No. I this this was mentioned elsewhere, but we don’t have motion vectors in the engine, which is why we use FSR and not FSR2 or DLSS.

A really nice reference from the time of CRT monitors is: http://poynton.ca/PDFs/Rehabilitation_of_gamma.pdf

The point of the photo is not to reference cockpit _appearance_ (e.g. the perceptual experience of being in the cockpit). It’s to point out that the actual difference in luminance is large compared to what electronics comfortably deal with.

In particular, your computer monitor is 8-bit, and it’d be 10-bit if we supported “HDR”. (Scare quotes doing a lot of work – HDR is better than LDR but it’s not close to the real world and doesn’t make tone mapping unnecessary.)

The idea of a photometric renderer is to get the _internal_ light levels to be accurate to real world physics and then solve the perceptual problem with tone mapping.

I agree that there’s a lot of uncalibrated monitors out there – I could see us providing a generalized brightness control, but I do’nt think it makes sense to let people tune black/mid/white…at some point they should just tune their display itself.

In the meanwhile, I also digged a little bit deaper and found an older post in the X-Plane org forum, where somebody edited a setting file of X-Plane 11 in order to increase shadow distance. I already replicated this and it works with X-Plane 11.55, now without the need of ASHA. I also found a solution for the ugly powerline shadows, I simply edited the corresponding PNG image and made its contents completely transparent. Problem solved. Concerning to X-Plane 12, these changes to shadow distance work in principle, but with a lot of terrain artifacts, default 2d trees don’t throw shadows and overall performance decreases to a slideshow. Maybe this might be beneficial once version 12 has more matured.

My perception is: The balance of light and darkness in a airliner cockpit is spot on.

The only issue that remains is that the sun is still being reflected by glass instruments as the aircraft body was translucent.

The issue is that “Cockpits are dark specially when you compare them from the outside.” but only when compared with outside and only when you were looking outside and than shift your focus to the dashboard. Nothing different with car dashboard when one drives on the highway in a sunny summer day. But when you shift your focus to the dashboard your retina would react and expand so you are able to see the panel within second of looking at it. This biological process can not be replicated on a 2d monitor unless there is some kind of super fast eye tracking. So i think it should not be replicated at all. Just the cockpits should be lighter regardless of if it is realistic in all conditions or not. Dark cockpits are not realistic in all conditions too.

Hi Ben,
1. The human eye can distinguish about 16-18 stops of luminosity. The electronic devices can 4-4.5. Hence, a photo taken under uncontrolled conditions and developed (even digital images are developed!) under not controlled conditions can not be a reference for cockpit appearance.
2. Dark, or better dynamic range of a scenery, can be assessed in a Gray 18 room and rendered accordingly to provide a similar physiological reaction from the viewer’s eyes.
3. I use a calibrated monitor for photo work. I don’t believe that many of the users use a calibrated monitor. so my suggestion is to provide some setting tool, per aircraft, to tune the black, white and mid points. This might free you from luminosity tuning and allow the users to set own preferences, like, for example, response curves for the yoke.

Good luck!

I agree on what Babar says. In some scenarios I have to turn on the panel lighting, otherwise it gets too dark. Feels very realistic to me.

I had manually calibrated my monitor though, a long time ago for photo and video editing/grading. It still shows the nuances in very dark colours. I think that might be important.

Imho the lighting is already very close to fantastic. Very immersive, only beaten by the puddles, which are just awesome. : D