light

[yancovitch]

every time i see screenshots of fs9, they seem so much brighter and friendlier, and i feel more real, than those of fsx.....was wondering if there was some way of changing that in fsx, without affecting my monitor or computer settings.....

[Daube]

There are a few addons for FSX or P3D that will modify the shaders to alter the intensity of light, shadows and colors, and add some neat atmospheric effects etc...
One of them is ReShade.
You can install the utility (be careful about the installation instructions), then you download some presets (some pre-configured settings) and try them until you find something you really like.
https://reshade.me/
https://reshade.me/presets

[yancovitch]

thanks mucho.....virus protection says no go because of pup.....hmmmm?

[Daube]

Might be your antivirus is detecting some false positive... maybe.

You might also want to take an alternative, called SweetFX. Same principle (ReShade uses SweetFX internally, if I'm not mistaken...), it will modify the shaders to bring some new stuff to your graphic rendering, and you can configure it or load presets.

You'll find more information and explanations on the official topic here (go through the initial post):
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/sweet ... -4.381912/

And the presets for FSX can be found here, sometimes with preview pictures too :
http://sfx.thelazy.net/games/game/136/

[Daube]

One more thing: in case you're not using any payware utility like REX tools, I would recomend you to use the freeware texture pack named HDEv2.1 by Pablo Diaz.
That package was made for FS9, but there is a version 2.1 that was made specifically for FSX.
The sky textures will make your sky look much better (better sky colors for dawn, day and dusk).
The cumulus textures look beautiful, and you can install them in 512x512 DXT format. These clouds, despite their "low" resulution, will looks way better than the default clouds, and they will be much lighter on the FPS too !

Using this package (again, if you don't already use a payware texture package like REX) combined with a nice SweetFX preset, should really transform your sim.

[Daube]

There is yet another alternative. The old ENB mod, which was presented here a long time ago (see my signature "got bloom").
This does not modify the shaders, it works in a different way, but it will work ONLY if your FSX option "DirecX10 Preview" is disabled (so, it works only in DX9 mode).
There ware a very nice package made by the people from REX, containing both the ENB module and some custom settings, but I cannot find it on their website anymore.
I have uploaded it here: http://sapdaube.free.fr/fsx/REX_ENB_SUNLIGHT.zip
It should contain 3 or 4 files to be placed directly in the FSX main folder (where the FSX.exe is).

This package will tranform the colors of your sim to make them a bit "warmer" so to say.
It will still be a bit dark though.
You might be able to alter this by decreasing the value "Darkening amount day" in the ENBSERIES.INI file (with notepad). Each modification requires a sim restart.
Might be worth a try

[yancovitch]

oh...i just caught this.....thanks very much!!...lots of stuff to look into....cheers......