Another commenter noted the non-believable lighting in FSX. To me, FSX looks like an overdone HDR photo – more painterly and less real. Our eyes work more like dynamic-range-limited film (digital or otherwise). I could see a future X-Plane camera supporting automatic exposure, so a brightly lit day renders the dark shadows of a hangar interior as nearly black when viewed from outside… or when viewed from inside, the outside world looks overexposed and blindingly bright. Just like we see in real life. Extra credit for night-vision adjustment over time that can be wiped out with an accidental bright white light. 😉

Was nice meeting you an AOPA in San Jose a few years ago. Hope all is well!
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Geoff
Everett, WA

As of now, the whole thing is cut out. We have a few different ways to deal with this in the code, and I don’t know what the final authoring interface will look like, so it’s too soon to alter your airplane.

So will the glass parts use a cutoff alpha to determine what’s shadowed, or does the entire geometry get left out of the shadow casting? Say for example I have an opaque sticker affixed to the window in the cockpit. If that’s just textured onto the glass object, will it cast a shadow, or would I need to make it a separate piece of geometry to make it cast shadows in the cockpit?

Sort of. You _do_ get dynamic shadows in the cockpit. But the dynamic shadow system can’t shadow translucent things – so glass is simply excluded. So you’ll get a nice shadow from the metal frame of a glass canopy, but you won’t get a tinted shadow from, for example, a translucent visor.

This is why it is very important that the ‘glass’ elements of your plane be marked “glass” in Plane-Maker — so that the glass doesn’t cast fully opaque shadows.

Speaking of new features…. will XP 10 feature Tropical Waters ???

🙂

thank you

He did too…(return)

This is certainly still work in progress…