IMO, it would be a big step up in both the feel and the utility of X-Plane if the environment reflected (no pun intended) the same visual effects. Improved daytime vibrancy and a greater range of light qualities depending on atmospheric conditions would be great. But night lighting effects! Currently there's no discernible moon illumination, which is unfortunate. It would be neat/useful/realistic if a full moon night seemed almost as bright as day, in that wonderful way it does in the real world.

Thanks for the great work and the great (articulate, engaging) blog.

Ugh.

🙂

productized = tech demo + all the details for backward compatibility, bug fixes, etc.

"Productized"? Really?

Ugh.

I'm not sure I understand the question, and writing a tutorial or providing tech support is beyond the scope of this blog.

Most of the specific details of lighting in cockpits is on the wiki, but there isn't much on integration.

I can tell you one thing: the most 'modern' technique I have seen from users for doing post lights is as follows:
– They use their rendering tools to create a _LIT texture with the post lights drawn in; this implies that the post lights are lighting up non-cockpit texture.
– They use ATTR_lit_level to tie the light level of the mesh (for only the areas affected by post lights) to a dataref from one of the lighting rheostats (e.g. panel_brightness_ratio[n] or instrument_brightness_ratio[n]).
– They also add one global 3-d cockpit light at very low intensity NEAR the center of the post lights. This 3-d light casts just a liiiittle bit of 'extra' light all over the 3-d parts to make the look a little bit more convincing, particularly for moving animated elements like switches and throttles.

This technique requires very careful planning of how the mesh UV map is created.