It might help if you find these screenshots and post the links because there are a few in this topic.
I didn’t bother with night lighting since weeks and I’ve been quite silent about this in this topic for quite some time. But a few days ago I was playing with the settings and while I adjusted the time of day, I can to realize it is still not solved, but they did a few changes nonetheless (not for the better in my opinion).
Nevertheless, my tests in doing so (and the series of screenshots I’ve re-posted here a few posts above, with the reflection on the tail of the C172) are really showing they are basing their light build rendering on the following technique:
- a core opaque bulb with a halo
- some lights are rendering smaller than others (the core is smaller)
- the brighter the ambient light, the smaller the halo (simple pixel shader blending of pixels, not much logic there, just a pure visual processing)
It is clear to me this technique only advantage is there is no extra computation: you project the light coordinates in the 2D plane, and you pixel shade a core with a halo.
In my opinion this is still wrong for all the wrong reasons already documented in this topic: they don’t change size with distance thus the farther the light, the higher the perceived intensity but also, and especially in VR, the farther the light the fuzzier it is.
I’m still convinced the best technique would better be:
- a core opaque bulb with a halo.
- the closer the light, the bigger the halo (brighter and fuzzy - glint effect)
- the farther the light, the smaller the halo (dimmer and sharp - in the distance effect)
- ambient lighting could still affect halo size if up close (appears less bright and sharper/smaller)
- ambient lighting might not need to affect intensity if distant, otherwise just dim the intensity of the light pixels.
Compared to the actual technique I don’t believe it is much work on the pixel shader nor much change:
- modulate blending of the halo by both depth and ambient light to make the halo disappear by distance and/or ambient light,
- modulate intensity by ambient light alone.
NB: with carefully chosen light bulb core texture opaque values, and halo alpha values, you might be able to do both of the above in 1 single mul per pixel in my opinion.