Night lighting seems to have a persistent grey haze that I cannot get rid of. With MSFS 2020, I was able to get rid of it in VR by playing around with OpenXR Toolkit post processing by crushing the black levels a little bit. I use a Pimax Crystal which has local dimming with pure black levels. After adjusting the colors with OpenXR Toolkit, I managed to achieve night lighting that was actually 100% dark where it should be completely dark.
Unfortunately I cannot seem to get OpenXR Toolkit working with MSFS 2024, and this sim doesn’t have any color/brightness settings so I cannot change it.
Please consider at least adding an option to specifically target the night brightness. I want to use my Pimax Crystal’s local dimming display to its true potential.
Here is a photo edit I made showcasing the issue and how I would like it fixed. It is best viewed on a bright screen and preferably OLED (or a monitor with good black levels):
Before (No Moon)
This looks HORRIBLE on the Pimax Crystal
After (No Moon)
And during a full moon:
Before:
After:
People can argue that this change would make flying at night too difficult to see on a monitor, and for that I agree. But a VR headset is a much different environment than a monitor where there is no external light that can reflect off the screen making it harder to see. Especially with how egregious it looks with no moon.
Furthermore, after analizing the first screenshot in GIMP, so much color information is just missing from the darker end of the spectrum. Surely this isn’t necessary?
P.S. MSFS 2020 has this exact same problem. If this fix is considered for MSFS 2024, please consider backporting it to 2020 as well.
1 Like
Night textures are still a disaster! The land in desert areas still omit light at night and its very unrealistic and ugly! Please figure out a way to fix this!!!
2 Likes
This issue is now partially fixed since one of the recent patches. They fixed the first example image when the moon isn’t visible. However I still think the moonlight and the light polluted areas are too bright. If the light pollution was as bad in real life as it is in-game I would be able to walk in the unlit areas and see just fine, which obviously isn’t the case IRL. The same point with the moonlight. When the full moon is out it feels like a post-processing effect trying to make daylight video footage look like night.
3 Likes
Well I did 2 night flights recently in real life, and it was pitch black outside. You couldn’t see any clouds. Lighted Areas like cities were visible but everything with no lighting was pitch black. In the flightsim you can see like everything, clouds, the ground area with no lighting etc.
Please fix that! It is so annoying!
2 Likes
Couldnt agree more with this!
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The scenery night lighting is still completely off.
It should generally be a lot darker, looking from cruise level, with much higher contrast and much more smaller detailed lighting. Right now it looks like all cities and small towns have their own big lamp shining down on them, lighting up big areas equally.
The screenshot speaks for itself:
This is a random picture from Google, perhaps from a lower altitude, but you get the idea of how it should be:
The same goes for clouds being lit up. This effect has to be way more local.
Generally speaking, the lighting in this game is weird, cockpit lights being way to bright and airport light being off (Please look at this post). This is one thing i genuinely think MSFS2020 does better.
4 Likes
Yeah the black levels are bad in VR. There needs to be a way to adjust this in-game - please!
2 Likes
I agree the night lighting needs major overhaul.
Cities do not look vibrant, e.g. they do not glow and glitter at night especially when weather conditions are clear. The POIs are not even visible until you fly very close and even then some of them are completely dark, such as bridges and other POIs within the photogrammetry radius.
It’s just not convincing and I’m now finding the greyish-brownish sepia mask really annoying. HDR needs to be reworked or improved at night to make the sky and ground look pitch black. It’s just too brown and washed out, very weird and not what you see IRL when flying at night. It’s as if there is a constant haze or fog on the ground, making everything clearly visible even at midnight with clear weather conditions!
The contrast, black levels, HDR calibration, everything needs a drastic improvement.
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This is a probable duplicate of the bug reported in 2024, currently WIP for MSFS2024 SU4 (apologies if you are talking 2020). The screenshots I’ve seen look like a reasonably dramatic improvement.
I was referring to 2024 only.
