More X-Plane Eye Candy!

[GoranM 3,772]

31 minutes ago, Greazer said:

Cockpits are too dark. This has always been an issue, even though every new X Plane has a new lighting model! There are forum posts everywhere on this issue.  Numerous YouTube videos on lighting hacks.  But there is no official fix by LR Devs. Honestly the time for this is getting pretty crazy by now, and considering the other Sim is on the 15th Sim update and those include hundreds of updates / fixes.

Have you even read the last 3 pages?

[Mike_CFII_MEL 789]

18 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

Oh goood!!!

And how embarrassing that it has taken them so long and they still seem to need hundreds more in so many areas, with orders of magnitude more devs on payroll :)

 

Are you sure?? I personally don't think so. I personally don't mind it at all in VR.

Get in line, I've been waiting for networking fixes long before you had any dark cockpit issues. I wouldn't be surprised if they do in fact need hundreds more!

[mjrhealth 820]

2 hours ago, Biology said:

I would like to add that LR has not found it solely by themselves but by listening to the feedback from their users. In other words, user feedback has always been listened to and taken seriously. LR has been aware of the issue since the beginning and never denied its existence, I don't know where some people heard the "cockpits are still not dark enough" comment but it certainly is not from LR.

Fact is one developer a RW pilot went with a Laminar employee with a light meter and measured. They needed to know what was real, they have that info. They do know what they are doing. The fact that even real pilots cant agree on them being to dark, says a lot about peoples opinions, and anyone who has never sat in cockpit and flown under all visual conditions, really has no idea of reality. As pointed out by you, Its all going to be a fudge, for people who demand realism, they will get a fudge to keep them happy. Limited by hardware and drivers,

Than we will see a full set of new complaints.

The only time ive ever had an issue is when transitioning through the evening. otherwise all its good for me, and my site isnt the best.

Edited February 19 by mjrhealth

[Greazer 1,326]

 

This is approximately how X Plane 12 should look out of the box in bright / sunny conditions.

Notice the difference is the cockpit brightness?

It's a big difference right there!

 

 

[jcomm 5,939]

1 hour ago, Greazer said:

 

This is approximately how X Plane 12 should look out of the box in bright / sunny conditions.

Notice the difference is the cockpit brightness?

It's a big difference right there!

 

 

I find it way brighter than reality on that video.

[Biology 1,347]

13 hours ago, brinx said:

You were one of the users pointing out the issue and providing some technical insights into what you thought was happening.

When many of us pointed out the issue, we were somewhat ridiculed as is usually the case with anything perceived as negative in this forum. I even had to post a video with Austin admitting the lighting was an issue as proof it was something Laminar was aware of.

In any case, good that there are plans to address now.

I mean if you remember the thread, you probably also remember that I wasn't just giving technical insights but also pretty much arguing with a lot of people who didn't believe this was an issue, so it's not like I haven't dealt with the same thing.

Either case we are not responsible from what people in forums or other places say, from LR's side the dark cockpits issue has always been acknowledged & worked on and hopefully will be fixed by 12.3.0 as per the timeline.

Regardless I hope it is reassuring that one of the people who vehemently argued about existence of this issue the most is now personally working on the issue, especially given that my opinions on the issue hasn't changed much.

Edited February 19 by Biology

[Biology 1,347]

13 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Fact is one developer a RW pilot went with a Laminar employee with a light meter and measured. They needed to know what was real, they have that info. They do know what they are doing. The fact that even real pilots cant agree on them being to dark, says a lot about peoples opinions, and anyone who has never sat in cockpit and flown under all visual conditions, really has no idea of reality. As pointed out by you, Its all going to be a fudge, for people who demand realism, they will get a fudge to keep them happy. Limited by hardware and drivers,

Than we will see a full set of new complaints.

The only time ive ever had an issue is when transitioning through the evening. otherwise all its good for me, and my site isnt the best.

Hi,

Just to prevent a misunderstanding, this will not be just a "fudge" to make a group happy at the expense of the other. Quite frankly I don't think the drastic difference in opinions is detrimental to us being able to come up with a quantitative approach of solving the issue in a way which will make the majority happy (in other words, perceptually accurate) while being physically accurate at the same time.

Yes whatever we like something or not is subjective, but at the same time color science is a real science and it allows us to quantify human perception. We have standard observers, color appearance models and much more which helps us to model human perception accurately. And the variance between people when such differences are properly quantified is much lower than one would think given the drastic difference in opinions, but it's not all that surprising after all given that we all share the same DNA and hence the same general brain and eye structure. Because of that I genuinely believe that there is a "no compromise" solution which most people will like, and I believe we will get to that solution by using color science.

In short, it's not an either physical accuracy or perceptual accuracy situation - the goal is to take perceptual facets into account without sacrificing physical accuracy. To give a loose photography analogy, physical accuracy is like getting the scene illumination etc. right, while perceptual accuracy is like using a good film & camera and mastering photography techniques such as dodging and burning. People have been able to get perceptually accurate results using basic film cameras for decades, despite the fact that print media has a much lower dynamic range than an average monitor. So it certainly is possible with a monitor, whether it's straightforward or not.

