And yet theses are very beautiful long time exposures with a lot of handwork behind it.
As an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer I can tell you 100% that the Milky Way is depicted wrong in MSFS. In fact you do not need a whole lot of light pollution to hide our own galaxy completely in the sky.
But on the other hand we are talking about a tech alpha with missing light pollution (most certainly not implemented for this alpha) and therefore the Milky Way image is maybe correct and will look correct after reinserting the light pollution algorithms.
Well, we’ve seen pictures of MSFS2024 from space, so over there that backdrop will surely make sense. Also for pictures taken with a longer exposure time from dark places on Earth it will make sense being there. So I don’t think there is much wrong with such a backdrop being in the sim.
Now all that is needed is to filter it out based on several conditions like light pollution, atmospheric density and camera exposure time. Maybe that filter (or a more simple one) just wasn’t in place yet for the alpha. I cannot imagine that anyone at Asobo thinks this is right for showing over brightly lit Manhattan right?
Surely it’s no showstopper, but for me it’s an important part of reality, though.
The appearance of the night sky is what you see most of the time during a night flight above the clouds. And don’t forget celestial navigation (which was done during the early transoceanic flights) - you would need to recognize constellations which is much easier when you see the sky as you really do with naked eye. Some fancy long time exposure with zillions of stars would not be helpful.
Even more so the overly bright sky visible through the window is unrealistic.
And IRL sky visibility should not necessarily be totally hindered - instruments can be dimmed, glareshield prevents them mostly reflecting on the windshield, and for celestial navigation, airliners had an astrodome where light distraction was nearly null.
The night sky in 2024 is totally unacceptable to me. It doesn’t look anything near realistic. There should be light pollution, but even in the most remote location it doesn’t look like this with the naked eye. It won’t be very good if you see the milky way like that in cruise flight, especially from a cockpit.
The lights in the cockpit make it impossible to see anything out there. In a dark cockpit you can maybe see some stars. No need to make things prettier than real life.
It was an alpha, nobody says it will look like this in the final version. They clearly said it does not represent the final version in any way. If it does, then yes, they should change it. But just like the missing grass, there’s probably more missing from the alpha version. Personally I think this skybox will get a filter over it in the final version.
It’s long since it came up in other threads in this forum that many visual features in MSFS are tuned to produce dramatic results. However, things in nature are dramatic because they occur rarely, like for example to see the Milky Way from a dark desert twice in a lifetime. MSFS risks to saturate the senses. On the other hand, the outside world is boring for most of the time, so the publisher has to strike a challenging balance to produce a realistic while attractive product.
In theory, ( at least for Nvidia Video PC cards- the only one I have looked into) it IS possible to make a simple Simconnect exe program, that allows one to alter the Monitors Gamma (and/or Brightness / contrast) with a simple L:var, that could be mapped to some hardware slider or encode knob, or even up and down keyboard keys
Then one could simply easily adjust the Monitor in real time, to optimize day or night conditions, or dull or brightly sunlit views.
Although that could extended to control those parameters automatically, according to day or night etc, since there is no way (I know of) to measure the ambient light level, in or outside the cockpit, maybe a Manual control is the best and easiest option . KISS.
Then C++ code to do this is really quite simple, using the Nvidea control dll and simconnect dll.
Really surprised that nobody has created this yet, ideally as Freeware, but I suspect many would buy such a tool as Payware, if the price was reasonable,
EASY for the PC, and may not be IMPOSSIBLE for the X-box ?
(I have no idea about X-boxes, except that they are heavily restrictive on what you can do to alter their basic SOFTWARE operation)
Maybe for X-Box , a BRUTE FORCE Hardware solution !! A BIG GAMMA control Knob, mounted on the console itself !!
They always say that, i even heard companies say that a week before release. They won’t change big things, maybe some small bugs. I was also in the original 2020 tech alpha which was out long before release. They are not going to change the skybox a month before release day.
But yeah if they add the light adjustment like in 2020 it would be nice.
I said i was in the alpha, as anyone can see. I did not say anything about it, only that i was in it.
Also, i was joining the discussion here. You can answer any topic here with “It was just an alpha” but we can discuss these things here right? Better to give some feedback now. And if they fixed it, fine!
In not even three weeks we should know more. If it’s still the same in the release version of MSFS 2024 you can create a wishlist item for that. Might be interesting if a setting could be implemented, like “realistic” and “I want cool screenshots”
Totally agree! The best flight sim in history with so many planes and mods. And you won’t play it because the Milky Way is to bright. Batterlby76 you goy it right nit picking. Maybe Asobo was thinking you might want something beautiful to look at on those long night flights. For me i’m just happy that Microsoft and Asobo have put so much effort in to the sim.