It is a long topic which in my opinion needs a TOC in the OP. There are some good examples in this topic with lots of screenshots, technical data, analysis you might like to read.
Since it is long topic spanning a long time, I’ve tried to mark some key “chapters” in order to help navigating, and I hope this will help new readers to find out the most discussed aspects they can build the discussion on, and Asobo to find some of the most relevant suggestions.
Light bulbs and generally points of light look fuzzy and huge. There is no sense of depth and distance. They also aren’t crisp and piercing, with a small halo around them as they were in the early builds. The draw distance still isn’t as it was, but it is much better in the latest patch. Also there is no randomness and light trails look extremely artificial, with the early builds there was a lot of randomness and it looked much more organic. Also if you look at the distant beach on the upper rig…
@CptLucky8 is right. Same lamp texture since release.
Oversized at release, still oversized.
Here’s the release build early september, compared to Update 5 & Update 7. The biggest difference is the brightness falloff, “old” lamps also fading into invisibility with unchanged size after a very short distance.
[image]
Before update 5, lamps disappeared after just a fraction of what the distance in real life. But they where still the same size bulbs.
I can see this is confusing for many, so try this one then and you might understand.
With the extremely short lamp visibility range of release build, you never encountered scaling problems as these since lamps disappeared.
There’s no part of the sim I’ve tested since december last year, as night lighting (it’s where I have the most knowhow), so I can guarantee you the actual size of bulbs have remain unchanged since release. But the extended range after update 5 will fool many into thinking th…
I had a look and your lights do look weird indeed, especially in the corners, making me think of lens-distortions like spherical aberration / coma.
I’m currently running with post processing Sharpening and Film Grain disabled in MSFS (UserCfg.opt) so this might give me less squarish lamps?
(I have no before/after shots of this, as I changed those values some while ago to lessen cloud pixelation.)
So I had a look at the Lens Correction option in graphics, and noticed I definitely get better l…
Concerning night sceneries as seen from high altitudes, especially for big cities, I made some tests over Paris using approximatly 40x40km of baked night textures generated by an algorithm I developed (that uses OSM data).
Not a big impact on performances.
Original :
[night1_bf]
After adding baked texture generated using an algorithm :
[night1_aft]
Original :
[night2_bf]
After adding baked texture generated using an algorithm :
[night2_aft]
Original :
[night17_bf]
After adding b…
The release-light tech was very nice, if you only fly below 3000-4000 ft and haven’t really done any amount of night flying IRL to understand what’s painfully obvious and missing. Pretty much all screenshots praising the release-tech is taken at really low altitudes focusing on close features.
It was definately beautiful , but hardly realistic other than within a kilometer or two at very low altitudes.
(Lamps disappearing after 1-2 km, while IRL visible for +30 km. Ambient “sepia-glow” illumin…
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 curren…
The biggest issue I have currently with night lighting is that it’s all so darn blurry [unknown]
I am running the sim on high-end with an ultrawide
Native Resolution = 3840x1600 (Alienware 3821DW)
Render scaled to 4992x2080 to get rid of some b…
This problem has been documented in greater details in the following posts:
Grinde81:
@CptLucky8 is right. Same lamp texture since release.
Here’s the release build early september, compared to Update 5 & Update 7. The biggest difference is the brightness falloff, “old” lamps also fading into invisibility with unchanged size after a very short distance.
Lamp sizes doesn’t scale linearly with distance, that’s the thing with point light sources, where the origin source is smaller than a pixel or smaller than what your eye can actually resolve, if it was a extended unlit surface.
Before update 5, lamps disappeared after just a fraction of what the distance in real life. But they where still the same size bulbs.
CptLucky8:
Here is a series of images to show what is creating the illusion of a bigger size, i.e. white clipping the halo.
The source image is one of the texture from XP11. It is has a bright center and a falloff. The image shows the original in the middle and the effect of just adjusting the brightness level:
NB: This is the same light bulb texture in all cases but showing as 5 different sizes in appearance.
