Night lights with TerraScene

[Guest]

I noticed an option in the advanced rendering options:NightLights cutOffPercent=20.What I would like to get as a result is all towns, big and small lit up at night.Does the above setting allow me to fix this?Thanks for all your input.

[Guest]

Well, it has been awhile but roughly what the cutOffPercent does is allow you to tell Fly! or TS not to render the darker night tiles to help keep the size of your scenery a little smaller, i.e., there is no point in rendering a night tile for a tile that is completely dark or nearly so. If you want to make sure that small towns or roadways light up in an otherwise dark tile then you need to set the percentage fairly low, say 5%. If you're more concerned about the size of your scenery and really only care about the largest cities showing up at night you can set the cutOffPercent much higher. Keeping more tiles completely dark probably helps with frame rates too, which may be a more important aspect than the overall size of the pod. The cutOffPercent tells TS or Fly not to render any tile for which less than 20% of the tile would have nightlights, which is why your smaller towns in rural areas are experiencing extended power failures.Don

[Guest]

Thanks Don for clearing that up...I will experiment with different values and see what is acceptable.

[Guest Dean]

I use 2% percent as a cutoff. I don't remember why I ended up at that number but the problem I noticed with higher cutoff percentages was the highways would have gaps in the night lighting when they passed through a sparsely populated tile.