2 hours ago, Litjan said:

So a sun of the correct diameter will appear "too dim", even if all pixels within it´s diameter are at maximum brightness.

True, but it's a different issue. Indeed, X-Plane already (correctly) uses a large "bloom" effect around the sun to make it appear brighter, as we perceive it in real life. This is not affected by changing the above datarefs.

In sim, the actual diameter of the sun can only be seen around sunrise/sunset, when it's a lot less bright.

2 hours ago, Litjan said:

That is why it feels better to have it "too big", physically.

Yes that's exactly the reason why they intentionally made them smaller when I reported it as a bug some time ago.

But then they made some changes, so I don't know if it's still intentional or if it's now a bug.

2 hours ago, Falconjet112 said:

Don't think that would work for me as I use a realistic field of view. I have to pan around the cockpit. Artificially enlarging the sun and moon would be most annoying. 

Yes, probably with a realistic FOV you would get better results with my tweaked real values than the default.

Another use case would be VR. In theory the enlarged default diameters would be more noticeable in VR since it should have a 1:1 FOV ratio compared to real life.

EDIT: anyway, let's discuss beta 5 here, if anyone is interested in this issue let's make a new thread.

Edited May 10, 20251 yr by Murmur

20 minutes ago, Murmur said:

I measured the diameter as the ratio of horizontal screen space occupied, times the FOV setting.

I reported this bug some time ago, when the diameters of sun and moon in X-Plane were actually even bigger than now (and different from each other). At the time they said that it was intentional because if real values were used, users would find them too small.

But afterwards they changed the diameters, and now the default datarefs use the correct values (but the actual shown diameter is still too high).

So I don't know if currently this is still intentional, or if it's a bug in the code.

Ah I see. Thanks for the explanations.

On 5/9/2025 at 2:26 PM, Franz007 said:

Yes I agree, there is a problem with clouds and flickering.

Not sure if this is coincidence / related or not, but I cleaned out my Nvidia cache folder and restarted the sim and no flickering now.

On 5/9/2025 at 7:27 AM, strider1 said:

Clouds are flickering in VR, completely unusable. Can anyone else confirm?

I can confirm this. Reverb G2

On 5/9/2025 at 7:27 AM, strider1 said:

Clouds are flickering in VR, completely unusable. Can anyone else confirm?

I can confirm this. Reverb G2

 

Sorry, double post

Edited May 11, 20251 yr by monica6211
double post

Noted comments above - visually way too bright for me - curiously over bright to my eye. Cloud definition is poor also. Noted drop in FPS probably of the order of 30% back down to 30-40 FPS. The sun bloom or diffusion is overdone.

I also swapped over my system to a different (Larger) HD Monitor so asking a bit more graphically with a high refresh rate on a bigger screen. So the brightness and cloud does overwhelm. Also makes poor textures really stand out on a big monitor. Interesting anyway.

It all works if I use the sunglass feature or shader. Night is ok.

 

One day every one will be happy... That was a joke...😁

52 minutes ago, mjrhealth said:

One day every one will be happy... That was a joke...😁

😂

4 hours ago, KERNEL32 said:

Not sure if this is coincidence / related or not, but I cleaned out my Nvidia cache folder and restarted the sim and no flickering now.

I clean it every time after having started my PC 🙂 But you are not wrong; I think it‘s now more of a shimmering as a flickering, not sure how to describe it. The „disturbing“ factors for me are that the whole sky and clouds seem to constantly adapt a bit, for example when looking to the right, distant-clouds shine like black dots and then disappear etc. Again, not sure how to describe.
 

@coastaldriver I also noticed the very bright lighting, in particular the when looking into the sun. At the same time I am not sure if in real that is not the same, since we would not even be able to look into a full sun for more that 0.5sec. I think this point is more about doing a compromise about what is „realistic“ and what most users imagine to see when looking into a PC-monitor in a simulation…

Franz - i would agree re compromise.

This is what I mean by the light and the sun effect as it stands. Sure. Now I have had the good fortune to change monitors from a 1900 to a 2500 or 34" HD, coincided with the Beta 5. Took me awhile to determine that this was the XP12.2.5 change not me mucking up the monitor etc (Did discover a weird WIN bug on the way - another story altogether). The other thing is that I have many decades of RW flight experience - including flights on a track into the sun from dawn all day! This Beta makes it seem like your in the spotlight (Not conical but blinding depending on the angle), moving the eye view outside you can get out of the glare yes but it is still overly bright by a factor of many lumens. In the cockpit varies with the model in terms of texture colour and density - outside is still difficult or overly bright. The sunglasses do knock this off but not the overall brightness level. 

