Disable Rural Street Lighting at Night

I think every other orb on the other side will help with the pattern pearl look. Also make the orbs dimmer and smaller. The street light should light up the road not the sky because they have light covers over them. Thank you :slight_smile:

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Fixing this in a realistic fashion is certainly doable, even without existing map data that would directly translate to street light positions. It’s just a matter of these poor devs at Asobo already stretched thin enough as it is trying to recreate the whole planet.

Masking out the lights using the nighttime satellite data is a great idea. I was thinking the Blackshark AI fix for this would be to actually compute the road density in a square area, the building density in that area, and then use that as a baseline for how rural or urban a location is. If it’s super dense, you could start laying strings of pearls on the roads, but as it tapers out to a mile by mile farm grid, maybe just one light at highway intersections.

This reminds me of the lightning. They realized they could add street lights based on the road data, and lightning based on some atmospheric variable, and then they just blew it up everywhere without taking a step back to see if it was actually a good idea. Maybe it’s because they’ve got a feature list a million miles long that they’re trying to plow through with insufficient staff, so everything gets a minimal, rough shod treatment.

The lighting in the Halloween challenge is really jarring actually. I felt like I was in the lamp section at the hardware store.

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I’m flying in rural Indiana at night. Every Interstate, highway, and country road has street lights. That’s absolutely not the case. Even Interstates in rural areas ONLY have street lights at entrance/exit ramps. There are no streetlights at all on long stretches between ramps, and no lighting of any other road except when in a town.

Please fix this. It looks ridiculous and God-awful.

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For the love of God, even if Asobo doesn’t want to go through the trouble of trying to update lighting again can we at LEAST please just have an option in settings where we can use “legacy lighting” that was present before the patch to the lighting? Please?

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Bump! I fly mostly in “rural” areas (not too much around major airports) and it looks WILDLY unrealistic. The only lights on even the interstate highways outside cities should be vehicles and MAYBE exit ramps.

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I think, in relation to street lights on rural roads (outside settlements), Asobo tried to make a mix effect between Street Lamps and vehicle lights:

  • in rural arees, it is strange to see continously street lamps, exepct for highways in Belgium.
  • on the other side, modelling moving cars for night light would be very frame intense / expensive, because you see more cars by light (at night), than visible by day. And in an moving airplane, farer vehicle lights are less in moving than foreground cars close and down your plane
 so the trick is to show static lights, represneting cars, for far distances, where yourself wont see the very slow moving, as your eyes are more moving between instrument check and outside panning. I think this is a good compromise for frame/calculate saving effects and perception


my suggestion for Asobo would be:

  1. calculate aprox cars for each country ( List of countries by vehicles per capita - Wikipedia)
  2. take a worldwide raster of population density ( World Population Density Interactive Map (luminocity3d.org))
  3. blur this raster of density to 3x
  4. calculate a raster worldwide (e.g. 20kmx20km) and calculate the car density for each cell, based on population density and cars per country
  5. calculate the amount of cars on these roads, with a classification like:
  • main roads and highways have 3x to normal roads
  • roads inside of urban area have 2x to other roads
  • at least 1 car for each cel 20kmx20km, if any road exists within

  • depending on blur density, the amount of cars increases
  1. depending on this, create the static vehicle lightsnumber randomly in distance each to another for these roads

The values above are mostly not optimal and some adjust in a trial and error manner are surely necessary

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Just wanted to throw out the idea that perhaps light pollution data can be used to “paint” areas that should have no street lights on rural roads. I used

https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/

to find my current house in a Bortle class 2 area. Perhaps anything class 3 and lower could have street lamps disabled? That’d be roughly accurate to my experience in real life.

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Wow! I just checked out that website and that would a fantastic way to easily map where there should be no street lights!

And as you said, it wouldn’t be perfect. Unlit roads around urban areas would still be lit in the sim. But removing street lights from class 3 and lower would make most roads that shouldn’t be lit, not lit!

It would be a vast improvement over the current situation!

Especially in very remote areas, Such as the Dalton highway in Alaska USA and the Dempster highway in Yukon Canada. Both of which are currently lit up like Christmas trees :crazy_face:

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I only saw this after my previous post, and it’s even better!

There are several great ways to implement more accurate street lighting in this thread, but this one is my favourite by far!

Especially because if Asobo/Microsoft already have the rights to use this data, there shouldn’t be any additional expense to any aquire data(which I’m sure will factor into their decision). It should be quite easy to implement too!

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