Understood. Thank you Ben, for listening to the community, and providing feedback. It's encouraging to know that our suggestions are taken into consideration, and are not lost in the shuffle.
Keep the blogs coming 🙂
*mumbles in his sleep…mmm tesselation…

– This is not ambient occlusion…and there is no radiosity. Any case where it looks like that is just nicely made textures.
– This is global illumination.
– Shadows will be in the sim – but they're not very soft.
– Reflection mapping – we'll get there eventually and it's something people want; the order of effects we've done is based not only on what people want but also their cost of implementation and interdependency (e.g you can't code B until you code A). Heat blur is in because it's really cheap once you already have some other code we put in for GI.

Is this a form of ambient occulsion, or some sort of super fast interpolated GI? It seems like you have light transference happening…

Will the engine have "soft-shadow" capability?

Id wager however that reflection mapping -of any kind, is much more desperately needed that heat blur.
Painted-on reflection textures are dating the engine tremendously.

I ask that real-time reflections – if at all feasible, are not lost in the discussion.

Thank you for all of your hard work. Looking forward to XP10!

I have to ask, though – and I apologize if I've missed it somewhere – what effect does this have during the daytime?

The way I'm looking at this is that lighting up buildings at night is great and all, but aside from the landing light on the runway, I'm not sure how crazy I am about the toll on system overhead it will take for a yellow runway marker to cast a yellow glow on the ground, or a streetlight to spill onto some grass.

(Point lights, however, are something I've been hoping for since they went away.)

Without a doubt, it helps with immersion – but is this carried over to daylight, occlusion, shadows in the cockpit, etc. ?

Simon

will these lights cast shadows in the future version of XP10?

"2. This is programmer art – I attached a few lights and took some movies…it will be up to our artists to decide what lights cast how much illumination."

Will it be as simple as specifying the lamp's light intensity by giving it the value 5W (5 Watt) and the computer calculates the illumination?

1. These lights do not cast shadows and
2. This is programmer art – I attached a few lights and took some movies…it will be up to our artists to decide what lights cast how much illumination.

Just two things:
1) I don't see a a weak shadow from the nose steering wheels, which should be there in reality.
2) The ground is not weakly lit up from the aircraft's navigation lights in it's wing.

http://www.airliners.net/photo/LAN-Airlines/Airbus-A340-313X/1193179/&sid;=86e56effda5239a1501413338243dac4
X-plane needs to include airport lighting pylons.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2661/3971677796_0165a6915d.jpg