I would love to be able, but we are not allowed. 
It is not that it looked 1000 times better, but it had an overall more realistic look to me, with intenser lights at far distances and better fade out. In close distances it looks better now with more variation. But the orange tone, darkness when no lights, and far away lighting was much better back then imho. Most of us were AMAZED with night lighting in the alpha, so that must mean something.
Yeah, but I think people complaining about intensity are refering to “close” range lights. Imo I think it looks quite nice when close, actually I think it is where the night looks best now.
this looks great, intensity wise, to me.
A different thing is, that the area the bulbs illuminate, seems to be some times too big:
The buildings here seem to be too illuminated in both, intensity and area. However, I suspect this is a clear limitation due to performance constraints, as in real life, city lights are not spheric orbs that emits light in all directions so they cast shadows upwards, and thats what looks off in this situation. I don’t think this can be improved, it would take waaay too much performance and it wouldn’ t be worth it, but definitely, could give the impression that lights are too intense, when they might not be, just the area the lights illuminates have no limits because there are not casted shadows of the lamps.
So it seems like many people in this thread agree that in city lights up close is quite good.
Rural places aside, I have read this argument a thousand times.
While it is valid sometimes, it is NOT always a valid argument. Saying that a camera’s recording is not looking like what the eye would perceive is misleading and not totally true. Most of the times videos/cameras have some post processing to make things brighter/darker, sharper, etc. but you actually can make a video that looks very close to what your eyes saw in a given situation. Granted, the dynamic range of a human eye is bigger than most cameras (and most if not all screens) but the overall intensity/darkness balance of a recording can very well match what the eye perceived in terms of ratios. So, there could be videos that won’t be useful as reference, but there could be others that are great references, it depends on how these videos were recorded.
In my experience, lights should be much brighter than they are now (at mid to far distances only), I just have to look through my window and see along the 20km+ (65k ft) I can see (at ground level, where pollution and fogs are more prominent) and realize that lights look MUCH brighter than FS20 at the moment.
Yup!, at least I think so. I have no complains in close range night lighting, well, excep bugs 
:
duplicated lights all over the place.
Yet it still hinders the travelling of light.
Sure, just too much imo.
So only Alpha & Beta testers are allowed in that thread? I would like to see the screenshots in that thread too but I was not an Alpha or Beta tester.
Have you tried accessing the thread? I don’t think there are any restrictions on what you can read on the forum. Asobo/Microsoft just don’t want alpha screenshots posted out of context, but you should be able to see them.
Lighting looks waaaaay too uniform. There is no way IRL you could make out individual points of light with that amount of precision at distance.
It looks like they have stuck LED strips everywhere.
Has anyone else been seeing light that are floating 100s of ft up in the air??
No, he can’t see those threads. We can see them because we are in the alpha insiders group.
A couple of weeks ago I missed the alpha tag and the alpha area of the forum became inaccessible to me.
mmmm, nope, I think it is perfectly possible and realistic.
the problem are the duplicated lights, which are all over the place.
I’d like to see some shimmering and more white lights and other colors of lights as variation
check this video at the timestamp i linked with a XP11 mod.
looks quite real:
Just tried the new patch and the brighter lighting looks great. They did probably go overboard on some of the street lights - I’m not even in a particularly rural area yet the state highway nearby has at least double the density of street lamps it ought to. Still, it’s a distinct improvement.
Hi,
I tried to re-create this scene with a custom camera on TBM930 which is the only plane I (sort of) know how to fly in MSFS. Apologies for the landing and taxing to the wrong gate. My HOTAS ordered in August has not been shipped yet…
Yes, very visible in the Halloween Landing Challenge. Maybe they’re ghosts?
True. I mean, it looks pretty cool and helps a lot with orientation at night but I think it’s far from being unrealistic. I’m FL380 feels a little like making a low-level VFR flight.
Actually that first video by the OP as a side effect also points out another lighting problem that is very visible IRL when compared to the sim - the lack of forward illumination within the sim for both landing and taxi lights, but that’s another subject too.
Thanks for making this video. The lights are even brighter in the real life Chicago video. But I wouldn’t make the lights brighter in the game because people are already complaining about how bright they are already.
