The Stars in the Sim are beautiful, however, they’re fully visible under any lighting conditions, even in a brightly lit area.
In real life, the darker the area you are in, & the more distant you are to light sources, the brighter the stars are.
If you’re in a brightly lit cockpit at the gates, you would’nt be able to see many stars, but at cruise level with all the lights dimmed you would be able to see better starlight than most places on the ground.
Yes, I know it’s a very small factor, & not a big issue at all, but it would add it’s small little bit to the immersion of the Sim.
I get the best results from an aircraft with a bubble canopy because they usually can climb above 34000, and they have autopilot for hands free viewing. Also, play with your monitor presets to get the best results in low light conditions. My monitor has a Theater mode that gives the least amount of color banding in the sky at night. You may also want to research 8-bit vs 10-bit vs 14-bit color support if you are shopping for a new monitor. The higher the color saturation, the lower the color banding in low light conditions. I hope this helps.
I know it’s not correct, but I like to see the stars at night over cities. Hopefully, the world will eventually reduce air pollution and clean up it air, together with reducing light pollution, so we can again see stars over cities.
ok, I’m probably dreaming, but in the mean time, lets keep the stars to see the world how it should be.
It would indeed be nice to have those tiny little things done correctly. But I’d also be glad to have those on the back burner for a while until the bigger issues are fixed.
I’m glad many things have been coming along nicely the last few months, although there’s still a lot to be done. Looking forward to next week.
This is something that really stands out to me. Not only do you see many, many more stars than you do in real life, the sky itself is more or less blue rather than black. Forget about light pollution (even though I really would like adjustments for that), the brightness of the nightsky needs to be adjusted just with regard to where the sun is.
very starry skies and no-light airports at night I would like asobo/microsoft to sort out the issue of the sky at night and default airports without lighting. flying at night is very strange and surreal with the absurd amount of stars in the sky, looking more like the milky way and getting confused with traffic. to the horizon which should be slightly bluish and completely dark and with unreal stars very visible. my suggestion is to reduce this absurd amount of stars at night. and the issue of airports… we know that we have few detailed airports in the sim, and it would be very interesting to have lights illuminating the default airports, especially in Brazil where I fly a lot since we don’t have detailed updates for south americavery starry skies and no-light airports at night I would like asobo/microsoft to sort out the issue of the sky at night and default airports without lighting. flying at night is very strange and surreal with the absurd amount of stars in the sky, looking more like the milky way and getting confused with traffic. to the horizon which should be slightly bluish and completely dark and with unreal stars very visible. my suggestion is to reduce this absurd amount of stars at night. and the issue of airports… we know that we have few detailed airports in the sim, and it would be very interesting to have lights illuminating the default airports, especially in Brazil where I fly a lot since we don’t have detailed updates for south america.
I posted this in the locked 2024 forum, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t get washed away (not sure if that’s what happened when they made that forum private).
Anyway, I think it would be awesome if MSFS 2024 used a source like Dark Site Finder or Dark Sky Map to use as a source where they can tune the visibility of the night sky based on where you are on the world. So near a major city (the white areas on the map) you would see no stars, but if you are flying over a dark area (like the middle of the ocean) then the night sky would open up and you would see the brilliant deep-space sky. It could also be a function of altitude, so if you are above LAX at 40,000 ft you would still see the deep-space sky just fine (not sure if this is actually true though, maybe an airline pilot can confirm).
Imagine taking off from LAX which has basically no visible stars, to then be at FL400 with the amazing milky way view like we got in the Tech Alpha, and then on approach at Las Vegas with a nice stary sky, but of course not being able to see the milky way. This would really enhance the realism and make those moments of seeing that beautiful milky way extra special.
Asobo is already doing that since MSFS 2020, I believe the NASA Black Marble data is used for both light pollution as well as distant city ground glow texture (the infamous Sepia Mask)
Oh ok I see, it was missing in the MSFS 2024 tech alpha so they had not done it before. I know it was just an alpha though with many features missing so hopefully it’s there in the release version!
I think the biggest issue now is that the star background texture is just a flat low dynamic range texture, with no respect to sky brightness / limiting magnitude deciding how many stars that should be visible (also taking light pollution into factor).
This nightsky-texture scales very badly to different resolutions / zoom-levels as well, “eating stars” when scaled down while milky way is still clearly visible, the opposite of what’s visible in real life.
