Quick background: commercial airplane/helicopter pilot since 2003, worked in various conditions from northern europe to now flying in the US often at night over multi million cities, and also long term photographer/digital artist, most work at night.
This is mainly a cut’n’paste from my earlier posts regarding MSFS night lighting / degradation.
Subjective feelings aside, there’s a few features that were more realistic in the early alphas.
Lamp scaling/appearance, visibility range, lack of “Sepia mask” (more on this further down)
Here are some comparison-shots of Rio in the following order:
- Early Alpha (Initial alpha build - mid alpha Mar 2020)
- Release Build (Spring 2020 - Sep 2020)
- Update 5 (Sep 2020 - Apr 2021)
- SU3 (Apr 2021 - present)
Halfway through the alpha, the lamp textures got changed into the current fuzzy orbs fading in opacity instead of size. The lamp range was severely downgraded from realistic ranges to just a kilometer or two, unless using 4k and or resolution upscaling.
Also, the notorious “Sepia mask” was introduced, illuminating huge areas of the scene that IRL would be pitch black.
After many complaints, the mid alpha changes have been slowly/stubbornly reduced but we were still better off in many ways over a year ago in the early alphas.
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As you can see here, the constantly sized lamps becomes enormous fuzzy orbs in the distance.
Regarding the “Sepia mask”:
Here’s the low-res light mask that’s being used both in the world map and also to apply the terrain-glow in the sim.
Take a look of this comparison of real life Dubai vs MSFS release-build (and present in terms of “Sepia Mask”). MSFS is pretty much the opposite of real life using this sepia illumination tech:
Deserts shining in the night and roads being dark, most obvious if flying higher than 5,000 ft.
Here are two videos how the release version of MSFS night is simply just the daytime texture with a brown/sepia filter and a lowres mask.
Completely different from what it looks like IRL.
Here’s a comparison with a screenshot from a real video approach over LA that some user claimed was easily mistaken from the release-build, but comparing to the other versions, it’s obvious that the release-build looks the least like real life. (Engine photoshopped into on the MSFS screenshots.)
Unfortunately there’s no early alpha shots in this comparison.
Here’s another comparison of the different night tech versions we’ve seen so far…
- Early Alpha
- Release Build
- Update 5
- *Update 7 - World Update US (November 2020, nothing significant have been done after this)
Los Angeles:
Once again you can see the highly unrealistic “Power outage look” of the release build with lamps disappearing at extremely short distance.
& why the early alpha was superior imho, with higher lamp amounts, “glow” around clusters of bright lamps, and more saturation.
Release and current lamps look like overexposed photos, with little to none color retained around the core, with very little color variation as well. The whole night scene feels dull brown low dynamic range compared to reality (And early alphas.)
Also note the more “organic look” the residential area to the right, compared to the much too uniform lamp placement of the more recent builds. 1 year of development between the pictures and we’ve regressed quite a bit in that aspect.
Here’s another location I’ve been using to compare night tech of different versions.
Currently lamps are visible at a greater distance, but still degraded from early alpha in terms of visibility of lamps (smaller lamps visible much longer), and with the new “feature” floating lamps at medium/long distance highways, where lamps are floating +100ft higher than they should, until getting closer where they fade away and the “regular” lamps fade into visibility. (More on this in separate post).
(Note that the early alpha generated too many lights on rural roads that IRL wouldn’t have any lamps. But this can be solved in a multitude of ways proposed by the community in the various threads regarding that problem.)
Feels like we’ve wasted a whole year at this, the early alpha tech was in my opinion definitely the most promising tech, but instead of building from that, Asobo downgraded it horribly to something very different with the release-build, to slowly start reverting towards realism again, but with quite a few visual / realism shortcomings / mistakes that wasn’t present one year ago in the early alpha…
More info can be found in this thread: