Awful Night-time Graphics

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nullack
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Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by nullack »

Hey fellas

Now that Im teaching myself IFR flights, Im doing more night time flights. I notice how awful many of the A2A C182 graphics are at night on P3D 2.5+hotfix. Im not sure if this is aircraft specific or not at this early stage. Specifically, things like:

1. The maintenance hangar. Start cold and dark at night, goto the hangar, you'll see really poor shading and 1980s era style artifact blocks for shaded areas
2. Shift 2 in flight - the shading around the cowling flaps for example is low res and poor
3. Turn up the glare shield, wow, what a mess, especially on the door trim on the left hand side for the shading effect of the light hitting the left hand side door trim

Also while Im doing night time stuff, how do I turn down the brightness of the default GPS? Its silly bright and overpowers everything else in the cabin at night

Thanks
A2A Accusim Piper Cherokee 180, Piper Comanche 250, Cessna 172, Cessna 182, Civilian P-51 Mustang, Military P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, T-6 Texan

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taildraggin68
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by taildraggin68 »

Generally, for night flying, I tend to only have the minimum lighting needed. No glareshield, panel lights as low as I can get them and still see them, radio panel lights dim. Play with your settings in P3D though, such as HDR etc. Shift 2 panel should be your checklist pop up, so I'm not sure why you are looking at your cowling and the maintenance Hanger is much better viewed at night by turning the airplanes battery on first.(It turns on the lights in the hanger and other menus as well)

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Bruce Hamilton
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by Bruce Hamilton »

Why are you in the hangar at night, anyway? Your mechanic went home at 5:00 PM, nobody there to fix anything. :lol: :mrgreen:

MarcE
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by MarcE »

lool Bruce :mrgreen:

nullack
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by nullack »

Look how bad these screenshots are, this isnt A2A, this is craptastic 1980s stuff

I resized these images to 800 res, I can provide to A2A staff the full res pics

Image

Image

Image
A2A Accusim Piper Cherokee 180, Piper Comanche 250, Cessna 172, Cessna 182, Civilian P-51 Mustang, Military P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, T-6 Texan

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taildraggin68
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by taildraggin68 »

These textures you see are across the board as far as A2A maintenance hangers go (notice though the addition of the battery switch engaged gives the hanger lights). The 182 and 172 are comparable on the lighting textures although the 182 has the extra sheet for the side panels.

hanger 182 lights off
Image

hanger 182 lights on
Image

182 panel (stock lights)
Image

Hanger 172 lights off
Image

Hanger 172 lights on
Image

172 panel (modified lighting but notice no lights on the side panels...was added for the 182)
Image

These are in FSX-SE but there is a difference in P3D as at night I use the HDR lighting.

nullack
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by nullack »

Lewis and Scott I hope you can plainly see how awful it looks for example when the glare shield light is turned up at night time, look at taildraggin68's pic of the interior showing that, the shading on the door trim both left and right is just plain awful

I do not know if this is an A2A specific issue or is a P3D issue, I mainly fly A2A because of accusim and the overall quality, as well as PMDG.

It would be great to fix this. Right now Im not enabling glare shield lighting or the like, cos its its just too horrific to look at without having a time wrap back to 1980s DOS based apps
A2A Accusim Piper Cherokee 180, Piper Comanche 250, Cessna 172, Cessna 182, Civilian P-51 Mustang, Military P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, T-6 Texan

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Lewis - A2A
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by Lewis - A2A »

Hello,

whats you P3D settings, are you running in 16bit?, are you running lots of tweaks to nvid inspector? and lastly is your dimmer nearly turned all the way down?

thanks,
Lewis
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nullack
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by nullack »

Lewis thankyou for your response

Im running ofcourse a windows standard 32 bit colour space

Im not doing anything in P3D that is strange, simply the usual settings simmers apply, if you like I could detail each config screen in P3D and post them here, but Im quite sure you can replicate the problem without that

I would not tweak nvidia driver settings and then try and blame A2A, I know your time is valuable and I can attest mate to not doing any non driver default settings in the nvidia config. I entirely control the P3D graphics though the P3D menus and not the nvidia control panel or third party stuff like nv inspector. I have from time to time enabled forced SLI, but this issue appears regardless of forced SLI or not

I have configured my monitor black levels, brightness and contrast to ISTF certified standards and there is zero problem there

Im more than happy to help with testing and so on, Ive got decades of experience on the windows platform and I am privvy to allot of the gpu industry with my work
A2A Accusim Piper Cherokee 180, Piper Comanche 250, Cessna 172, Cessna 182, Civilian P-51 Mustang, Military P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, T-6 Texan

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Lewis - A2A
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by Lewis - A2A »

How's your dimmer settings? It looks like you are running quite low and with limitations in the sim with how the lights work it'd be the result you are posting when the lights are set to be v dim. We have done our best to avoid banding but there will still be some ESP at lower light levels and ESP in P3D where the new graphical enhancements of the platform tend to play against potential banding issues, HDR a etc.

