I love MSFS, don’t get me wrong, but I’m tired of flying during the day. When I land at an airport, it’s so dark, and it’s really depressing. I know the AI traffic is another story, but this game is not usable at night at all. It breaks the immersion. During the day, it’s fine, but I refuse to fly while sitting at my desk at 9 PM and faking the time to noon or whatever. I don’t mind buying MSFS 2024, but this issue cannot be present in that release.
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Are you saying that whatever airport you’re at doesn’t have any decent runway/taxi lighting? There are plenty of airports that look awesome at night time, especially ones with city lighting nearby, perhaps with a cloud deck to reflect it. Not sure I understand the issue…nighttime is, well, dark, unless you’re in Alaska or South Australia in the summertime.
While I always use live weather, I have no qualms about changing the time when I’m flying. When I’m on Vatsim at nighttime and following ATC taxi instructions, I’ll almost always switch it to dusk or dawn so I can see my way around.
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I’ve been running this mod for a while now and it’s been a big improvement at night.
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There’s a Wishlist Topic about this!
Looks good, I hadn’t heard of that mod before, I’ll have to get it!
You probably want to invest in Air manager. You can create your own instruments. One of the instruments I use is a Radar Altimeter.
It shows you how far from the ground you are. You can also programme it to make a sound at specific heights.
invest in third party airport addons or nightlighting, runway lighting and landing light mods they are all available on flightsim.to for free, also landing at airports in really life is really dark, especially the smaller ones
I’m not sure what the actual complaint in the OP is, since it wasn’t described other than ‘don’t like night’.
Airports ARE NOT brightly lit. Pilots flying at night go to a lot of effort to protect their night vision for that task and one way to bugger it right up is to have brightly lit concrete all over the place.
You need to see the surface of the runway as you land, but thats about it. You need to have the edge lighting so you know where not to be. Taxi edge lights are different color so you know where they are.
But what you DO NOT want is floodlights illuminating everything brightly. Its horrid.
Now – This isn’t easy to translate into a computer sim. Thats probably what the real problem is… The solution, if you’re able, is to do night flying in a dark room… Because if you were on the flightdeck of a plane at night, you’d be in a dark room.
It’s just exactly the same as how we don’t drive around in our cars at night with all the interior lights on and expect to see anything outside. The difference is, driving a car, its great to have bright lights outside. Not so with flying.
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Agreed. The lighting is so poor it can be a struggle to find taxiways sometimes. In reality taxiway lighting especially the green lighting is much brighter than shown on the sim and of course apron areas are extensively floodlit.
Then there’s the aircraft landing lights themselves which again in reality light they ground up much better than you see on the sim.
I fly in VR so room lighting makes not difference. The airport is unrealistic dark like there is not power at the airport. I do not want constructions light all around the airport to look a daytime but look at this picture. ? Is it real? I doubt it. I will try the mod to have at least the gates light up.
The area around the terminal is too dark, I agree.
The runways and taxiways really aren’t far from how it would be.
Flying in urban areas, one of my flight instructors once said (and it has served me well), when you’re trying to find the airport, look for the dark hole in the city, there is almost always an airport there. (unless its a lake, of course). So, if you know approximately where your airport is, and you see a black hole in the city at that approximate location… That’s almost certainly the airport.
I also agree that the landing lights in FS are too weak. Even in small planes with less lighting on them, in that last 20 or 40 feet, they will nicely illuminate the surface. MSFS is a miss in this area. You do need to see some surface detail to work out your flare and touchdown. But its probably less than you think, unless you’ve flown a plane in the dark for real. The lighting is really pretty subtle at most airports. But to your fully dark adjusted eye, its easy to see.
One of the problems with conveying this on a screen is that your screen is backlit, and the real world is not. So even in a dark scene (VR or not) you’re getting a lot of light blasted into your face, and since that light is generally more blue (daylight) in hue, your eyes respond to it and dark scenes end up darker than intended.
TL:DR, there is a lot to unpack when you get into trying to show an eye a realistic night scene using any kind of electronic device.
Just remember taxiway and runway lights are dark. Generally darker than the surrounding city areas, and darker than street/highway lights.
Terminals and aprons on larger airports could use some more apron lighting, I agree. Maybe a smaller light shining down on the default hangar models at smaller airports would be good too.
In many airports runway lights can be increased in brightness if there’s bad visibility or rain etc. But if it’s not, and they haven’t set the lights to normal, it actually gets too bright, as your eyes are accustomed to the darkness before landing.
I believe military airports do not light up at night. That’s been my experience anyway.
Custom airports have better lighting than generic.
I fly almost exclusively at dusk and dawn. I enjoy the lighting at those times. You can’t see all the warts in the landscape, and the light show is nice.
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Again, it’s just hard to fly in MSFS at night when I am flying at night in XP12 and it’s such a world of difference! The default airports there feel ALIVE at night (as they do during the day).
Default and autogen airports have terrible night lighting. No doubt about it. Some 3rd party ones are better, and that mod certainly helps quite a bit.
But even without modding, to say it’s “unusable” at night is rather dramatic. I’ve done all kinds of night flying in said airports without the mod. It’s definitely more difficult and less enjoyable, but hardly impossible or unusable.
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Maybe what you are seeing is a realistic simulation of what the MSFS Avatar pilots see at night - with their sunglasses still on. !!
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I did a VR night flight in the X12 demo the other day. The lighting is sooo much better than FS2020. Like shockingly better.
No intention of bashing FS2020 (it’s still a great sim, apart from the occasional crash) but the night lighting is NOT good.
You might want to contribute to this whishlist in that case, detailing what you believe could be improved.