Sun glare simulation

[FuriousMeow]

I think YoYo's isn't good either. 

GB at a certain point looks like YoYo's but it isn't quite right either. 

From GB, it looks pretty good until the star graphic overlay. I think somewhere between what GB did - minus that star graphic - and what Korea has would be good.

 

 

Because this looks like some kind of portal

 

14 minutes ago, Rocket_Knut said:

You know, what sarcasm is do you? 😉

Sorry, wasn't sure what you were referring to and wasn't tracking that response from the devs.

Edited July 21 by FuriousMeow

[YoYo]

These IL-2 GB screenshots look much better in terms of the sun's size, even with the star effect, although it is still far from ideal. Perhaps the halo itself (the star) is too large; in reality, it's not that large (it's some form of lens distortion), and it's the lens and aperture that influence it. Here are some examples.

Which is more realistic? To the human eye:

The Sun doesn't have rays like a star. We see a bright disk with a subtle glow, and at sunset, a red or orange glow. The star effect is an optical artifact of the camera, not the actual appearance of the Sun.

This is why, for example, in flight simulators, if maximum realism is the goal, many players prefer a Sun with a natural, smooth glow over a "star" effect.

Edited July 21 by YoYo

[YoYo]

4 hours ago, MajorMagee said:

I'm still hoping that we end up with something more like YoYo's Chat GPT version.

I still hope so. Furthermore, screenshots like those posted here should be taken with a normal FOV, preferably from inside the cockpit, because then you can clearly see how overly large the sun itself is. The blinding effect itself is also too strong. In VR, it looks like a nuke explosion. However, we'll have to wait for the patch and my fingers are crossed for solution.

I should add that I'm not using any HDR, and btw. some of the screenshots posted here (bug with washed colors) don't show the simulator's natural colors so comparing it makes no sense (I suggest flying without HDR until this problem is solved).

Edited July 21 by YoYo

[MajorMagee]

I think that once they switched the game engine to PBR we were destined to have this problem crop up. It may not be a simple thing for them to resolve within the limitations of the rendering system they've chosen. There are other sims that let you turn off the camera lens related effects like the star filter so maybe we can get a toggle for that at least.

[MajorMagee]

No changes to help with this issue in the 0.003 update.

[YoYo]

6 hours ago, MajorMagee said:

No changes to help with this issue in the 0.003 update.

That's right, it hasn't been touched. We'll have to wait for 004.

[R3animate]

The "white/grey filter" effect is a bit overdone, but it also flickers as the camera is moving around. It's very jarring and doesn't contrast correctly with the cockpit. Attaching a track, if devs don't see this I'd honestly suggest we report it as a bug. On an OLED monitor or VR headset, this is just turning the whole screen grey. If devs disagree and think its fine, it might be worth request a toggle in graphics settings. 

career-hadrian smith-1951.2026-07-23_09-22-13_00.zip

[Husar]

On my OLED monitor sun looks like an nuke explosion taking half of the screen 😂

[MajorMagee]

There is an entry in Startup.cfg called bloom_enable, but there is no corresponding selection available in the Graphics settings UI. You can manually set it to  = 0 or = 1, but it currently has no effect in game as Bloom is always active. You had the option to disable this in BoX.

[YoYo]

14 hours ago, Husar said:

On my OLED monitor sun looks like an nuke explosion taking half of the screen 😂

There used to be some strange policy about not including Nuke in simulators for reasons I don't quite understand. Now we have it without even asking, even if we don't want it. 😜

[MajorMagee]

No change to the oversized sunrise/sunset bloom with 0.004

[Leifr]

Mhm hmm, it's one mighty powerful sun over in Korea.

[MajorMagee]

0.004B appears to have addressed this issue. You still get the white veil of whole screen bloom when you look toward the Sun, but the Gigantic Nuke Explosion look of the sunrise/sunset is much reduced.Gamma at 0.9, HDR disabled.

[YoYo]

16 hours ago, MajorMagee said:

0.004B appears to have addressed this issue. You still get the white veil of whole screen bloom when you look toward the Sun, but the Gigantic Nuke Explosion look of the sunrise/sunset is much reduced.Gamma at 0.9, HDR disabled.

Very interesting! I can't test it right now because I'm struggling with CPU temperatures. It turns out I need to repair the water block, so I'm waiting for the components and probably won't run any games to save on temperature. It may still not look perfect, but it's much better. Thanks for the info, and I'm glad the developers did something about it. 👌

By the way, could you show us a screenshot from 9 a.m.?

