By tuning the Terrain Level of Detail graphics setting, the maximum visibility range for lamps can be somewhat tuned… Biggest difference between the 10-70 values…
Above 100, it makes almost no difference.
Unfortunately this setting wont scale the brightness falloff range, so with a tighter lamp LOD range, there will be a sharper “cut-off” with LOD squares of lamps fading into visibility as the flight covers more distance.
Too bad light-falloff isn’t scaled with the terrain lod distance, otherwise this could serve like a temporal fix for those miss the short lamp visibility distance of previous version.
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Here’s some different Terrain Level of Detail settings.
Manhattan from the south, 20,000 ft, night, no moon.
(I recommend using arrow keys to scroll through the images, to easier spot the difference.)
10
20
30
50
70
100
200
As you can see, the difference is the most noticeable at very low settings. And if we could set it to 0 , it would look pretty much like the versions before Update 5, no lamps and just the brown effect of the sepia mask when flying high.
Too much brown / pale yellow for my personal taste, I’m leaning to seeing IRL lamps being colored more towards amber/orange instead of pale yellow, but that could be biased or local types of light where I’ve flown the most.