From the analogy you can see that both physical and perceptual accuracy must be achieved to get realistic results, and this is exactly what we are aiming to achieve. As I explained in my previous post currently we need improvements on both fronts, but especially on the perceptual accuracy front, and rest assured that they're all being worked on.

Edited February 19 by Biology

[Murmur 3,944]

@Biology it's so great that LR has an asset like you on board. I look forward to your contributions even to XP13 and beyond. 😁

[mSparks 2,086]

3 hours ago, Biology said:

color science is a real science and it allows us to quantify human perception. We have standard observers, color appearance models and much more which helps us to model human perception accurately.

And when that science comes back with the cockpits already being to bright.....

Please do not darken them more....

[Bjoern 1,157]

@Biology Are proper polarization filters (= sunglasses) on the list for XP12.1.0? The default ones do not do jack, the rendering engine's clipping thresholds do not permit modeled ones (tried and failed) and XPLMDrawTranslucentDarkBox is a rather poor workaround.

 

On 2/18/2024 at 6:37 PM, UrgentSiesta said:

He's talking about internal lighting, which was and sometime is plain to see.

I can remember early WIP shots of v11 aircraft brought into v12 and they looked horrendous - even on the outside.

Not my experience.

 

On 2/18/2024 at 6:37 PM, UrgentSiesta said:

It's weird - were you not around in the early days of v12?

VERY few aircraft were ready on Day 1, many are still not available, some required upgrade fees, and my favorite helicopter required a full-price re-purchase.

Been there since day 3 of the public beta or so.

Valid commplaints, but none related to "lighting recalibrations". I can't think of a single add-on that got updated or had an upgrade because of that. They all either got breakage fixes (hello, SASL), feature updates (hello, XP12 rain) or general tuneups under long term support plans (hello, VSKYLABS).

[Mike_CFII_MEL 789]

More eye candy from X-Plane 12 getting a bit of help from Reshade, now my night lighting is getting better.
 

 

[UrgentSiesta 932]

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

Not my experience.

 

Been there since day 3 of the public beta or so.

Valid commplaints, but none related to "lighting recalibrations". I can't think of a single add-on that got updated or had an upgrade because of that. They all either got breakage fixes (hello, SASL), feature updates (hello, XP12 rain) or general tuneups under long term support plans (hello, VSKYLABS).

Do you REALLY think LR more or less completely re-wrote the lighting engine and that there were/will be no changes to...uh...lighting necessary?

I mean much the same thing is being widely reported for P3D v6 and its new lighting...

I stand to be corrected, but:

• From what I've been able to glean, all the lights including instrument lights, had to be replaced when modding v11 addons to v12.
• Aspects of the external models needed to be adjusted to bring them to looking correct "IRL"/as-intended.
• And there's even an (unofficial) statement out there from not too long ago about developers possibly needing to make further modeling changes to compensate for whatever the end result from LR might need to be (tho LR are advising to hold-what-you-got until they know what the final fix will be).
• Heck, even mSparks came up with a mod to his 744 to help with the issue for his mod.

 

[mjrhealth 820]

And when its done, no matter what they do, there will be a new round of complaints, people cant help themselves.

[mSparks 2,086]

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

and that there were/will be no changes to...uh...lighting necessary?

there definitely is, e.g.

night lighting is still 💩

^That cockpit, and world is much too black imho, should be various shades of grey. especially since its a fully moonlit night.

[efis007 885]

23 hours ago, Biology said:

The goal is tuning autoexposure, tonemapping etc. to resemble human vision as much as possible.

In the meantime, I thank you for the time you dedicate to our questions and I hope you do a good job with LR. 👏

I want to ask you a question.
You mentioned “autoexposure.”

In all the experiments I have conducted so far the "eyes autoexposure function" has always damage my graphics (the sky became white and overexposed, and the panels even darker and underexposed).
We both know that XP12 has big problems with tonemapper, lighting, shadows too black, etc... we discussed this at length in another topic.
But in addition to these problems I had highlighted ((showing curves and histogram graphs) how the "eyes autoexposure function" contributed to further damaging the graphics by burning the overall exposure of the image.

For example that horrible blinding white sky is only generated due to the "eyes autoexposure function" ! 
By removing that function the sky becomes blue, just as I see it every day in reality. 👍
And so I did: with the ART controls, I removed that function, and had a clear graphic improvement.
Finally the skies are no longer white, the sunsets are no longer pale, and the cockpits are less dark when I keep a frontal half panel/sky shot.
Fantastic. 
After seeing how much the graphics improve without the "eyes autoexposure function" I am perplexed to turn that function back to "ON".

So I was wondering, and I'm asking you only out of my own curiosity:
- In the next XP12 versions is it absolutely necessary to implement the "burnt graphics function" again ?
And if YES, why? 🤔

Edited February 20 by efis007