So I think the night lighting is much better in patch #5. All that is required is some tweaking on Asobo’s part, especially in rural areas. Let’s look at some real life video of night lighting from planes above the city so that we can compare it to what Asobo has done for patch #5.
So you can see in the Chicago video, the night lighting when we enter the denser parts of Chicago is being represented well in patch #5. What patch #5 doesn’t do well is the the night lighting for rural areas. You can also see in the Chicago video for the rural areas, that the night lighting is much more sparse.
I think what Asobo needs to do is make the lighting along the roads in the rural areas more sparse. At the moment, the highways and roads in the rural areas are lit up, because the number of lamp posts in rural areas is too dense.
Having said that, I like the lighting in cities now. I’m sure Asobo can also tweak the lighting in cities further.
I agree it is better now, however, there are many issues yet:
Light bulbs are too big at distance, in fact, it seems like they are barely being affected by distance (or not enough)
light bulbs are too affected by natural atmospheric haze, they should be brighter at distance. (I have edited this point, as I said the opposite I meant, now is correct, sorry)
“Sepia mask” is still there, not sure why, whyyyy? . There wasn’t ANY of it in the good old night lighting alphas and it looked incredible, why is this still being used for near/mid radious?
Light bulbs intensity seems too low at mid to far distances, which make them look like they are not LIGHTS!. i think the light orbs should be intenser at farther distances.
Yeah, however, note how in real life, light is much stronger far away. In the sim now, it looks way too weak a couple of miles away. Light is light, and will “shine” very far away.
A slightly smaller bulbs (far ones) but with increased intensity (only far away too) and with less intensity degradation due to distance haze would look much, much better imho.
for example?. Other than being occluded by clouds, rain or terrain can’t think of anything else. At the moment live weather is not using aerosol or other parameter to account for visibility so the distance haze is pretty much constant and to me, the light is way too weak at mids to far distances. Simply watching real life footage demonstrates this.
That indeed looks a bit hazy but still what @usamor is saying is quite correct. Live weather has no effect on aerosol density and hence the visibility is always cavok unless you run into clouds on the ground which seems to imitate cat III conditions.
The rural night lighting has been off for a while but it is worse with this latest patch. Looks like strings of pearls in the night over farmland. I believe Sebastian said they changed the texture. This works great for cities, but not for rural areas. I think they need to create some logic that can differentiate rural roads from cities. I opened a wishlist item a while back here in case you’d like to upvote -> Rural Street Lighting at Night
The problem is, some people think the lights are already too bright. I’ve been reading comments from other people on the brightness of the lights. I think it’s better if Asobo leaves the brightness for now. I would rather Asobo work on making lights more sparse and less dense in the rural areas.
You can not compare Youtube night videos taken with a camera to what the human eye perceives. The huge bloom and the high brightness, especially of distant lights, is just not what you see with your eyes. And this is especially true once eye adaption to dark conditions has set in. They should model their ‘realism’ on what the eye sees, not what a cheap GoPro from 2005 sees. The lights at night right now are totally overdone. Too many of them, especially at rural areas, and too bright with apparently no any fading with distance.
So this patch looks better for me, based on what I have experienced inside a plane, for what cities look like at night. What Asobo did for night lighting for patch #5 within a city looks much more realistic than patch #4.
Where I agree with everyone else is about the rural area lighting. Rural areas aren’t as lit as MSFS and the lighting is more sparse. So Asobo just needs to tweak the lighting for rural areas.
As far as I know, Alpha/Beta testers aren’t allowed to post internal screenshots from the early versions, but you can see some of them yourself in the Tech Alpha Discussion -> Screenshots thread
. There wasn’t ANY of it in the good old night lighting alphas and it looked incredible, why is this still being used for near/mid radious?