Thanks,
Lewis


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Nick - A2A
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by Nick - A2A »

Hey nullack,

Just though I'd chime in here. I think using adjectives like "awful" or "horrific" to describe the night lighting is a bit OTT. The night lighting effects in the C182 are far more sophisticated than any other GA sim I've used, and more so than airliner sims as a general rule. For example the dimmable rheostats for the radio stack and so on allow the light levels in the cockpit to be fine-tuned in a very convincing way.

Only a handful of aircraft that I know of in FSX/P3D model dimmable flood lighting (I don't know of any other GA sim which does). I'm not an expert, but the somewhat 'posterized' effect you're describing is presumably a result of a colour quantization technique to allow acceptable performance in the sim at the different dimmer settings. Remember, this is a rather ancient graphics engine which A2A are having to work with, not the Dunia Engine! :)

Although I agree that the colour banding on the door panels when using the glareshield lighting is a little off-putting, there are plenty of other lighting options such as the 'dim' flood light setting. As a general rule I would say the night-time graphics are rather splendid - not awful. Not really sure why you'd worry too much about the lighting effects in the darkened hangar either?

All the best,
Nick

P.S. Please don't take this for a 'fanboy' type response: I'm not afraid to be picky now and again either! :wink:
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Tim-HH
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by Tim-HH »

I fully agree with Nick!

You don't have to forget that FSX was never built for these kind of techniques. Remember, FSX is almost 9 years old! You can't compare it with one of the new and fancy computer games. The FSX light system is very simple and has not much to offer. Thanks to some very talented artists we now have "real" landing lights as well as dimmable cockpit lights. Sure there are some shortcomings but at the end it's still a huge step compared with what we had when FSX was released.

A2A has done an amazing job with the cockpit lighting. In fact, you won't find anything better.

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Tim
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AKar
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by AKar »

I wonder if FSL Spotlights and similar technologies will help developers such as A2A to further enhance night lightning in the future. Overall, I like the moody and realistic night lightning we've got here.

Image

-Esa

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TymK
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by TymK »

I thought I'd add two more points here, as I've also had some comments regarding the VC lighting at night in P3D2...

First, HDR in P3D2 makes a mess of texture-based lighting in pretty much every aircraft, and the issue is more pronounced in the A2A C172/C182 mainly due to the adjustable brightness. The only way to work around that would be to use effect-based lighting (see how the dome light causes no real issues), but the amount of resources it would take makes it unrealistic.

Second, the one area in which I would love to see some improvements is the glareshield lighting. I hope A2A consider adding a higher-resolution version of the lightmap texture, as the existing one causes a very pronounced "raster" effect.

Generally, it's much easier to work around these limitations with non-adjustable lighting, but I very much appreciate the approach A2A has taken. I've simply experimented a bit and found a rheostat position at which the lighting looks fine even with HDR...

Tym

PS. One more thing... Since you're working on some additional avionics configurations, is there any chance the backlight on the Davtron clock could find its way into the C172, pretty please? :wink:

nullack
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Re: Awful Night-time Graphics

Post by nullack »

Lewis - A2A wrote:It looks like you are running quite low and with limitations in the sim with how the lights work it'd be the result you are posting when the lights are set to be v dim. We have done our best to avoid banding but there will still be some ESP at lower light levels and ESP in P3D where the new graphical enhancements of the platform tend to play against potential banding issues, HDR a etc.

Thanks,
Lewis


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Thanks again Lewis and I see from your response its a render engine issue, which I will now take to Lockheed Martin with P3D.

What should happen in modern rendering engines is that the entire lighting and shading should be done via universal pixel shaders in real time, not ancient techniques with hard coded shadow maps that look awful, and worse, at a lower colour depth than the main textures like what Taildraggin PM'ed me about. While there is recent technology like per pixel lighting using deferred rendering techniques, doing real time lighting and shading via pixel shaders goes all the way back to 2003 when those sorts of techniques became common place. This 8 bit hard coded shadow map is 1980s techniques that I'll take up with LM.
A2A Accusim Piper Cherokee 180, Piper Comanche 250, Cessna 172, Cessna 182, Civilian P-51 Mustang, Military P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, T-6 Texan

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