Question asked by Lederhosen

Any way to reduce the size of the sun in WOFF? Sun glare that is. I love the sun glare but feel at times that's its just toooooo big. Any chance of making it smaller?

AnKor replied:

Hi!
I agree that the sun in the game appears too big sometimes.
It is a combination of factors one of which is limited brightness range that can appear on the monitor. In the ideal world you would see a bright sun of normal size and a less bright glare around it, but it is hard to simulate on the monitor without making everything else too dark.
Modern games use HDR rendering (high dynamic range) to partially solve the problem, but I didn't implement it because this technique increases GPU memory requirements (which are already high in WOFF) and as far as I know there are some issues with it in DX9 - i.e. it works better in DirectX 10 and newer.

Anyway, I think DX9 shaders are tuned properly and there is no need to tweak them, but instead you can try editing suneffect.xml to reduce the glare size.
Go to WOFF\WOFFScenery\Weather\Lighting\, there are 3 subfolders Heavy, Normal, Overcast. Each one contains a copy of suneffect.xml for corresponding weather conditions.

Now, make backup copies of these files and edit the "Size" parameter in the first couple of lines which start with <SunGlare
Originally they look like this:
<SunGlare Size="1.0" ...
<SunGlare Size="0.5" ...
For example you can reduce it to Size="0.5" in the first line and Size="0.25" in the second one to make the glare 2 times smaller.
Of course you can experiment with parameters in other lines there as well. Just keep a backup copy! smile

I recommend trying editing in "Normal" folder first and testing with "Clear Sky" weather. Then if you like the result, make the same edits to other folders.

Note that when a new update of WOFF comes out it will likely overwrite your edits and restore original sizes.


Edited by AnKor (December 23, 2015 15:34)


Last edited by Polovski; 03/09/18 03:43 PM.

Regards,

Polovski,
OBD Software, developers of immersive flight sims;
Wings Over Flanders Fields and Wings Over The Reich
http://www.overflandersfields.com
http://www.wingsoverthereich.com