It looks so unnatural compared to real life

Something with color is wrong. I am not an expert for colors and lights techniques but it’s so obvious that any real life clip from YouTube looks so better than in this (and any other) game.

Can someone who is expert or has real knowledge about colors and light shed some light (pun intended) about this strange problem. I am using same monitor, same settings so something about pixels coloring or whatever hide the answer about this … If we realize what is missing maybe we can improve visual representation of Real World.

All games including this looks like drawing, like cartoon not like real thing… Why? There must be good explanation…

An example :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqpOGSq8KXE

and look at the wing on the left side . It looks so unnatural and fake it hurts my eyes. Literally

and sky behind no depth looks like panel or drawing board … Please comments only from real experts about pixels

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LOL are you being sarcastic? It took me a while to understand which one was the real one…

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No I’m not sarcastic. I am serious … behind this is much better simulation of this World… and as usual most people can’t see or understand it…
That’s the reason I am asking experts if there is any about this problem

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There’s always one isn’t there.
The sim looks almost lifelike sometimes, you should probably get out more.

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I get the feeling that there are a lot of kids in this forum. And that’s great - a new generation will take over some day. It also mean that we have to deal with threads like this from time to time, but that’s life.

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Long time ago on FSX forum I raised the question about unnatural and horrible scenery with roads crossing houses over the roofs and not only houses but cites and experienced attacks like now. But now you have this bing/google maps, photogrammetry and finally roads are in right place. This will be the same case. So I don’t care what you are talking. Again this topic is not for you but for people who understand computer graphic and problems…

So please go don’t spend your valuable time on this topic

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hi @CivilianApple2,
I think perhaps the developers have been a little overenthusiastic with the lights that’s all. In the sim, it appears all lights are on whereas in real life it would only be some of them. Also, it seems (in the 2 images that you have supplied) that the sim has more reflected light as well.
Thanks
PaulyFSPauly

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In this simulation real life imagery must give a little to for the real-time rendering part. This something that has been an issue for 3d artists for sometime. (Recent tech helps to overcome it.) Some things that you don’t see are how colors shift to gray as they get farther from you and how atmosphere affects what one sees. To some that might be trivial but it is a thing that many notice. But when we look back at sims in general this good. (for now) :wink:

To be perfectly candid, the problem is that your expectations are ridiculously high.

How do video game developers place lighting? Well, normally, they literally just place some lighting across the map, adjust ambient settings, etc. But what about when the map is the entire world? The only way (more or less) to get 100% “realistic” lighting is to connect every single light bulb to the IOT, communicate on/off status, luminosity, color temperature, bulb type, precise geographic position, etc. to a constantly updating database, translate the positions and types into the game, then have the client query said database to get the specifications of every light in X radius, then update those specifications repeatedly to get the power status. This, obviously, is insane and impossible.

So what they presumably do is analyze the models created by Blackshark and photogrammetry, then insert lighting commensurate with said analysis. This will (and does) provide realistic lighting, but not “true-to-life” lighting. In other words, the lighting shown in the game is feasible, but is not necessarily what you see if you go fly above the city in real life. This is because you’re looking at a video game, not real life. Like I mentioned, it’s literally impossible for the game lighting to 100% mirror real lighting.

Because it’s a video game. What did you expect? It’s impossible for a developer to accurately reflect the entire library of physics that affects lighting at any given moment. Yes, color temperature in MSFS is slightly adjusted, but that’s for the same reason that professional photographers edit their pictures.

What are you expecting it to look like? The graphics in this game are insanely good. Either your settings are too low or you’re expecting it to literally look like real life, which would be asinine, so I’m going to assume it’s not that.

Then you should see an ophthalmologist, because that’s not normal. Alternatively, make sure there’s not too much lighting disequilibrium (bright screen + dark room = eye strain), or just buy blue-filter computer glasses.

