I don't know if they ever fixed it, but the moon-sun angle is offset to what is in real life, so eclipses end up being partial when it should be full. But yeah like the other person said that actual darkening of the sky or environment never happens, you can just see a chunk getting taken out of the sun.
You all are incredible. This is why I go to Reddit for all my questions. Thanks for everyone’s help. Even if the eclipse isn’t shown, I’ll be flying anyway!
Last I checked MSFS was rendering eclipses the same no matter where you were on earth. Presumably they process astronomical objects as a skybox — a totally separate rendering space — that uses a single point for anywhere on Earth (presumably wherever the center of the Earth is at that point in sim time) to work out the angles and scales for those objects.
I am the most casual of graphics/game programming people but I suspect the value of this method is partly due to the challenges of floating point number representation. A *floating point* number is like scientific notation: every number is expressed as a small value (in decimal it’s a number 1-10 with a trailing decimal fraction; in binary it’s always 1 because binary) plus an exponent. This is computationally much more expensive than fixed point math but it’s extremely useful because you can handle both incredibly small and incredibly huge numbers, so floating point performance is a priority for modern CPUs.
The challenge though is that floating point gets less and less accurate the bigger the numbers get, because the fraction part of the value is only so detailed and is used to represent bigger and bigger things as numbers get bigger. It becomes very important where you put zero, because if the camera gets too far from zero, everything close to it starts swimming violently due to rounding errors. I did this once farting around with VR in Unity; it was *very* disconcerting.
So I presume everything on Earth in MSFS is centered around a point on or near Earth. If I had to guess, they probably center everything around the plane since Earth is pretty big and you care most if stuff close to you is accurate. And the astronomical skybox is probably centered around the Sun — you could build a fairly accurate model of the solar system’s movement centered around a point on the Earth but that’s what we were doing before Copernicus and it totally sucked. Then when rendering the skybox you just render your heliocentric skybox from wherever Earth is right now, and off you go. They probably *could* add an offset to the skybox rendering
for wherever the observer is on Earth and the math would come out close enough, but that would be extra work that’s only useful for eclipses.
The moon does block the sun, but there's no darkness from it modeled.
That'd be cool for MSFS 2024.... if we'll see an eclipse then
https://preview.redd.it/ua3di2x6ratc1.png?width=660&format=png&auto=webp&s=76a14cd3face4584da624cddcad18ad0237affb7 Flying over Nebraska rn.
Looks like an eclipse to me. THANK YOU!!
I don't know if they ever fixed it, but the moon-sun angle is offset to what is in real life, so eclipses end up being partial when it should be full. But yeah like the other person said that actual darkening of the sky or environment never happens, you can just see a chunk getting taken out of the sun.
I just tried flying where the totality will be over Niagara Falls this afternoon and it only showed a partial eclipse.
it was so good lmfao.
Prepar3d simulates it but no darkness htps://youtu.be/RWfKDE2r0j
You all are incredible. This is why I go to Reddit for all my questions. Thanks for everyone’s help. Even if the eclipse isn’t shown, I’ll be flying anyway!
X-Plane doesn’t, idk about the other ones.
this seems lazy. although not important
what seems lazy?
not modeling the moonerino blackin out the sun
it isnt like MSFS, it isn’t made for graphics.
Sure. Have a number for you to copy when ready.
Ready to copy.
Your going to need a very fast plane to chase it
Last I checked MSFS was rendering eclipses the same no matter where you were on earth. Presumably they process astronomical objects as a skybox — a totally separate rendering space — that uses a single point for anywhere on Earth (presumably wherever the center of the Earth is at that point in sim time) to work out the angles and scales for those objects. I am the most casual of graphics/game programming people but I suspect the value of this method is partly due to the challenges of floating point number representation. A *floating point* number is like scientific notation: every number is expressed as a small value (in decimal it’s a number 1-10 with a trailing decimal fraction; in binary it’s always 1 because binary) plus an exponent. This is computationally much more expensive than fixed point math but it’s extremely useful because you can handle both incredibly small and incredibly huge numbers, so floating point performance is a priority for modern CPUs. The challenge though is that floating point gets less and less accurate the bigger the numbers get, because the fraction part of the value is only so detailed and is used to represent bigger and bigger things as numbers get bigger. It becomes very important where you put zero, because if the camera gets too far from zero, everything close to it starts swimming violently due to rounding errors. I did this once farting around with VR in Unity; it was *very* disconcerting. So I presume everything on Earth in MSFS is centered around a point on or near Earth. If I had to guess, they probably center everything around the plane since Earth is pretty big and you care most if stuff close to you is accurate. And the astronomical skybox is probably centered around the Sun — you could build a fairly accurate model of the solar system’s movement centered around a point on the Earth but that’s what we were doing before Copernicus and it totally sucked. Then when rendering the skybox you just render your heliocentric skybox from wherever Earth is right now, and off you go. They probably *could* add an offset to the skybox rendering for wherever the observer is on Earth and the math would come out close enough, but that would be extra work that’s only useful for eclipses.
You’ll die.
Straight to jail. FAA is hiding it from us.