The other thing I checked was light and latitude! So midday setup and locations from equatorial to high northern latitudes. In the real world the light intensity decreases with latitude due to the angular relationship with the sun so it gets a bit weaker and not so bright at high latitudes and bright at equatorial or mid latitudes. I do not see this effect in the sim. Just as bright in Iceland as it was in Central Australia. 

The light problem is also affecting the way the clouds are displaying. I see from other posts angular issues with view change in rotation in VR as well - not unexpected from my perspective. 

Note I am one of those users who also spends an inordinate amount of time balancing and making sure my monitor is doing what it should do and is balanced and displaying colour and images correctly. So ever seen a photograph of the world that looks like the sim does into sun? Nope. 

I admire your level of attention to details in image colours , objects...

Well, the Moon phases I do check for consistency, but... other details you take seriously into consideration I must say I envy you for simply being able to glimpse it 🤣

I am so amazed by the new colours, lighting, cloudshapes that I just wait for the day I get a decent AI Traffic with coordinated ATC to pump in 😁

I don't mind being controller  (ATC... I mean... the rest my wife takes care of it 🤣), but heck! the others should be controlled too!!! and unfortunately using XP's own AI Traffic is just too heavy...

Edited May 11, 20251 yr by jcomm

3 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

This is what I mean by the light and the sun effect as it stands. Sure. Now I have had the good fortune to change monitors from a 1900 to a 2500 or 34" HD, coincided with the Beta 5. Took me awhile to determine that this was the XP12.2.5 change not me mucking up the monitor etc (Did discover a weird WIN bug on the way - another story altogether). The other thing is that I have many decades of RW flight experience - including flights on a track into the sun from dawn all day! This Beta makes it seem like your in the spotlight (Not conical but blinding depending on the angle), moving the eye view outside you can get out of the glare yes but it is still overly bright by a factor of many lumens. In the cockpit varies with the model in terms of texture colour and density - outside is still difficult or overly bright. The sunglasses do knock this off but not the overall brightness level. 

I see. For me one of tmy references are that in reality I cannot even look straight into the sun, yet in the sim I can although it is very bright. So it's difficult to translate that part of reality into the virtual world.

3 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

The other thing I checked was light and latitude! So midday setup and locations from equatorial to high northern latitudes. In the real world the light intensity decreases with latitude due to the angular relationship with the sun so it gets a bit weaker and not so bright at high latitudes and bright at equatorial or mid latitudes. I do not see this effect in the sim. Just as bright in Iceland as it was in Central Australia. 

I just checked that during my flight form OMDB to LTFM. Yesterday evening when the sun was very low, everything was extremely bright and also big. But during that flight (happening around noon) the sun was very well defined and not shining out in a huge halo like during twilight.

3 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

The light problem is also affecting the way the clouds are displaying. I see from other posts angular issues with view change in rotation in VR as well - not unexpected from my perspective. 

I can see that something affects the clouds changing colour very fast when moving the camera (or needing a few milliseconds to adapt when switching to a different camera-view). Even in the previous betas there wer some of these black-clouds in the distance that didn't look right and I don't know how those clouds got generated if the light-calculations (angles and intensity) are supposed to have been massively imporved. For me these black/dark layers beetween some clouds in the distance are really looking like something is wrong. At the same time the clouds look really great in 80-90% of the time 🙂

13 hours ago, KERNEL32 said:

Not sure if this is coincidence / related or not, but I cleaned out my Nvidia cache folder and restarted the sim and no flickering now.

Has this actually work for you in more than one session and has it work for others as well including in VR?

I might give this a try to see if there is any flicking in the distances and then try to clear the cache to see it actually make a difference. 

7 minutes ago, BobFS88 said:

Has this actually work for you in more than one session and has it work for others as well including in VR?

I might give this a try to see if there is any flicking in the distances and then try to clear the cache to see it actually make a difference. 

UPDATE: Yeah so I noticed after some more trial that once I went "into" or above cloud layers I started to see flickering again. Also I do not have VR I am seeing flickering in regular 2D.