Yeah this must be an issue with your graphics, considering this isn’t the Roblox skybox we’re looking at. Voluminous clouds alone are incredible and add a lot of depth.

lmao

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This is by far the best looking simulator. It won’t match the video exactly, nor will it look 100% identical to real life. Microsoft + Asobo did a fantastic job and most of us are grateful for the work they have done. Different conditions also affect the lighting and how the world looks.

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Real expert about pixels here. Pretty d… impressive those videos, believe me. If you’re anywhere near serious then video gaming / computer simulation isn’t for you for another 30 years…

This is how I took my first simulated flights back in 1988 on a C64:

Sorry, no English version, this is the only video I could find with the exact same version of Solo Flight I played (and thoroughly enjoyed!) back then… I even learned how to use VOR navigation…

Computer graphics in general and flight simulation in particular have come a long way…

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Looks pretty flippin’ good to me.

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Don’t you see? The pixels are wrong! Trust me, I’m a pixel expert! :grin:

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Lights are not the same so it is an impossible comparison really. You need the exact same light from the exact same direction.
Visuals are always subjective so its bad for you but for me it is spot on.

Aircraft fidelity, well, it is not a payware plane, it looks really well for what it is. Texture quality depends a lot on the love they put on the process, the textures we have right now looks awesome, but most of it (or at least a big part), is thanks to the PBR technology. With PBR you literally add 3 additional PNG files to the diffuse color and it makes it look how it looks, you can see the metal, the roughness, the normals, that process is almost automatic with nowaday’s software like Substance painter. But again, it depends a lot on how much you work the model. I am not saying it is a bad work, they put a lot of effort into that model for sure and it looks great.

In terms of technical difficulty, making a game look like the real world is extremely difficult and resource-intensive, no PC can handle super ultra-realistic effects really, not even a 3080 that is not even on the market. Simulating light is really expensive on the GPU / CPU. They put a lot of effort into that, all gaming companies put a lot of effort to make a good looking game, but it is impossible to be 100% realistic. The closest you can get today to real lighting is when you model a 3D object and you “render” the scene, it takes a couple of minutes or even hours to render a single scene but it looks like the real thing (when made by experts of course).

That been said, MS2020 is the closest you will ever get to reality, at least for the next couple of years or maybe decades. If we want more fidelity, we need better hardware and the ones we have nowadays are not even close to the power we need to render a scene with full fidelity. Just to give you an example, to simulate a simple light with PBR, you simulate a ray trace coming from the sun, that will be a pixel, it will look bad, you need that ray trace to bounce a couple of times to catch the surrounding objects’ light and color, so if the light was full white, it bounces against a red ball and the light becomes a bit red now. that ray trace can take many CPU cycles. Now imagine you need hundreds and millions of ray traces at the same time, hitting objects and bouncing, that is what makes it look good, the bouncing of the ray because with every bounce you catch more color from other objects. That part is what takes a lot of resources (there are more reasons but just to be simplistic). With more bounces, more fidelity, but the problem is that you can’t make the light bounce infinitely, because it will kill your CPU and GPU, so they limit that to a manageable number. So you need millions of ray traces hitting and bouncing all over the place. Each ray will ultimately be a pixel on your screen.
Well, it took me a while to write that, I needed to practice my writing skills lol

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Smh…some people just complain to complain…unbelievable

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What amazes me with people that complain about the graphics not looking exactly real is they forget what’s involved in producing photorealistic looking images. Still today with all the computing power we have rendering cgi images for movies takes a huge amount of power and some time so how on earth is a video game supposed to produce photo-realistic images at 30 plus frames per second on a home pc?

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Lol this is the most ridiculous post I’ve seen in this forum. The sim looks fine.

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Quite right. The water alone is incredibly good I think. Its very hard to animate water but they have managed to do it well and it looks beautiful.

Agreed :woozy_face:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhj9fXexJ6A

this was also stupid and unreal just a year ago…

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