In the night!

C’mon man, take a deep breath

I get that it’s easy to mistakenly read in an “underlying tone” in forum posts but I assure you there is none over here.
I was hoping all those comparisons I posted could be a good base for discussion instead of broad nonspecific and subjective statements.

I’m definitely curious what others think of the comparisons and in ideas of how it could be done different / better / more realistic.

If this is of no interest to you, given what was addressed and what was not, no problem.
Happy landings!

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My night images look nothing like yours - I do not see that massive terrain glow that you do.

In this image, the towns seems to be correctly illuminated, with the intervening countryside more or less pitch black.

Do you have HDR turned on or off?

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For sure, I was only referring to the cities. I’m sure not all global cities are perfectly lit.

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Ah ok, we’re only talking about the city night lighting. Yes, that could certainly be improved.

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Great post, I would say ‘I wish Asobo would listen…’ but during Alpha it was asked alot but they ignored it. A great shame.

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It looks quite good at the place you got that screenshot, especially closer to the horizon. And rendering individual lights for every town/city would be a FPS nightmare. So for close-to-the-horizon situations I’m all for it. But not as it is implemented now.

As soon as being watched closer and/or a steeper downward angle, it becomes apparent that it’s just a diffuse and uniform brightening of the daytime texture, the most prominent parts are bright rooftops and surfaces, that IRL would be pitch black. I’ll dig around to see if I some better comparison screenshots to show this.

But try flying over parts of the world with bright surfaces, especially deserts, like Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi and you’ll see what my screenshots show.

Applying a low res illumination mask will unintentionally illuminate adjacent unlit features, while IRL is much more like seeing a “road map”, strings of highway lights instead of huge evenly illuminated brown surfaces.

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Here are more examples from fclem33 with the proposed method of using pre-baked night texture overlay to reduce need of individual lamps illuminating ground at medium/long distances, AND getting rid of the Sepia Mask method once and for all…
(or preferably limiting it to shallow viewing angles / close to horizon)

Note that this was done by a lone amateur (and I mean that very respectfully), who created a software from scratch that generates these texture tiles procedurally out of OSM road vector data. (Dubai / Sharjah) , which can be done worldwide.

Desert/Sand areas are the worst affected in MSFS, and are used here to show why the Sepia Mask is a flawed approach only working somewhat ok in very specific situations.
Also, as you can see in the MSFS image, the resolution of the Sepia mask is way to low for creating satisfactory results, and even if high enough resolution existed and was bought world wide, it would still be a mono-color solution with few or none advantages over the free and procedurally generated much higher res texture shown below.


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It’s still down as long term fix over sim updates 6 & 7

It’s somewhat curious that they mess up something that wasn’t a problem to begin with(early alpha lamps, both close and long range), and then spend more than a year trying to fixing it, with admittedly less than satisfactory results… Instead of just rolling back to what looked great to begin with, and work from there…

I’m very interested in what will be released in a few months in those sim-updates, but very surprised by the statement that it’s only the long range lighting that needs fixing now that “much has been done to the close range lights” , even though they are far from as good looking as what they showed us during the initial alpha before the major downgrade last spring.

Statement about that the original night artist now is busy with other projects seems like an plausible explanation, perhaps with new artists trying to learn what night lighting might actually look like.

Even though they increased lamp visibility range, we still only have what seems to be about a 3rd of the early alphas range. And only a fraction of the total numbers of lamps visible at the same time. As well as huge pale fuzzy orbs with fading transparency instead of sharp defined and colorful light sources.

What an awesome post. Thank you for all this work. I think it’s embarrassing what Asobo has done here (sepia). Though, I’ll cut them some slack as they are developing lots of things, but, that really brings to light compared to real night lighting (pun intended). Thank you again.

And, yes, night lighting is important to me. When you see roads lit up that would never have street lights, and would normally have only a couple of cars, it gets annoying. Clearly, they’ve got some work to do.

This I totally understand. If you’ve ever been in a very complex development environment, you must know that, one, you can’t fix everything all at once, as all these systems interact with each other. And, being so complex and limited resource-wise, you have to be judicious about where you apply your resources when. I’m currently quarterbacking a huge development project, and each person can only work on pretty much one thing at a time. I myself have a long list of items I need to attend to, but, some of them have to wait until I finish others. Some of them I’ll carry so far so I can get them sketched in and so other development work can happen, but I won’t finish them until much later as other portions of the project have priority as to when they need to be done. I know what to do, but the work has to wait.

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