MSFS20 Revisiting MSFS Lights after a few years...

[=Hollywood=]

So I was originally developing Brisbane City after MSFS came out but life got in the way and I had reasonably good results exporting Blender lights into MSFS back then.

I seem to remember there was a way to extend the visibility range of the lights , although it wasn't a great distance, it seemed to do okay.

I've finally gotten into a project I've dreamed of for years, and although I'm setting up the lights okay it seems the view distance is shortened from what I remember (maybe 500-1000m is my estimate).

Have we made any progress on understanding the lighting system in MSFS? I know some people have made some addon's re-working the MSFS light ball lights over cities, and those have a much better viewing distance which is what I need, but I need to be able to customize the light colors and make them blink, and I'm not sure if the default street light balls would be capable of that.

I was digging though the BGL files to try and see if the light ball lights were in one of the modellibraries. And while there's light_cold (or is it cool), warm and semi warm they only light the environment and don't have the light ball. Then I started wondering if those are using a similar approach to what I pioneered in conjunction with Allen Kriesman for FSX, of placing a lightpool under the street light ball to make it look like it was lighting the ground.

As I was trying to figure out my gltf blender based lights, and wondering about Asobo's approach and I noticed both green and red light ball street lights, which means that somewhere that those lights may be configurable, but if so, where?

I guess the only other alternative would be to create an animated emissive texture that can be seen for long distances based in LOD's, and then compromise by having the blender lights kick in once close, the only danger with that is the animated emissive blinking may get or be out of sync with the Macro Light. The only other thing is if Asobo hasn't told us there's more codes we can put in to affect viewing distance of lights?

                    ],
                    "intensity" : 10000,
                    "cone_angle" : 360,
                    "has_symmetry" : true,
                    "flash_frequency" : 24,
                    "flash_duration" : 0.5,
                    "flash_phase" : 0,
                    "rotation_speed" : 0,
                    "day_night_cycle" : true
                }

if only there was a "visibility distance" setting we could input.

This is one of the tests earlier tonight, first shot in the video is just 5 lights, 4 at intensity 20 and the 1st at intensity 10000, testing the range, no matter how strong the light is it gets occluded about 1km away from the light. According to real world specs they should be visible for 11km. So I'm looking to find a solution...

I'm wondering if maybe going down the new effects route might be an option...

 

[mamu]

Hi Dean,
the only way to mimic msfs orbs, outside of airports, is what you are suggesting: emissive balls and LODs

The balls should be wrapped in a simboject to hide the geometry in daylight
A simple animation with constant frame interpolation can be used to move the ball underground for the blinking part if needed, or, more elegant , use the emissive_code to change the emissive value of of the materials (used it for my Christmas lights)

Or you can use the airport light preset, and you'll have a glowing ball like the default ones, visible from a very long distance (a large lamp housing may be needed if you enlarge the ball too much). Bad news, they stay lit during daytime too, so you really need a lamp housings

Dick recently made some experiment with lights, have to search for its 3d


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View attachment 86531

 

[rhumbaflappy]

Everything I found about lights

 

[astaticmusic]

not to jack the topic, but are there any tiny/smaller lights already in the scenery library? or a way to make the light splashes smaller for inside buildings? i dont use blender well enough to make lights, so i was just wondering, thanks!

 

[=Hollywood=]

Everything I found about lights

Great thread. I just realized this afternoon after working on recreating the fx_ForestFireHuge effects in MSFS that the Blender Lights approach, while pretty up close, is great at first glance but it has its obvious drawbacks.

In FSX and even before, nav lights, beacons, strives etc were all .fx based. Well duh, why don’t I create my objects at attach the new MSFS VFX light effects to them? You can define the range of how far they can be seen very easily.

Once I’m done messing with the ForestFireHuge effect I’ll experiment with re-doing my flashing lights in the visual effects editor. They may only reflect on water at a distance but that’s okay, but it may work well if I dial back the blender light effect to be more subtle when it kicks on.

I’ll have a deeper dive into things tomorrow.

 

[=Hollywood=]

Further Investigations:

Okay going back to square one with lights and taking a different route...

Here's the limits for the sprites in FSX:

; These particle spite limits are applied based
; on the "Special Effect Detail" settings slider.

[Sprite Limit]
Medium=5000
High=99999
Low=1000

; These particle emit rate modifiers are applied based
; on the "Special Effect Detail" settings slider.

[Emit Rate]
Medium=0.700000
High=1.000000
Low=0.300000

; If an emitter has its LOD flag set and the viewpoint is
; further away than this at the time the effect is started
; then the emitter will be disabled.

[Detail]
Forced Distance=250

; The [Emitter Detail Distance] and [Emitter Detail Modifier]
; tables work together. If an emitter is further away than a
; distance specified in the distance table then the rate it
; emits particles at is scaled by the factor specified in the
; modifier table.

[Emitter Detail Distance]
Medium=5000
Far=10000
Very Far=15000

[Emitter Detail Modifier]
Medium=0.700000
Far=0.500000
Very Far=0.000000

So the main ones I need to plug in to the node graph are:

[Emitter Detail Distance]
Very Far=15000

That's 15km away, and for generic emitters globally for FSX. However in MSFS we can set the modifier to whatever distance we want, which is great to give us granular control for each visual effect. Example would be a light that is visible to 11km.

The next one is:

[Sprite Limit]
99999

That's globally within that 15km radius, so in order to keep frame rates up in MSFS it may be wise to keep the number of emitters per visual effect below 1000 for the most complicated VFX.

The other sections are really deprecated I assume and not necessary to worry about.

Here's some of my results from today... I'm still trying to figure out how to make a static emitter, as I feel like my hack workaround isn't the best approach...

 

[GaryGB]

Hi Dean:

Remember this thread ?

https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/street-lights-like-ultimate-terrain.6674/post-238798


One might wonder if current implementations of appallingly wimpy and cyclic 'sputtering' of extruded smoke by effects in MSFS is due to sprites being used rather than true 3D "particles", and if Asobo's attempts to achieve graphical control over VFX display attributes while preventing a severe impact on FPS / run time perf through use of sprites ...is actually causing a problem to get worse / look worse ?

https://www.quora.com/Are-particles...st-polygons-with-transparency-applied-to-them


Nick Wittome once alluded to a way that we could demonstrate how to bring the FS2Kx sim to its knees with changing sprite params, which IIRC was discussed by this Blog post by ACES' Adrian Woods (aka "Torgo 3000"):

https://web.archive.org/web/2015021...om/b/torgo3000/archive/2006/01/25/418037.aspx

"Q: How come I can't see all of the sprites in the incredibly elaborate and perf intensive effects that I've created?

A: Being the effects artist for Flightsim (among many other duties), this one has bothered me to no end. We have a sprite limit cap that is determined by your effects quality settings (in the display setting dialog). This is for performance reasons, because it is incredibly easy to kill perf using tons of facing sprites. Unfortunately, because the volumetric cloud system are volume clouds of facing sprites, they got thrown into this budget (this is a bug, and our bad). So here's how you hack it. Put an "effects.cfg" file in your effects folder with the following contents:

[Sprite Limit]
Medium=500
High=9999999999
Low=100

Then set your effects settings to high and watch the billions of particles bring your system to its knees. DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any fried hardware or lost wages caused by the minutes per frame display you may achieve using this trick. However, I will be fully responsible if you end up with beautiful visuals and not much of a performance hit. []"

GaryGB