Tweak for Earlier Night Lighting

[Jim Robinson]

I stumbled across this a couple years ago but only recently (yesterday) got around to trying it. Somebody posted this on Avsim (sorry I don't remember who or in what thread), this was from Phil Taylor's blog just prior to the release of SP1:

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ptaylor/archive/2007/05/15/new-tweaks-in-sp1.aspx

 

For the dusk/dawn textures some people feel, subjectively, the result is too dark or too light. There are 2 items that allow the transition time to be changed:

 

[GRAPHICS]

 

DAY_THRESHOLD

 

NIGHT_THRESHOLD

 

 

 

acceptible values are 0 to 65535.

 

Defaults:

 

DAY: 32768

 

NIGHT: 4096

 

 

These represent the amount of 'ambient' light at the ends of the day/night blend threshold. Zero is perfect dark, 65535 is full day sun at noon in the summer.

 

While it appears Phil was using "powers of two" for the values, from my experimentation it seems any number will work. I was able to get my FTX and UTX lights to turn on about 40 minutes earlier using the following in the FSX.cfg:

 

[GRAPHICS]

DAY_THRESHOLD=50000 //min 0, max 65535

NIGHT_THRESHOLD=4096

 

The higher the DAY_THRESHOLD value the earlier the lights come on, a value of 40000 vs 50000 appears to amount to about 10-12 minutes difference in the sim. Using yesterday's sim date near Washington DC the FTX lights were turning on at 20:09 local time without the tweak, with a DAY_THRESHOLD value of 50000 the lights would come on at roughly 19:35. At 19:35 the ground textures were just starting to light up and without the tweak you'd fly around for 35 minutes before the actual FTX/UTX lights would turn on, the tweak changes that so the lights come on while it's still relatively daylight which to me looks more realistic.

 

To implement this tweak simply open the fsx.cfg in notepad and add the two lines anywhere under the [GRAPHICS] header, save. Start a flight, choose "day" then "dusk" and then roll back the clock about an hour, fly until you see the lights come on, note the time and ambient lighting. Play with the DAY_THRESHOLD value to suit your tastes.

 

There may be unwanted side effects, for example it seems to also effect the time that the aircraft panels light up. That in itself didn't seem like a problem to me but quite possibly there may be other side effects I haven't seen yet.

 

Works in P3D as well (you can use "time preview" in P3D for adjusting the DAY_THRESHOLD value, works great).

 

Jim