Night lighting issues still present - The community solutions

Because you didn’t follow the link I’ve posted a few posts above, which further links to:
Blurry lights on ultra-wide/4k resolutions - #33 by vrouleau

I am currently using the following as a crutch until night lighting gets significantly improved.
My resolution (native): 1920 x 1080
Set render scaling to 150
Set AA to FXAA
Both land/terrain and objects LOD set to max (200)
Buildings set to Ultra
Other settings either ultra, or high.
Lens correction OFF
Light blur OFF

I get smaller light orbs as a result, which is nicer than the bloated orbs that I got when using TAA.
Super sampling helps to some extent with smoothing up the jagged edges since I’ve lowered the AA.
I got FPS hit for sure, but at least my night lighting looks better now for the time being.

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1920 x 1080 monitor, GTX-1080ti graphics card, I-9 CPU - 32 gb ram, M.2 hard drives - most settings on High or Ultra, no light or scenery mods enabled - But these lights are just FUZZY and OVERSIZED. Why?
Can someone please make a patch to reduce the size of night lighting by 50%? It must look better if smaller… this is silly - see pic.

Yes, someone can and I believe it is Asobo.

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Haha! Good answer! What does seem strange is that I’ve seen on the board here that not everyone has this issue… I’ve seen pictures posted here where the night lighting looks quite good and normal sized, with sharp clear detail…surely a video bug?

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.

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Wow, you know your stuff… it’s above my head . Surely it could not be too much work to (as a start) just make the light sources smaller… or create a tool in the Sim with some sliders to adjust size, sharpness and halo for example.

It seems such a long way off.

In the meantime, try unchecking “lens correction” if you haven’t done so… This will make the night lights less fuzzy.

And try using anti-aliasing method other than TAA (choose no AA, FXAA, or DLAA). I found TAA bloated night lights on my system.

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Thanks… FXAA helped a little. I had Lens Correction off already. I’ll keep experimenting.

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I feel pretty discouraged and tired of yet another update (sim update 3) and no improvement or whatsoever to night lighting, despite clearly it’s one of the big issues felt by the community.

I don’t know whether others feel the same as I do, but I feel the community (us) start to become “disengaged” with Asobo in regards of night lighting… Maybe a lot of us are tired that we’ve committed ideas, suggestions, time and energy in this huge thread, but lately it seems Asobo won’t even put any priority on this issue (plus all of us have lots going on in our lives, maybe also other upcoming games that we’re anticipating etc).

If we (the community) are really starting to disengage about this issue, Asobo better act quickly… It could be a sign that community interest is wavering.

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Go back to earlier posts/threads shortly after release and see the many votes and engagement surrounding issues. That seems to have dried up recently for some reason even though the issues still exist.

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1440p is not UHD mate

You might want to disable BLOOM as well. It makes a difference to me in VR but I honestly didn’t cross checked in 3D.

With the 10 deg increment bug for which I have posted the exact reasons and solution:
Heading Increment Bug (10 degree instead of 1) Explained - #298 by CptLucky8

And with the SU3 release notes published yesterday (and this bug still not corrected)

I felt compelled to write this yesterday:

Discussion: Sim Update 3 (1.14.5.0) - #701 by CptLucky8

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Thanks corrected to QHD

Well there you go… Turns out not only this thread.

If issues not fixed but engagement dried up, could be a variety of reasons… But for devs, this should be a wake up call that the community might start to disengage from your product.

Take our issue for example… 648 voted at the time I write this, underlying the importance the community feel for this issue to be fixed… But the status is “backlog”! We don’t even know when we can expect the next improvement(s) to night lighting, and what sort of improvement will it be!

In the meantime, me personally my engagement to MSFS decreases (as might the others here also, and in other threads) due to discouragement, boredom, less hopeful, couldn’t be bothered etc. Plus something extremely powerful stole my attention away… DCS Apache! (also their marvellous clouds).

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have asobo/msfs ever talked about the night lighting being too bright? i flew in to a desert at night yesterday and it was glowing yellow.

the entire world is too lit up at night and you can see the glow of cities for 100s of miles out on a clear day. they need to reduce the glow and fix the individual lighting better.

any idea if this is being looked at?

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Until they put some sort of Gamma slider in here, my fix is to use the Nvidia control panel to adjust gamma, you can adjust with the sim open by alt=tabbing. Set a test at night, adjust until it seems right, and when your done flying just turn it back to system settings or whatever in the Nvidia control panel.

Or any other monitor/TV/system tool you have to adjust the gamma. It’s a terrible oversight, any game that involves dark areas / night play should have an in game adjustment to adjust your gamma settings. That’s just basic common sense.

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Can we manually make the night lighting more realistic using developer mode? Or could anyone produce a mod for nighttime lighting?

Cairo

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