New Panel Lighting

X-Plane 920 will have a pile of new panel features...this video shows the new "spot light" system. Basically you can define up to 3 gray-scale masks that define lit regions on your panel. 3 separate rheostats control the lighting levels independently.



I was excited when Blogger got its own video facility - saves me the hassle of keeping YouTube account active. Unfortunately the video quality is, well, "web-ish" at best. What you're supposed to see is independent control of instrument lighting, panel and dash lighting, and flood lighting.

The performance hit is pretty tame:

• The system works by recomputing the panel texture from sources when lighting or panel brightness conditions change. That doesn't happen that often, so most of the time, the system costs nothing.
• Panel layers are RLE compressed in RAM when not in use, so they aren't that big.
• If you have more than one core, the lighting recompute happens on the second core, which makes it virtually unnoticeable.

So the only case you'd notice this is if you crank the panel light rheostat really fast or fast-foward time (from light to dark) on a single-core machine.