You achieve reduced luminance in the distance in shrinking down a point sprite image of a light bulb. That is the point I’m trying to make. If you just approach lighting in painting white pixels, sure, you’d change brightness. But in painting sprite with a semi transparent halo, you let the hardware filtering the texture at smaller size do the magic for you… And this will give a correct size appearance based on the distance too.
Again, download, open in a paint program, then zoom the XP11 and the FS2020 images of the EGNX runway and compare, measure RGB levels, etc… Then zoom out and compare the overall distribution of lightness from front to back of the runway etc… This is self-evident to me but I might be alone looking things the way I see them (of course only me can see what I see anyhow LOL)
Why do we need a Legacy / Modern Light Setting
(like Legacy / Modern flight model setting)
Regardless it is more accurate perceptually, some prefer left, some other right…
PS: of course there are different performance implications doing one approach or the other but ultimately it appears FS2020 is rendering point sprites anyhow, so in the end it might not change much between doing what they do which looks like:
- they’re changing brightness using the halo as an indirect size changing effect, instead of changing size using the halo as an indirect brightness changing effect.
- the former makes distant and close lights look nearly the same size and distant lights seem brighter
- the later makes distant and close lights look accurately sized from each other and accurately emitting the same power.