Since it can’t be whiter than white, it will clip when adding brightness and make the semi transparent halo less transparent and whiter, adding to the ‘core’ size.
What is happening in update 7 like I’m showing is that they are increasing brightness nearby, and decreasing it farther (most likely nor inc/dec at middle distance). this gives the illusion of brighter lights close by and dimmer lights farther away, but this is wrong. They shouldn’t change brightness, they should only change size.
Now compare the light bulb above with the comparison with update 3 and 7 at RJTT:
Update 3 was still showing the halo not far away (this is a crop from the lower right of the original image) while update 7 is white-clipping.
CptLucky8:
Why do we need a Legacy / Modern Light Setting
(like Legacy / Modern flight model setting)
Regardless it is more accurate perceptually, some prefer left, some other right…
PS: of course there are different performance implications doing one approach or the other but ultimately it appears FS2020 is rendering point sprites anyhow, so in the end it might not change much between doing what they do which looks like:
they’re changing brightness using the halo as an indirect size changing effect, instead of changing size using the halo as an indirect brightness changing effect.
the former makes distant and close lights look nearly the same size and distant lights seem brighter
the later makes distant and close lights look accurately sized from each other and accurately emitting the same power.
CptLucky8:
This will probably be my last post about light bulbs sizes, but I’ve experimented trying to make them more visible and this is really interesting comparing the different approaches vs the photo. Here is:
Real:
XP11:
FS2020 Update 3:
FS2020 Update 7:
NB: you have to open these images in their full size to really see the details!
A few quick comments on what I see:
fs2020 update 7 is rendering almost all “street light” bulbs at the same size, whatever the distance to the viewer. In addition the emboss filter is showing sharp edges which means they are very bright with very small halo. There seem to be “types” of lamps each displayed the same size and same way (all taxiway bulbs are rendered the same, all street bulbs the same, etc…)
fs2020 update 3 is rendering smaller street lights in the distance which is good, and the emboss filter is showing more fussiness revealing a wider halo. However it looks like their size vs distance is not linearly distributed like in the xp11 shot. Instead it seems they are displaying by LOD rings (all lamps in LOD ring 1 are the same size, all lamps in LOD ring 2 are same size). Otherwise if not by LOD rings there is some form of ‘clustering’ of same size lamps.
xp11 is rendering street lights with size varying with the distance and all lights are softer than fs2020 indicated the rendering of the halo around the light even for the closest ones.
real photo is showing more variation in light sizes but it shows there is a correlation still with light size and distance to the viewer. Furthermore, some of the lights are as sharp as the ones in fs2020 but most are fuzzy like xp11
CptLucky8:
@AlexE75 has posted a series of screenshots exhibiting the latest WU3 outline/edge bug around objects lying in front of clouds and I find there is some very interesting visual info about the night lighting issues we’re discussing here*.
Some comments:
It seems to me the halo around light bulb is displaying better than the last time I visited this topic.
Light intensity attenuation with ambient lighting is really credible, but I believe lights are still too large at night . This is even more disturbing in VR than in 3D.
Light size still doesn’t decrease with distance and it is making them a nuisance in VR where the most distant ones are creating a soup of light.
I believe if there would be only 1 thing to change first is light size with distance. And this is where these screenshots are really interesting to me because the reflection distortion along the longitudinal axis of the aircraft is showing exactly what would the green lights look like if their size would decrease by distance, vs the white lights on the edges which are not.
I don’t know for you but to me, the varying green light size is much more realistic (and they’ll solve the light soup problem).
*I’m reproducing some of the screenshots here in order to make it easier to follow through but the original link to the topic is found below and worth looking out: you can cycle an entire day time span and see how this affects runway lighting rendering.
Glowing Aircraft - Ugly bright outline on airplanes against clouds - #46 by AlexE75
Grinde81:
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)
Here’s another location I’ve been using to compare night tech of different versions.
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:
CptLucky8:
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.
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