Hello Asobo Team & Fellow Simmers:
Throughout my lifetime, I have had the absolute pleasure of flying on many a charter and corporate flight. This has afforded me the luxury of being invited to sit up front in the jump seat fairly regularly.
Whilst pondering what i was missing from the view out of the front the other day, i realised that i have never seen the flames on any Oil Rigs burning away, nor the red warning lights of any wind farms when flying at altitude on clear nights.
Across the North Sea, and certainly around the Arabian Gulf, these are regularly very visible on clear nights, even from FL350, and yet within MSFS2024 i canât recall ever seeing any.
I suspect that this is entirely LOD related, however, would it be possible for the game team to rectify this?
Many thanks in advance for your kind consideration.
Paul
You mean where they are flaring off the gasses that come along with the oil? That could probably be added as a fire FX object I expect. Iâve played around with those for forest fires, so it might be possible to add them to an oil rig too.
If I find the time I might have a play with that tonight, for one oil rig at least.
Iâve seen flames coming from oil refineries on land, but never at sea.
This kind of thing:
Iâm sure there are animated flame FX we could add that would approximate this. They have no glow to them so you would also need to add a light emitting FX that would illuminate that side of the rig at night. There is a gold one which would be perfect for this, but it has one downside. Itâs glow is steady, with no flickering, and I wasnât able to work out a way to approximate this. I had considered finding an object that rotated, make it very small, and have the rotating object occasionally obscure the emitted light, but I wasnât able to find anything suitable. A rotating radar disk might work, for example.
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Iâm sure Iâm missing something here, every oil rig in 2024 has a flame, they may not be visible from a long distance, but take a helicopter to any of them and youâll see flames burning.
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Sorry I shouldâve elaborated: In MSFS2024 Iâve seen flames coming from refineries on land, but not at sea. So the game already has the right objects to correctly implement this.
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Are the rigs the exact same type? They might be different models, and they just never enabled that feature on one of them.
No, the refineries on land burn excess gas released during refinery processes, while on sea i believe they burn the excess gas from extraction. They arenât refineries though, most platforms at sea just do extraction. But both when extracting and refining youâll have excess gas.
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There are definitely flames on offshore oil rigs. But it seems like the flame is not emitting any light. In the background is another oil platform. No flame visible there.
The small dots on the left side are wind turbines. No red or other kind of blinking light noticeable, but there are lights. The oil platforms even have a red light on top of the tower, but it has a really low draw distance.
I think our wish should be for certain lights to have some sort of âinfiniteâ draw distance. Especially the warning lights on tall structures. And if performance impact isnât too big, flames should also light up their surroundings. Maybe they can adjust the sepia mask to make it more realistic from a distance at least (not sure how itâs looking in SU4 beta after the improvements)
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This is exactly the kind of flame I saw at the Shell refinery plant in Pernis. During the approach to Rotterdam Airport from the south I passed the refinery at around 4000ft and saw the flame. Sometimes the flame can be seen from 10 miles away in real life, so definitely some work for Asobo here!
I was hoping to show some pics that show that not only do the oil rig platforms have flames (both sea and land) but the radio antenna masts have little red pulsing lights on them (or at least some do) â but Iâve apparently deleted those pics soâŠ
Start at Galveston Texas on a clear night and fly and low and slow first east and then north â and once you see some flames at the oil rigs and refineries, take a heading of about 290 degrees towards Sugarland and youâll pass some tall radio towers which are lit. You have to fly close though as the lights are dim.
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There are often flames (called flares) at land well sites in the US as well and theyâre very visible from the ground and air. These flare stacks burn off the natural gases released during the extraction process. The sim doesnât have scenery objects for landside oil production, but really should as itâs a major part of the landscape in several regions.
Additionally, a comment was made about flashing red lights for wind turbine areas, and those exist as well, at least in the US. Some are on permanently, some flash (all in unison - looks creepy), and some change their lighting when triggered by proximity sensors.
As with many other things, it depends on what part of the world you live in. Part of the issue is weâre a global community here and we often donât realize (or forget) that what we experience in our âbubblesâ isnât universal, which is why communication might be better received when qualified as such (âin the USâŠâ).
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Just scanning over some rigs on the map screen there appear to be a few different types. One of them certainly has the flame, even visible on the map.
Some have two!
Iâm sure there are more, but its really impressive there are so many different types. I did find one type that had no flame though.
Spawning near one I was hoping the weird visual glitch I was seeing on the map was restricted to that, but sadly not. The flames are floating quite high up in the air, above where it should be.
I manually added the VFX_Fire_Center to the object, and placed it where it should be, then added a light source, B_gold24-2, to add a slight glow there.
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Hello All:
Thanks for confirming that i am indeed, not nuts! 
Precisely what many of you are showing here is exactly what I am talking about. Thank you for that.
Essentially, yes, there are many an oil rig in the sim, but from altitude on a clear night, they arenât visible, and as aluded to here by a couple of users, the flames are not visible until one is up close.
It feels like a bit of an oversight, but for sure not a gamebreaker. I just thought it would be one of those nice-to-haves that maybe Asobo could give some consideration to.
Oil Fields From Space At Night Shows some of the examples as visible by satellite.
Hereâs an image from NOAA using multiband imaging
Available on this page Revealing the Night Sky: Detecting Natural Gas Flares With the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) | NESDIS | National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service
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I just found the flame floating far from the nozzle glitch in the SU4 Beta, are your findings from the stable or beta?
