creating night lights

[djnigelcage]

hey guys

i may have struck gold here with creating nightlights object to then populate scenery with scenproc and osm roads data

everything looks perfect now but i have, after weeks of believing i was done, discovered that the lights are loading way further out than sim will load terrain

i wanted them to look good from 20k feet as well as 500 feet

the issue i found when testing high altitude is that at 20k i can still see the lights very far away which is nice, but when i move far from them the whole qmid tile lods out completely and all lights pop out at the same time

which means coming into the area at cruise will cause dark sky to suddenly populate with millions of lights all at one, lookin super stupid

i found a way around it by increasing the size the invisible portion of the model but keeping the visible part small

that way it is mip6 that carries everything to the horizon, and mip5 fades out before the qmid tile pop off

so removing the mip6 allowed me to make the lights fade out slowly just before the tile disappears completely

so no popping anymore

at the cost of a good few more miles of lights

but the trade off on the distance for the fading out smoothly isnt that bad at all

so my question is, before i settle on the mipmap method, is this...

Can the qmid tile loading be forced to happen further out?
Or is that a limitation of fsx based sims?

(i tried scenery load distance and texture request distance and all the cfg for scenery but no result, is it perhaps the terrain lod that is responsible for allowing the entire tile to populate further away?)