Well one thing id say about a lot of these pictures is that this is a long exposure photograph, so its going to look a lot brighter than it would to the naked eye because it is accumulating the light over a longer period.
Actually in real life you either can’t see the lights or they look very dim in buildings because most have reflective and or tinted windows. And yes, most nighttime photos you see are either long exposure or have high iso settings which make the lights look way brighter in the photograph than they do to the eye. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/video/aerial-point-of-view-manhattan-met-life-building-stock-video-footage/659-21?adppopup=true Street lights and the actual exterior building lights are much brighter than the windows.
So the main issue I feel, is rural areas right now. So to kind of trick my brain into liking it I tell myself that this is the future im flying in and they spent some serious money on rural lighting improvements.
Houston is pretty much one of the most formulaic layouts for a city there is, but the best way I would describe the night lighting in that video is practically completely randomized outside of major streets and highways. Theres also a wide variety of color temperatures and luminosity in the individual light points, along with the “twinkle effect” of the lights being obscured as you fly by.
Dunno, I think it needs adjustment, needs some random “noise” lighting rather than so much grid like lighting that pretty much carpets the whole region.
I like the brightness and the pop of the lighting, I think there needs to simply be more randomness.
Also just a remember of how a street lamp looks / functions in reality:
it iluminates DOWN and not UP the sky, they usually are covered on the top (except some old lamps in e.g. city park areas) , so DIRECT light is not seen from Top Down, more and more from the side, at low altitudes visible from sky. So most of lights are light REFLEXIONS.
that’s why I think, the lower the angle to a street light, more intense it gets, but also more far away, they reduce intensity. So it is a calculation with two factors: angle and distance of light source in relation to eye point… everything else is reflexion… which need to be drawn only on the ground texture (no light FX)
When flying low level at night in Europe. Highways, dual carriageways, autobahns appear to have many more street lamps than is the case in real life.
Perhaps this may explain the high bloom levels noted by many.
After a flight tonight I must say what we had before was better. The biggest problem I’m seeing is the highway lighting totally over powers the ground below. Highway/Freeway lighting outside of cities shouldn’t be this bright. If given a choice I’d take what we had before until a better solution is found.
I agree, they have to revert this, it’s awful now and not realistic. I wonder if they don’t have any real world pilots in their team who would tell them this is very bad.
I agree that the night lighting was better in the previous version. They should have just fixed the sepia mask issue and increased the skyscrapers light intensity. Everything else was perfect back then.
I prefer old pre update night lighting, more variation. Now it look like all lights are uniform everywhere, in fact all you can see now is the bright light along highway.