Render nighttime landscapes without lighting

[Leo Sutic]

This is a feature request.

Stellarium darkens the colors of landscapes depending on the amount of sunlight (that is, the time of day in the simulation). However, when using a landscape that was photographed at night and intended to only be used in Stellarium's "night" it is impossible to disable this behavior. The result is that the night-time landscape is further darkened and the resulting simulation view ends up being incorrect.

I would like a feature that would simply put the pixels of the landscape texture onto the screen unchanged, with no lighting being applied, so that the nighttime landscape looks the way it does at night.

Update: Based on what Alexander wrote, I'd like to change this request to
having Stellarium read a landscape/initial_brightness parameter not just from
config.ini (system wide) but also from landscape.ini (per-landscape override).

[gzotti (georg-zotti)]

I have thought of this a while ago. Maybe add a functionality to the landscapes to have two sets of textures, day/night, and blending between them: illuminated daylight vs fixed-brightness nightscape.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

But you can set landscape/initial_brightness parameter for controlling brightness of landscapes for night.

[Leo Sutic (leo-3)]

Alexander, that is precisely what I was looking for! Could this parameter be read from the landscape.ini file, instead of being system-wide?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

A fix has been committed as revision 6215 of the trunk branch in Stellarium's Bazaar repository at Launchpad:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~stellarium/stellarium/trunk/revision/6215

[Leo Sutic (leo-3)]

Legendary work, mate! Thank you!

[Victor Reijs (web-victor-reijs)]

I must do something wrong. I have the below landscape.ini file using Stellarium 0.13.1.
No matter what I put in minimal_brightness (I tried between 100, 1, 0 and -100), the landscape is not visible during the night, while my landscape is light green. I ticked the option 'Use brightness settings for landscape' in the View->Landscape menu.
Can someone help? Thanks.

All the best,

Victor

[landscape]
name = Rolls of Butter
author = Victor Reijs
description = Skyline made using HeyWhatsThat service: http://www.heywhatsthat.com/main-0904.html?view=UI3TGIMC
type = spherical
maptex = rollsofbutter.png
angle_rotatez=-90
minimal_brightness=0

[location]
planet = Earth
latitude = 51.819073
longitude = -9.499193
altitude = 140
atmospheric_extinction_coefficient=0.3
atmospheric_temperature=15
atmospheric_pressure=1013.25

[Leo Sutic (leo-3)]

Victor,

it's "initial_brightness", not "minimal_brightness".

try:

initial_brightness = 1.0

/LS

On 2015-02-11 14:35, Victor Reijs wrote:
> I must do something wrong. I have the below landscape.ini file using Stellarium 0.13.1.
> No matter what I put in minimal_brightness (I tried between 100, 1, 0 and -100), the landscape is not visible during the night, while my landscape is light green. I ticked the option 'Use brightness settings for landscape' in the View->Landscape menu.
> Can someone help? Thanks.
>
>
> All the best,
>
>
> Victor
>
> [landscape]
> name = Rolls of Butter
> author = Victor Reijs
> description = Skyline made using HeyWhatsThat service: http://www.heywhatsthat.com/main-0904.html?view=UI3TGIMC
> type = spherical
> maptex = rollsofbutter.png
> angle_rotatez=-90
> minimal_brightness=0
>
> [location]
> planet = Earth
> latitude = 51.819073
> longitude = -9.499193
> altitude = 140
> atmospheric_extinction_coefficient=0.3
> atmospheric_temperature=15
> atmospheric_pressure=1013.25
>