Night not dark enough - how to fix this?

[Guest cbuchner1]

Hello everyone.Set your location to Arizona, Marble Canyon, Cliff Dweller`s Lodge. The time of day is Night on Summer (August 15th 2007). This should be a night with no moon at all.Now why is it still so bright outside? I can clearly see the landscape, the cliffs, the clouds. Is this caused by starlight only? I would expect to sit in total darkness.If anyone knows how to get a real dark night out in the desert in FSX, please enlighten us (pun intended).Christian

[Ramasurinen 0]

Christian, you can add these lines to your fsx.cfg in the {GRAPHICS} section to control ambient light:DAY_THRESHOLD=32768NIGHT_THRESHOLD=4096Those are the default values. Try setting night threshold to 2048 or 1024. I quite like 2048, looks more realistic to me. 1024 will give you near pitch black hehe.Cheers,

[Guest cbuchner1]

I am sorry to say that it does not make a big difference whether I set NIGHT_THRESHOLD to 1, 1024, 2048 or 4096. I can still see the cockpit and surrounding landscape.So far I've understood DAY and NIGHT thresholds to be values that indicate to FSX at which brightness levels to load the dusk and night (+light map) textures from disk, which are simply different versions of the ground textures.Christian

[Guest UlfB]

Christian,Full moon night, is it?Ulf B

[Guest cbuchner1]

August 28, 2007 would be full moon. I picked a date 13 days before, so it should be nearly a new moon.

[Ramasurinen 0]

1024 seems to darken the ground a lot for me, but you might have to modify the ambient light pixels in the sky textures to achieve what you're looking for. I've been meaning to try that myself actually, the ambient light on water for instance always seems far too bright on full moons to me.Good luck,

[Guest RonB49]

What type of monitor are you using? I get near total darkness on my CRT monitor but not so on my LCD. I've decided that I'll never be completely happy with the scenery display on the LCD and thus use it only for panels. My ages old 19" CRT just looks better to me. The difference is like night and day (so to speak). R-

[Guest cbuchner1]

Yes it is an LCD panel. I wonder if I could play with the gamma curve of the graphics card to make "nearly black" appear as "pitch black" on the panel.

[GaryGB 10]

Hi Christian:You might find "PowerStrip" will work wonders with any type of monitor/video card combination.If you browse to http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm and download the free "PowerStrip" utility, you will be able to take further control of any PCI/AGP/PCIexpress graphics subsystem and monitor to maximize what potential is in a system.Anyone interested in how to more fully configure PowerStrip for use with FS might also wish to browse my ongoing system optimization thread here:http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?...t&sd=a&start=15Hope this helps! :-) GaryGB

[BIGSKY 316]

Try FS2004 Night Time Fixes, fs2004nt.zip in AVSIM Library by Carmine D'Amore Disregard, This is for CF9.