Concern on Day and Night regions (Daytime & Night time)

[aserna]

I am very strict on realisim within FS2004 and enjoy flying nothing but AA flights throughout its system of routs useing departure and arival times from skyguideonline.com. Anyway, almost all of the time I find that when I ajust the time, (10:37a/p) for example, I look out my window and it is still dark outside. For enstance, this morning I Departed KDFW for KORD and the deptre. time was 6:10a the sun was out ant lighting up the entire world, but outside still dark. Gitting to the point here, is there ANY way I can "ajust" this or correct it. I have downloaded and use "Perfict Sky 1.0" by Davide Scotti, if that helps. Thank you very much for your ancers.

[RFields]

Flight Sim's default local sunrise / sunset are amazingly accurate.

Even cities which are in the wrong time zone have sunrise and sunset by the correct local time.

Now you have an issue which is not solvable without extensively rewriting the scenery .bgl files for the timezones - the DST start / end change in 2007 in the US. We have to save our default flights after DST starts / ends to adjust the GMT offset.

So sunrise/ sunset will be an hour off from your clock until April.

Just so you know, FS will start to lighten the sky 30 minutes before sunrise and will transition to full day 30 minutes after local sunrise. The same hour transition occurs at sunset.

Okay, that's how it's supposed to work. Some questions about your setup.

First - use a 24 hour clock when describing issues, not a 12 hour clock. It's much easier to check that way.

Are you setting the GMT time or the local time?
Are you using today's date in FS?
Are you setting the local time AFTER your aircraft is in the sim at that location?
Can you uninstall the sky addon and test without it?

At KDFW today (March 26) the local sunrise time in FS is 0622:19 local - GMT 1222:19.

According to WFAA television - the local sunrise time at KDFW is 0723 CDT - GMT 1223.

So FS having dawning light at KDFW from 0552 local time in FS is correct for today - March 26.

After the second Sunday in April, save your default flight again, and KDFW will have a -5 hour GMT offset, rather than the -6 hour GMT offset for non-DST.

BTW - I also highly recommend Dennis Thompsons TimeZone update for FS2002/FS2004.

[Qballbandit]

I understand, agree with , and follow what Reggie says, but I find this a bit of a problem in the later fall, and later spring times of the year. I often adjust the sim clock to make up for it. I can tell you, right now when I wake up in Chicago at 06:30am, it is light. In the sim, even using gmt, it is still pretty dark. While 90% of the time it is pretty spot on, these 2 times of the year I always need to adjust or cheat a little bit.
What's worse is snow coverage. Wish that was a selectable texture option, because there just ain't no snow on the ground now here!!! (but the sim says there is :P)

Neil :7

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Hate to work, love to fly!

[scott967]

ISTM if you look at the sun position, it is accurate but what I find is that the mixing of day and night textures is off. for example, here in Hawaii sunset today is 1844 at PHNL , and in the sim at 1824 it is very dark but IRL that isn't the case.

scott s.
.

[aserna]

First to all who has responded so far thanks for your help. Now...Reggie here are the ancers to your Q's and I may have Q's (questions) further. I have tryed uninstalling and reinstalling "Perfict Sky" sevral times in the past thinking I was crazy but I am still haveing the same prob, I ALWAYS use RL time be it I am in KDFW or EBBR, I use the time off my cellphone, PC, and any item of precise time keeping, (Sounds like I could do a TV add) anyway... I will look for the download Reggie recomended what was it "Time Zone Correction" or something and see if it does the trick, if not... well I will prob. invest in comp. programing classes at my local U. Talk to all of you later. And thanks again.

[aserna]

Well I found some downloads from Avsim and here but they requierd donations to work. (Files did not state it was neaded unless I faild to notice) and they were a little complex to install (They did not contain detailed instructions) bottom line they were too trubblesome to deal with :( Anyway I gues I will resort to "Cheating" If I must, to correct for DST in "RL" Again it is so dark out in FS, with the sun down and a deep red and azure crimson on the horison when the sky should be light blue and the western horizon "turning red" (Quite a nice view) none the less "Unrealistic". But Like I had stated in my inital Post "I am very strict on realisim within FS2004"... Again thank you for your help to Reggie and others.

[RFields]

FSRealTime requires payments to work. However, the FSRealtime install will install Dennis Thompson's TZ30 files and you do not need to activate, or even run FSRealTime, to have Dennis' files working in FS.

The FS sunrise and sunset textures are generalized for the entire world - again something which has to be done. But the end result is that it is very unrealistic looking in many places.

Personally, I have chosen to use lighter textures which are probably unnaturally light at certain times of day.

I do enough night flying in FS, especially in the RTW race and practice, I need the light for these old eyes.

[aserna]

Thanks Reggie, I did download all of the D. Thompson's files as well as the FSRealtime and have ben tweeking everything to my likeing, I will (somehow) acheve the desired result I "Hope" to get but then again it is just a PC Simulator and not real life. Being a perfectionist (when it comes to the FS series) can be rough... :) Bye.