Anything that can make reading instruments more effective while flying will make me happy. In the meantime I’m using “Panel Builder” to lay basic analog instruments on any view.
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I think you’re misunderstanding my post there, those pictures was, (as I wrote), showing different HDR levels / Bright vs Shadow asking which level users in this thread prefer, not what numbers are on the screens…?
( Full resolution would be a 66K image, 17,280 pixels vertically )
Ooo-k…? 
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That’s a very clever workaround!
Looks like the dark Cockpit issue when it’s bright outside has been fixed in the current beta … 
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If that’s true, wonderful to finally get some traction on the issue.
Well. don’t get to exited. 
I run a startup script to run MSFS, and that always edit eye adaptation to 0, so I should check with a normal startup, to see what it does when it is set to the default value of 1.
Maybe others can comment of the Cockpit darkening effect in the Beta. ?
First of all, I didn’t know changes had already been made to adjust the dynamic range. That’s good, it looks much better. 
Second, the first thing we need to make clear when it comes to realism is that actual realism is impossible. We aren’t constructing a 1:1 duplicate of reality - we’re presenting an illusion of reality through the keyhole of our hardware. And that means we have to pick and choose which measures of reality are most important to us, because we can’t have them all at once.
The key point of compromise here is the display. If we had displays capable of illuminating the full dynamic range of the real world, from pitch black to direct sunlight, on a per pixel level, then none of this would be an issue. You could simply input those real world brightness values, the display would pump out those exact same values, we’d have a perfect recreation of outdoor light right in our offices/living rooms, and our eyes would take care of the rest. But, obviously, we don’t have that. Even the brightest HDR displays in the world aren’t anywhere remotely close to that (and most of us don’t have HDR pc monitors anyway). So we simply don’t get to have that full range of luminance. No matter how realistic the lighting simulation is internally, it will HAVE to be chopped down - a lot - to fit within the capabilities of the output display. And how to do that is what we are truly arguing about here. Not old vs new technology, not aesthetics or even realism really, but how best to compromise realism to get the best illusion through our limited screens.
And there are, basically, two ways of doing that. You can compress the luminance values to a smaller range, or you can clip values off the top and/or bottom to display only a segment of the full range (or you can do a bit of both in various ways). Clipping sacrifices information in the blown out whites and/or crushed blacks in order to preserve vivid contrast relationships in the remaining values (more like your first screenshot). Compressing does the opposite, flattening the tonal range but preserving details in both light and shadow the naked eye would be able to see simultaneously (more like the second two). Neither preserves true brightness of course, beyond what the screen can deliver.
So let’s come back to the question: which measures of reality are most important to us? For maybe 90% of games I’d say getting that deep contrast is more valuable, for a couple reasons. One, most games present important information in only one tonal range at a time - you’re outside, or you’re inside, or if you’re outside looking at an enemy in shadow and the sky happens to be blown out, that’s no big deal since the sky is just background eye candy anyway. Two, many games, consciously or not, are aping the aesthetics of popular films (LOTR, Black Hawk Down, etc), so to the extent the lighting model mimics that of a camera (which can only capture a fairly narrow range of values in the first place) so much the better (hence so many games rendering lens flares and other unnatural effects).
But Flight Simulator is the exception to both those cases, most importantly the first. The single most common lighting situation in MSFS is sitting in a cockpit with a bright background and shadowed foreground - both with critical information. And if I were really sitting in the cockpit of a real airplane (or a car for that matter - same situation), I would be able to see both simultaneously. I would be able to flick my eyes back and forth between the instruments and the horizon, instantly reading both without needing to wait a second for my eyes to readjust each time I do it. And, barring a few exceptions like getting the setting sun right in your eyes, is that not your experience as well? Can anyone here with healthy eyes not see vivid detail both inside and outside a vehicle on a sunny day? So… if the rendering engine doesn’t allow me to do that, that isn’t realistic either, is it?
So which realism is more important? Realistically deep contrast ratios? Or being able to realistically scan the instruments and horizon like a real pilot? Unfortunately, due to the limits of our screens, these options are mutually exclusive - you can only pick one. And, I’ll grant, it’s a subjective choice - I can’t really tell you you’re wrong. But if you would honestly say contrast is the more important realism… I just can’t understand that.
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Which is why it should be adjustable for the user to set whatever limitations they find “personally” acceptable, for whatever reasons.
One size does not fit all. (unless you have a 2000 nit monitor !!)
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You just spoke my mind exactly as I’m thinking it. I didn’t have the correct words but you did.
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Reality vs Usability. Hmmm. Is there a way to allow the end user to choose?
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A real cockpit can used, so there really ought not be a conflict between realism and usability.
As I said before, I see no issue here at all. I can easily see any gauge in any cockpit during the day, and I have no slider or setting that we don’t all have. But of course I have to look down enough to keep the sharp light from the outside from turning the gamma (or brightness?) down.
I can accept that some don’t like the automatic “aperture” feature, but if you remove it, you must accept that either the interior is too dark or the exterior is too bright. Others have already explained much better than I could why that is and why going back to older rendering techniques would be a shame.
In the end it comes down to how you look around and how you have your instrument views configured, IMO.
And that is exactly the issue. In RL, your eyes/brain would still be able to read those Gauges, even with a strong outside light, while a camera might well have difficulty.
That’s why there should be a separate SIMULATION control for Inside & Outside lighting, and the user be allowed to adjust those to suite their conditions and requirements.
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For those of us that do see an issue, do you have any objections to providing brightness/contrast sliders for tweaking the readability (similar to the many other tuning sliders), and those like you could just not use them? This would seem to be a way to make everybody happy.
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The important thing is to have separate control for Inside & outside the cockpit.
If it is just one control for everything, nothing is gained that does not already exist with the current Video/Monitor controls. ( Brightness, Contrast, Gamma)
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There’s not going to be separate inside and outside controls. It’s all one unified lighting model - there’s no way to simply carve out the interior space and render it independently, at least not without rebuilding the entire game engine to do that.
However there doesn’t need to be. The control that would be needed is basically a dynamic range control, to adjust what range of luminosity values is mapped to the screen. A narrow range would be a contrasty image with darks crushed to black and blown out whites. A wider range would flatten the lighting to show more detail in the lights and darks. This isn’t quite the same thing our brains do - which CAN balance regions within an image independently - but combined with an in-game brightness control it will do well enough to balance inside and outside detail to taste.
And I know this is possible, because, as Grinde81’s screenshots show, Asobo have already adjusted this (wider) in recent updates. All they need to do is provide access to whatever they did as a slider in the UI.
No, of course not. I just don’t think it’s as easily done as some of you seem to think.
In previous incarnations of MSFS it might have been straight-forward because the cockpit graphics were a separate overlay. In MSFS 2020 the cockpit is part of the world at large, which makes it possible to illuminate it much more naturally taking external light fully into account, albeit with the limitations of monitors in mind.
One “solution” for you might be to introduce an imaginary cockpit lighting system in addition to the already simulated real one, much like the current “torch”, but I doubt it will be satisfactory.
As title, please make eye adaption post-processing effect switchable - I personally feel it is both grossly overdone and unrealistic.
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I agree with you. I don’t like it how it is implemented. I really think there should be an option to disable it.
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you can disable this from the config file, but I think you have to make it read-only for the change to stick.
If you are referring to the EyeAdaptation entry in UserCfg.opt file, many of us tried disabling it but it did not have any visible effect.
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even if you make the file read only?