Can Distance "Fog" Be Eliminated?

[Agrajag]

I remember reading long ago that X-Plane generates a distant fog to keep performance acceptable. I have a somewhat decent system (i5 4670k, 16GB RAM, GTX-770 4gb, etc) and have a really prominent fog line at 16,000 to 25,000 feet in my Dash-8. I now see people saying this can mean your settings are too high. The problem is that I'm seeing this while the sim is telling me I'm getting 60fps. I'd be fine with less than that to get the distance fog pushed way back. Right now it's about 1/4 of the screen in height.

 

Is this something everyone gets or are my settings really too high? I tried literally turning off everything in the right half of the middle rending area (airport details, roads, world distance, etc.) and it seemed to have zero impact on the bar. I do run HDR if that matters.

[HarryCYUL]

wait for 10.30  devs said they will fix it  

[Agrajag]

The tongue emoticon suggests a bit of sarcasm. Now that I finished a flight, it seems obvious that it's there all the time. I turned everything off but texture detail and it had zero effect on the fog.

[Ben Russell]

Screenshots?

[Agrajag]

Here it is not looking too bad at DFW at roughly 16,000 feet. Sometimes it's much worse. However, this is a shot I just took before bed:

 

[FloB]

Currently there is no real fix for that. You can try to get the best out of it by checking draw highres textures from orbit (rendering settings), play with the maximum visibility distance in the weather settings screen and modding your art controls via "flywithlua" (see forum) thread. There are also some freeware and payware highres replacement textures out there but the result are not convincing IMHO.

BTW: Using Skymaxx Pro seems to disable the x-plane weather-visibility setting.

 

The limitation is XPlane loading just a certain number of highres tiles and fall back on low-res textures for everything that is behind them. Last word from Laminar was that they are looking into increasing the number of tiles now that they are running on 64-bit. Could be weeks, could be years...

 

Flo

Edited March 12, 2014 by FloB

[drifter]

There was a plugin at the org to "fix" that.

[FloB]

What/how does it fix that? Could you please point us to that plugin?

 

Flo

[Nicola_M]

There was a plugin called ClearSkies, which was primarily meant for getting rid of fog in xplane on low-end computers.  It's good, and might be what you need.

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=3580

[sqrt(-1)]

But will it work on XP10 in 64-bit mode?

[ointment]

No. It does not work in 64 bit. It does work, sort of, in 32 bit. It works fantastically in V9.7!

Edited March 12, 2014 by ointment

[Tonka]

Clear Skies was a plugin used to remove the framerate enhancing fog that was used in v9. When your framerate gets too low in v9, as decided by the Minimum Frame Rate setting, fog was drawn to reduce the visibilty distance and try and improve the framerate. Clear Skies just kept overriding the fog so you still see 25 miles out, even with a low framerate.

 

V10 works completely differently. It continues to try and draw all the way out to the visibility distance you specify. Clear Skies is irrelevant for this.

 

What you are seeing is the blurring that is used to fade distant land masses into view. Also, it looks blurry because outside of 25 miles, texture files are used to generate the landmass you see, there is no terrain mesh out there.

 

I think LR plan to increase the distance to which actual terrain can be seen at some point, but do't quote me.

 

Hope that clears things up.

[sqrt(-1)]

The OP is not using 9.7.

 

EDIT:  I replied to oitment's post...

Edited March 12, 2014 by SqrtOfNegOne

[ointment]

The OP is not using 9.7.

I'm well aware of that. I can read. I made the remark because the plugin was developed a long time ago for V9.

Edited March 12, 2014 by ointment

[sqrt(-1)]

I'm well aware of that. I can read. I made the remark because the plugin was developed a long time ago

 

Since you didn't mention that in your post, the relevance to the OP's post was in question.

 

I assumed you could read... 

[Agrajag]

Thanks everyone. So it's pretty much what I remember from before. So you can't get rid of it but may be able to slightly reduce it. It's one of the big things left over from the FS days that I'd like to cross off the list.

 

I actually don't mind the END look of it. It's the transition that's hard to accept. It's just goes from in focus to a blur in one pixel. I'd be happy if they'd just smooth out that transition, even if the answer was to blur a bit more detail coming forward (though not much). Ultimately it has to go as the hardware we run gets more capable.

[puffy]

Precisely.  I replaced my GTX 480 video card with a GTX760 4GB version.  I increased some of my rendering settings and now like the OP I get this hard line focus and blur issue when at altitude.  I tweaked around with my rendering settings, etc., but then realized this is the result of more powerful graphics hardware allowing me to run at higher simulator settings and a programming limit in the software.

 

Ultimately it has to go as the hardware we run gets more capable.

[Agrajag]

IF what I'm seeing is correct (from the FPS data that includes CPU and GPU load) then my issue now is CPU-based. The time to draw the images is always TINY while the CPU jumps from .50 to .990 once I get near the ground anywhere. Seems to me I can turn up more that's handled by the GPU (a GTX 770 with 4GB).

 

Let's set what 10.30 brings, if anything, on this issue.