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Why we do not like third party shaders...


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  • Aerosoft

 

While we are closing the CRJ and A330 projects we are seeing that some of the testers find the lighting to be incorrect. After checking their settings we often find they are using 3rd party shaders with some very whacky settings. Let me explain why we really do not like them.

 

For starters, if you use them you are simply not looking at the product as we have made it. You are looking at a recolored version where nearly every color is different from how the 3d artist designed it. Now we think the colors we provide are the best possible. When we do photoshoots in cockpit we use color charts, specific settings etc. That way we can make sure that what we sell is as close to the real colors as possible. 

 

Perhaps even more important is that they always remove a lot of the colors (while inventing new ones). That removal of colors is horrible for the 3d artist as he spend a lot of time on adding detail and with most shaders you simply will not see some of that. 

 

Let me give you an example. Check out this square. If you have not utterly messed up your display and driver settings you will see a cross. The vertical beam is one dark color, the horizontal one is slightly lighter. If you do not see the cross all bets are off because your system itself is not displaying all colors. Try using the windows color calibrator, it is pretty good. (windows key> display color calibration)

 

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Now with almost all the 3rd party shaders we have seen that square would look like this in the sim:

 

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Pure 0,0,0 black. It will look like that because most shaders try to make things more 'dramatic' and they do that by making lighter elements lighter and darker element darker. But while doing so a lot of information is lost (the cross). 55% of the square no longer has the correct color.  You see exactly the same in the lightest colors. Often I see screenshots where the sky is totally washed out and clouds are nearly invisible.  

 

A shader is a filter. A color is send in and a color is send out. The sim uses them to change the brightness and color of every object depending on the condition. But ideally it should never remove colors. The 3rd party shaders intercept what is send to the screen and change the colors. Without any regards to the lighting conditions, angle etc. They are very simple, very basic. Not black goes in and black come out.

 

In a flight simulator this hurts a lot because much of a cockpit has to be in colored very dark or very light because of the extreme light conditions on a flight deck. The light at 38.000 feet is brighter than it can ever be at seal level. That makes the contrast with the cockpit immens. Pilots do not see their own feet. As our eyes are not terribly good at quickly adapting to difference in brightness, the lower half of the flight deck appears extremely bright. Now as our modern screen are not even able to put out 0.3% of what the sun does at altitude, the 3d artist has to mimic this contrast. That's why the areas of the flightdeck where the sun shines have to be very bright, the parts where there is no direct sunlight have to be very dark. Still with all the detail, but all those details are colored with very dark colours. The colours that many shaders simply wipe out. 

 

256x256x256 is more than 17 million colors the artist has at its disposal. I got some screenshots (bmp format) that strongly suggest the use has removed 5.000.000 possible colors. I'm not saying it is going back to 16 bit colors, but as these are often the most important colors it's bad.

 

Try your sim as it comes, depend on the add-on developer to define the best colors. To be totally honest, there are enough light and color problems in the sim to deal with (and none of those can be solved with a 3rd party shader).

 

 

 

 

 

 

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