There seems to be as many opinions about how night lighting “should feel” to be realistic, as there are levels of understanding how light actually works.
Out of the problems with night lighting: lacking lamp visibility range, sepia mask illuminating unlit ground, “fuzzy orb” appearence instead of sharp lightsource textures, the devs seems to have addressed the lamp visibility problem, and postpones the rest until later updates.
Background, dualrated(rotary/fixed) commercial pilot, around 9k hrs flying in various places, from mountains north of the artic circle to now over multi million cities in the US, often at night. And I’ve put close to the same amount of effort into photography and digital processing on my free time. It’s the latter than I believe have given me the most insight in how light works and what is being captured by both the human eye and camera sensors. (Two Astrophotographers in the same thread, I thought we where a rare breed @Crunchmeister71 :P)
Since even though I’ve driven cars hundreds of thousands of miles throughout my life, it doesn’t really make me an asphalt texture artist, that would require some deeper knowledge of light physics and computer graphics.
Anyways
A lot of people apparently buys the somewhat simplistic “trick” of the Sepia Mask and prefers that, while others want light that works more like it does in real life.
Kind of like some find 2d “billboard texture” clouds more realistic while others want volumetric clouds, as with 2d vs 3d trees.
For those saying “this is nothing like real life, older version was much more realistic” , please watch those videos, and think again if you believe this is how cities/roads emit light at night:
Here’s Dubai IRL compared to the old style
(much of the sepia mask sadly still present in current version)
Pretty much no lamps, but strangely illuminated daytime-texture using low-res mask with resolution worse than kilometers / pixel. This falsely illuminate tons of features that in real life would be pitch black.
The same low resolution light map from the world map illuminates the game at night, this is not how it looks in real life. But at a distance close to the horizon might look plausible.
This is not a black & white issue, “either this or that”. Some stuff got better, other worse.
Getting the best parts out of both would be the best, so leave those “either the new, or the old” opinions at home since it won’t help the devs the slightest, as well as hyperbolic nonsense like “this is NOTHING like in real world” & without being able to explain the how and why this is your opinion.
It’s these kinds of drastic overexaggerating and feelings without backing up with constructive arguments / photos / examples that might’ve gave us the night issues in the first place.
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Let’s have a look at Berlin, first a photo, 2nd is current MSFS, and 3rd picture is the older MSFS before latest update.
In the photo, you see the grid-like/spiderweb appearance of illuminated roads being the most dominant features.
In after the latest update, you can now actually identify and recognize many of those roads.
While in the versions before update, street lamps are completely gone, just a brown smudge. How some people find this realistic is beyond me, as no explanations are given.
Feelings and hyperboles aside, lets look at the facts.
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Lamp visibility distance have now been increased to more realistic values, instead of fading away after just a few hundred meters like older versions. This is good, but comes with a couple of negative side-effects that needs to be tackled. But it’s a step on the road to more realistic night lighting, instead of a cheap sepia trick that might fool some.
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Nonilluminated ground shouldn’t emit light like past versions, period. What we should see at night is either the sharp lightsources themselves, or light reflected from those. (plus slight atmospheric glow/lightpollution)
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Lamps, especially along highways, are visible more than a kilometer, given atmospheric conditions/altitudes: all the way to the horizon. (Yes, they’re even visible from space), while in the versions before update dissapeared after a very short distance compared to real life.
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Lamp-eating effect of lower resolutions and TAA seems to be fixed as well, great news!
BUT, as many correctly pointed out, there is a bunch of shortcoming that require adjustments. For instance, all roads should not be illuminated, especially in rural areas.
What many people fail to grasp is that we had this problem before too, but with the severely botched lamp visibility range, those where hardly visible up until very close.
We also have lots of duplicated lamps floating in the air.
Since lights are visible a longer distance now, it’s bound to look more repetitive, and hope the devs find a way around that. Since IRL, except for very tall highway lamps, lamps will have houses, trees, obstructing the line of vision to various degrees, giving many variations of brightness for the same lamp-type, but since the lamps now extend much further than the lod for trees and houses, we loose this variation.
As a side note, and these are my personal preferences: I don’t like the scaling of current light bulbs, they become fuzzy enlarged orbs instead of sharp light sources. And the ground “light splash” looks too bright. And I also think highways (at least where I live) should be more amber instead of yellow.
And current lamps is lacking the “glow” around them making them appear more like lightsources than fuzzy orbs.
In terms of realism, I believe it would be best to make it as close as reality as possible, instead of the thousands of different opinions of what “feels” most realistic.
It’s like the color of the sky, should it have a slider too, to satisfy different tastes?
But if it’s such a divider, I guess two modes could be included, the simplified sepia-style and lamp-based illumination?
For more background on what lead to this update, here are some earlier thoughts on night lighting ingame, which has been debated since early alpha lighting got severely degraded isntead of tuned Night lighting - Terrain emits light? - #52 by Grinde81
I’m glad this is engaging a lot of people, and with more input (factual arguments) the devs sure will know how to improve this to as close to reality as possible.
So please, let’s back up our arguments with facts instead of personal feelings.