FEATURE | Night textures for "lit" areas

[Highspeed1964]

I find myself often switching between Ortho tiles and default tiles depending on whether I am flying at night or during the day. I have created two .bat files, one to "SCENERY_PACK_DISABLE" the ortho scenery packs when flying at night and the other to remove the "DISABLED" statement when flying during the day. When flying at night, obviously there isn't much need to see the detail of the ortho tiles but it would great to have the night textures that provide city lighting beyond what is available from the street lights out to a limited distance without having to switch over to default scenery. This is especially true if I'm flying during a transition from day to night or vice-versa.

I would love to have Ortho4XP generate such night "lit" textures as part of the package. It might even be possible to bring the existing textures from the default scenery much the same way as Overlays are generated, but I don't know the technical details if this would work or not.

[d41k4n]

IMO this will not be possible without doubling the size requirements of current orthophoto as Ortho4XP would have to provide an emissive ortho texture for each "regular" texture.

I therefore think this is something that can only be addressed by X-Plane's rendering engine e.g by a better LOD concept for distant spill/billboard lights and emissive object textures provided by the overlay scenery or the possibility to dynamically blend default meshes with custom meshes depending on distance.

[Highspeed1964]

It wouldn't necessarily double the size as the night textures don't need to be as high of a zoom level, but yeah it would add some size regardless. I just miss being able to see the cities in the distance, it gets quite dark out there.

[d41k4n]

IMO providing low-res night ortho textures is not an option as they will look awful from up-close.

Note that there is currently no mechanism available in X-Plane that only displays terrain night textures beyond a certain distance.