Here’s another comparison of the different night tech versions we’ve seen so far…
Early Alpha
Release Build
Update 5
Update 7 - World Update US (November 2020, nothing significant have been done after this)
Once again you can see the highly unrealistic “Power outage look” of the release build with lamps disappearing at extremely short distance.
& why the early alpha was superior imho, with higher lamp amounts, “glow” around clusters of bright lamps, and more saturation.
Release and current lamps look like overexposed photos, with little to none color retained around the core, with very little color variation as well. The whole night scene feels dull brown compared to reality.
Here’s another location I’ve been using to compare night tech of different versions.
Currently lamps are visible at a greater distance, but still degraded from early alpha in terms of visibility of lamps (smaller lamps visible much longer), and with the new “feature” floating lamps at medium/long distance highways, where lamps are floating +100ft higher than they should, until getting closer where they fade away and the “regular” lamps fade into visibility. (More on this in separate post).
(Note that the early alpha generated too many lights on rural roads that IRL wouldn’t have any lamps. But this can be solved in a multitude of ways proposed by the community in the various threads regarding that problem.)
One of the biggest problems with the release build up until now, are the blurry oversized lamp texture… Instead of being small sharp light sources at greater distances, we have huge fuzzy orbs that fade in transparency while still being huge at a distance. It’s almost like the devs have used telephoto night photos as reference with severe “out of focus” lamps in the background as reverence. Just look at this crop, IRL lights would be sharp small lights with fading size & brightness, not big fuzzy orbs with fading transparency and constant size:
