 12.

9 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

Now if only they could get their  scenery to look like something. 

You can actually get it to look like msfs or better (higher resolution) either streaming with Auto Ortho or downloaded Ortho to your local drive.

Either way I'm so excited that this guy decided to help out.  I hope he's able to get in touch with Asobo.

Hi,

Firstly thank you everyone for your supportive comments! I love MSFS and really hope that this can be adopted by them as well, as it would make sunsets / sunrises so much better. I registered in MSFS forums but I still haven't received a confirmation email so I can't use my account, I sent another confirmation email which also didn't arrive, so I don't know what to do. Until now, I can anaswer your questions.

Edit: I finally got in but seems like I have to wait for a while to become an "approved" user to be able to post, so I'm currently waiting for that.

Edited August 31, 20232 yr by Biology

5 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Do you need to have a current atmospheric ozone value to complete the colour calculations?

AFAIK live weather in MSFS doesn’t model ozone dynamically (?)

Hi, no, the good thing about the scattering and absorption coefficients is that they only depend on the composition of the medium and nothing else, so even if MSFS doesn't model ozone density it shouldn't be an issue as an average / standard value can be used. For instance X-Plane 12 doesn't model ozone density either.

2 hours ago, GSalden said:

If this can work with MSFS then that will be very welcome.

It can run on any simulator that uses physically based atmosphere calculations, which is the case for MSFS. Only the parameters that are entered to the atmosphere model needs to be changed, and I made sure that the coefficients generated by the Python script are compatible with both Bruneton's paper (which is what MSFS uses) and Hillaire's paper (which is what X-Plane 12 uses), so it should be fairly easy to implement.

2 hours ago, KERNEL32 said:

So neat! Thank you very much for progressing our hobby further toward simulating reality! 

BTW how did you get the screenshots in MSFS using your algorithm? I looked at the GITHUB files but it appears to be a python script file, Can we run this alongside MSFS to test it or?

Hi, I actually didn't get any screenshots in MSFS as I can't change the coefficients, they are hidden behind the game engine. Instead I used a ShaderToy implementation of Hillaire's paper for the comparison screenshots. Currently there is nothing an user can do to get this work in MSFS as these coefficients are typically never exposed to an user.

Edited August 31, 20232 yr by Biology

1 hour ago, martinboehme said:

Just guessing, but I assume @Biology found the shader file that computes the atmospheric effects and replaced the coefficients in it.

Luckily X-Plane 12 had it exposed for debugging reasons, in the form of art controls, which is how I made the change.

1 hour ago, martinboehme said:

@Biology This is an awesome discovery! The nice thing is that you don't need to increase spectral resolution (which would be a lot harder) -- you can just change the coefficients because IIUC, the computation of the atmospheric effects and conversion to sRGB are essentially commutative. IOW, instead of computing the atmospheric effect in high spectral resolution, then converting to sRGB, you can apply the sRGB response curves to the scattering and absorption coefficients, then compute the atmospheric effect in sRGB, and get similar or identical results -- correct?

Yes that's pretty much what this approach does, instead of increasing the spectral resolution, it calculates the best possible approximation for a given amount of spectral samples. Sadly it's not identical to rendering spectrally, because as the light gets attenuated some colors will shift outside the sRGB gamut, but it's still a pretty close approximation.

1 hour ago, martinboehme said:

It sounds as if X-Plane is also using the wrong coefficients from the paper? IOW, I assume your corrected X-Plane screenshot was also made by hacking your coefficients into X-Plane's shader? Or has X-Plane already corrected the coefficients? If not, are you planning to approach Laminar Research about this as well? I expect they would be pretty open to this, particularly as it's such a simple change to implement. I'm guessing Ben Supnik would be a good point of contact -- I believe he's responsible for a lot of the PBR work in X-Plane.

Indeed X-Plane 12 was also using the wrong coefficients from Hillaire's paper until very recently, but I contacted them about this approach, which very recently got integrated into the simulator.

Edited August 31, 20232 yr by Biology

5 hours ago, jcomm said:

Superb! @Biology

would be great to bring to MFS what you've done for xp11/!2...

The suggestion to open a thread at Flightsimulator Support Forum is the way to go for a start, but you will probably get faster to their Dev Team by opening a thread here instead:

MSFS DevSupport - SDK Q&A platform for 3rd party developers (flightsimulator.com)

 

Thank you. I actually thought of using the DevSupport channel but it's for developers asking questions about the MSFS SDK, meanwhile mine is a feature request for the base simulator, so I wasn't sure if it was suitable.

Edited August 31, 20232 yr by Biology