Out in the middle of nowhere oregon. Farmland and logging roads lit up like downtown freeways??
This is so frustrating, I didn’t see anything wrong with the night lighting before this. Makes me want to avoid night flying now because these bright laser beams in between cities are so inaccurately distracting, they’re the only thing I can look at.
I tend to agree with this in the areas I fly as well. In Canada for instance, lights along the highway usually only happens within a few kilometers of a turnoff and around residential areas. I’ve noticed some other things missing from a night safety perspective as well. Are there no cell towers, or radio towers or anything? I haven’t come across any yet…I know alot of these things seem small in perspective, but everything else visually is so outstanding that immersion things like that stand out even more. This is an aspect I am not sure many people have considered… I digress…you are correct sir! Some things are still amiss with the lighting. Even on the landing challenge I noticed a lot of floating orb lights while passing by the first hill on the far left side. Also…seeing the lights in approach without poles kind of makes your brain go, huh? Again…not a big deal, just a little detail. Otherwise, in general from what I’ve seen in this latest release it has indeed improved, but like many other things in this sim I guess its still an unfinished work. Take your time but hurry up development team! Hopefully this feedback is useful to development.
It’s FINE in the cities, and if I only flew over major cities, I’d agree that the lighting has been improved. But sadly, geographically, for most of the world, this is a downgrade.
Yes… night flying in Saskatchewan is terrible now. Msfs lit like a Christmas tree. Reality however is masses of dark land punctuated with distant villages and towns.
They could tie it to the density of buildings placed by the Blackshark AI. Less buildings = less or no lights.
There are global light pollution maps that could be overlaid on top of the OSM data to determine areas where lighting should not be generated.
The density of the road network itself is also a good indicator in a lot of areas.
Whatever they were doing before looked better in rural areas. They could just go back to that.
I will be avoiding night flying entirely now. I’ve spent a significant portion of my life in rural areas and seeing them lit up like this just kills all immersion for me.
The night lighting before Update 5 had issues ending up as the top 5 most voted bugs.
One of them, related to this thread, was that before the update, lamps faded away to invisibility after just a kilometer… There where as many roads before, with light even though they should be completely dark. But due to to the earlier light model, you couldn’t see those lights up until getting real low and close.
And, the night lighting had a much more pronounced “Sepia Mask” illuminating huge areas like a radioactive wasteland, areas that should be completely dark.
Here’s a summary of some of the stuff that was wrong with the night lighting before the update: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/night-lighting-terrain-emits-light/178647/52
The earlier night lighting contained some simplified tricks that might fool many eyes, in the same way 2d clouds looks very realistic to many simmers… But volumetrics are more of the real deal instead of “visual tricks”.
Starting to make the night lighting more realistic, Asobo finally increased lamp visibility back to more realistic distances (IRL highway lamps can be seen all the way into the horizon with the right atmospheric conditions(And even from space)), and not fading into invisibility after just a kilometer.
But, with increased visibility, many other issues became apparent, that was previously hidden due to the earlier extremely low lamp visibility range. All of a sudden, you see exponentially more lamps. And that’s why the lacking variation becomes much more apparent, than with having just a handful of lamps visible close to you. And the wrongfully illuminated roads, like I mentioned before. This can be solved by a number of methods, one of them proposed here: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/terrible-night-lighting-after-patch-5/310086/181
and https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/disable-rural-street-lighting-at-night-strings-of-pearls/151435/15
And, there should definitely be some kind of brightness/color variation noise implemented as well. Usually, various trees and houses obscure the line of sight between pilot and lamps, but currently lamps are getting drawn much further out than the vegetation/building LOD range, making most lamps have zero obstructions, and therefore zero variation in brightness.
I don’t have an answer why lamp visibility was increased before tackling the above challenges, since it looks very artificial at the moment. But understanding what’s being done and why, we will be seeing night lighting considerable more realistic than before, hopefully sooner rather than later.
