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.