It would be interesting to see what commercial pilots think of the current state of night lighting.
For night lighting, I think all of our opinions are also valid, if we have experience viewing the city from the window of a plane. Because if you sat as a passenger in a plane with a window, you are seeing the same thing that a commercial pilot sees, albeit from the side view.
When it comes to flying the planes, I agree that the input of certified pilots is the most important. When it comes to night lighting, I think anybody that has sat in the window of a plane for a night landing and had a view of the city has a valid opinion too.
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On 4K and ultra wide displays the night lights are so blurry that flying is quite not possible. No improvements of this issue introduced by patch #5.
No apologies necessary, that was a really nice video, better than anything I’ve done, which have a lower production value than your average 1970’s Dr Who episode.
The one thing missing for those city night flights are cars! White headlights, and red tail lights. They look so good in X-Plane, and one of the things I miss.
I too think it would look better if lights cast down instead of all directions. I don’t think it would eat performance. You see these building block the light for everything that’s behind them? Then it’s just a matter of putting a cap on top of these lights and the rest will just happen.
I also agree with the other user saying that we shouldn’t try to replicate what a camera sees, but what human eyes see. I bet most of us haven’t done a night landing in months and thus don’t have anything to compare too.
Rural streets probably need fewer lights. (in some of these pics, I haven’t tested my local area yet)
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The night lighting is better no doubt.
We need now darkest nights and fainter stars.
Here’s some cities I tested
(Sorry for the mouse pointer lol)
I find it strange that a vocal few have an issue with the uniformity of street lighting and think its not realistic. Street lights are very deliberately spaced at set interval’s by highways authorities, they are not randomly positioned so of course they look uniform. If the sim mimics that then its reasonably accurate. Rural lighting is a different matter, there appears to be a bit too much of it.
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About rural streets/roads we should report it. But the only way I see them fixing it is IF they have the streets/roads tagged by types. I think OSM does that, but I don’t know about Bing Maps.
If they don’t have them tagged right, things will change globally. Or we will have darker cities or brighter rural areas.
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While I appreciate the wanting to improve the below airliner level night lighting even more, it’s important to recognize that this is by far the best overall night lighting we’ve seen in a civil flight simulator…out of the box. I’ll take this any day over XP’s “squares of light” night lighting. Not to mention, XP’s often praised night lighting out of the box is terrible, and requires, surprise, a reworked lights file from the community to make it bearable.
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A little night lighting test i’ve done myself to show others.
This is 1440p Ultra preset with HDR enabled.
It seems a bit brighter with HDR than without.
Landing at Amsterdam which got ruined again unfortunately by the a320 banking bug at final.
But it’s to show the lights anyway hehe.
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Nice video.
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Thanks for your video. BTW, you are on selected speed right? Why do you manually turn down the speed to 139 knots when you land, even though your auto-thrust is on? I thought auto-thrust was supposed to automatically take care of the speed when the A320 lands?
So is there a need to still manually adjust the speed even with auto-thrust on?
100% agreed.
New night lighting is a definite improvement. Two observations that would improve it a bit more…
First, decrease rural road lights about 90-95%. Along rural roads only the occasional home or farm house has a street light at the end of their drive on the road. This adjustment alone will increase realism a great deal.
Second, in photogrammetry cities make two adjustments: increase light intensity of skyscraper windows (currently too dim), and randomize the number of windows that are lit in the buildings, as not all offices leave their lights on all night. Another big improvement and added realism.
These suggestions merely echo what some others have already stated, I am just adding my agreement on how to further enhance night lighting. I think the improvements made in the current update are a definite step forward. 
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The video is a nice showcase. The lighting is so over the top. Especially towards the horizon, it does not fade at all. The horizon line and below looks like some christmas decoration on steroids. Definitely not good.
lights won’t fade that much unless specific conditions:
Don’t take the picture as a global intensity refference but as a reference in terms of balance between close and far intensity. This is close to what I see with my eyes trought the window (not global intensity)
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Oh ok, didn’t know that. Thanks for notifying.
Oh no, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mean to assume therefore anyone who didn’t hold a PPL or an ATP didn’t have valid input on night lighting. Of course everyone’s input is valid.
I merely was pointing out that I’ve never personally seen a post from someone who flies for a paycheck comment anything about this topic - not that their views invalidates everyone else’s.
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Light bulbs need to be more random in general. It looks totally artificial and fake right now. They need : random brightness, coloration ,positions, directions, Size of halos and size of ground splashes etc.
They also look a little larger than they should be. Highways look extremely uniform when they shouldn’t from a head on perspective.
A solution for the rural lighting would be a secondary filter using an inverted Black Marble map from NASA. That way they could filter out the rural streets and national highways with no lights , while keeping the urban areas and lighted highways as it is in reality with very high accuracy.
For distant lights(and for closer ones) they could add an overlay effect(for the light source texture) that makes the light sources to shimmer/flicker. This way they could simulate the atmospheric effect for distant lights (like twinkling stars etc).
Generally (and I see that many people miss this when looking at real night photos) ,when looking at a highway for example, you mostly see the ground splash from all the lights. You see a river of yellow light reflected off the ground, and not that much the light bulbs/sources themselves. The street light poles prevent the light that originates from the bulbs , from going upwards towards the sky. 90 % of what you see is light reflected on the street , or as I said the ground splash from all the lights.
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