[MajorMagee]

Yes, it's still more blown out than it probably should be.

Gamma at 0.9, HDR enabled.

Edited August 2 by MajorMagee

[MajorMagee]

If you change atmospheric conditions, and time it just right, you can see the sun disk low in the sky now, but in most cases it's still lost in the glare until it's fairly high in the sky.

[YoYo]

The evening started to look okay, but the morning still seems to suck.

Edit. I checked the time, 7:00 p.m. (19:00), it still looks very bad and we have some kind of explosion on the horizon.....

Edited August 2 by YoYo

[MajorMagee]

I'm not getting the hard edged explosion look anymore.

[Husar]

Sun on the second scripted camping, the glare it's too big

 

Edited August 5 by Husar

[YoYo]

It's a matter of the sun's position, morning or evening - the entire aereola is unchanged from early EA. It's still a nuclear explosion, and quite close at that, not the sun far away in space.

[YoYo]

Here's mine. The sun appears to be half as far from Earth as it actually is (I'm not even mentioning the oversized halo). I don't know, maybe it's the North Korean Sun ? 

7:10 am in the summer:

Once again, I asked for opinion on the size of this sun and the enormous glare it creates on Chat GPT's eyes. Here's the effect and the commentary:

"Comparing both images, I find the difference very instructive from the point of view of realism.

What is most striking in the original screenshot from IL-2 Korea is that the Sun's disk has been practically replaced by a huge bloom spot. The effect makes the Sun appear to be several degrees across in the sky, when in fact its angular diameter is about 0.53° - about the size of a little fingernail viewed at arm's length. From the airplane cockpit it looks surprisingly small.

What bothers me about the original:

The sun seems gigantic. The brain interprets this bright spot as the Sun itself, making it appear as if it is very close to the Earth.
Bloom is too aggressive. Of course, there is glare when looking straight at the Sun, but it does not cause the light source to occupy one third of the frame.
Details of the landscape are lost. The entire left part of the image is "burned out" and the mountains and clouds practically disappear.
The scale of the scene is disturbed. Instead of the feeling of a huge distance to the Sun, there is an impression as if there was a giant spotlight shining there a few kilometers in front of the plane.

However, in the improved version:

• the Sun's disk has a realistic size,
• it's still very bright and blinding,
• the atmosphere remains convincing thanks to the light scattered in the air,
• you can still see clouds, mountains and valleys,
• the whole scene looks more like a photo taken with a camera with the correct exposure.

Interestingly, many game developers make the same mistake. Wanting to achieve a spectacular HDR effect, they increase the bloom instead of keeping the Sun's disk small and letting the camera (exposure) and the atmosphere be responsible for the feeling of intense light. As a result, the Sun resembles a large glowing ball, although in fact it is visually small even during sunrise or sunset.

Looking at your screenshot, I would say that the sky model and colors are very good - the clouds, morning fog and mountain lighting look really good. The problem is almost exclusively the Sun and bloom rendering. If the developers reduced the dial to a realistic size and reduced glare appropriately, the scene would gain a much more photorealistic feel while retaining the same morning atmosphere."

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Gentlemen from 1CGS, what's got you all riled up about do not fixing this bug that's been reported since EA launched  (and maybe beta testing)? At least I've had access to it since then. Please fix it in the next nearest patch. It really wasn't hard to tell that something was seriously wrong here. We are writing about the nuke effect and unfortunately this problem has still not been solved. Thank You.

Edited August 7 by YoYo

[MajorMagee]

I agree that we need a way to turn the bloom down/off so it looks like the second image.

[Husar]

1 hour ago, MajorMagee said:

I agree that we need a way to turn the bloom down/off so it looks like the second image.

Turning bloom off in startup.cfg doesn't affect the sun; it only disables bloom on aircraft.

[MajorMagee]

Yes, just in case the developers have misunderstood two pages of requests with example pictures, we're asking for a way to reduce the Oversized Atmospheric Bloom Region That Manifests Itself Around The Larger Than Life Sun Disk When It Is Low In the Sky!

[MajorMagee]

I've been experimenting with the Haze levels this evening. You can see changes in the intensity of the effect, but it has no impact on the size and shape of the area being washed out. Even setting haze to none this area around and between the sun and the horizon still blows out. The size and shape of that area is entirely dependant on the time of day as driven by the angle between the sun and the horizon.