I believe that visible distant and in the horizon light sources really need an effect overlay, like a slight trembling/shimmering of the bulbs/light sources. It would make it seem a lot more believable too and would certainly add to the realism factor. It is a very visible atmospheric effect in your video too. They also need to be more variable in size, coloration,etc(slight differences even for lamps on the same street). I am at least pretty happy to see that many people are actually trying to find out what’s wrong with lighting in the latest update of the sim.
1 Like
I would love to tell you much more, but with the respect of the NDA we’re not allowed to about it, I only share my thoughts on stuff that also can be derived from comparing officially released alpha screenshots. But I can say this, it was truly stunning in the beginning, before lamp distance was reduced and sepia mask introduced. Not perfect. But insanely promising.
I wish that was the foundation to build upon, instead of that awful sepia mask implementation.
But with thousands of voices which of a majority doesn’t have IRL experience of neither light characteristics or long experience of flying at night and being able to explain exactly how light behaves at altitude at night, I’m not jealous of the devs, I mean, how will they know which voices to listen to the most?
Similar to with all armchair pilots commenting on flightmodels, “it doesn’t feel realistic” without piloting the planes themselves IRL.
Right on the money, lamp placing is generated procedurally from road vector data (and who knows, maybe even AI image-analysis road-detection implementation?) , which is separated from the sepia issue. I as well think and hope some of those new issues can be fixed quite quickly.
8 Likes
I agree! As well as some other things.
Something has obv gone wrong with the update. I refuse to believe that Asobo deliberately flicked the switch on having street lighting on every road, back road and village. 75% of my flight time has been at night and now I made my first flight after the update checking whats all the fuzz about. Result is that I had to join the forums to voice my concern, that it can not stay like that - all the night flying magic is gone. I´ve read through the thread and I agree on points that experimenting like this is not right, even though there is a more effective and realistic way to implement night lighting for which the foundation is being laid to. Even so, atm I just wish we could roll back the previous setting for the time being and Asobo may take their time to work things out…properly.
10 Likes
The night lights are horrible now! I am embarrassed to fly at night. Bright orbs everywhere. Looks nothing like reality and just sucks the immersion right out of the game.
Most lights typically have “tops” on them so they only direct light down to the ground not straight up into the air. All I see are these really long line of orbs everywhere. Can’t we have a menu setting so we can choose "Simulator lighting (like we had before this patch) and then xbox gamer lighting (post patch).
Not kidding here but night flying looks like FS4 now. It is nostalgic, but not in a very good way 
4 Likes
I don’t want to be in their shoes either but are they trying to please some of us or are they trying to do the right thing…you know…give us realism in terms of scenery, aerodynamics, etc etc…
Someone would say now why should they listen to me or you about night lighting and what looks wrong or right…well…there are some things that we have seen with our own eyes, our experiences throughtout the years and what we know and believe as real and what not…there is a common sense on some things…
The thing is that they have to be wiser and show us that they know what they are doing and when…that they have a plan of what the final product is gonna look and not experiments here and there…
I am trying to find any config files for lights and I found a folder of light textures in…’‘D’’\official:onestore\fs-base\textures\lights…I will have a look if I can make any configurations…even though I doubt it…
1 Like
WOW.
Just WOW!
THIS looks awesome! Is this an add-on for XP11? I´ve never seen such lighting quality there…
Yeah it’s with some night light mod + some reshade effect
I agree 100%.
I’m waiting for them to fix this mess before I start flying at night again.
Ok… No worries about responding if you’re busy?
I probably should’ve posted these screenshots to better explain the point about lacking lamp distance and brown self illuminated terrain making it hard for, at least my eyes, to mistake real life video / pics for MSFS.
It’s actually the same video you posted, which I’ve used for screenshot comparison & benchmarking since first alpha almost a year ago (Can’t post those due to NDA), but here’s a few from the September build, same night tech up until Update 5.
Long Beach
Hollywood towards Van Nyus & Burbank
As you can see, the real world is lamp based with dark surrounding terrain having light sources visible 25-30 km away in this particular video, and the night tech MSFS was released with is based on evenly illuminating the daytime texture with a brown low res filter with hardly any lamps visible outside just a few kilometers away, less than 10th of the real life visibility of lamps.
The closest 10% where lamps finally are present and the sepia-mask gets reduced definitely looks great, but it’s the other 90% I’m trying to adress here…
.
- Reshade FX: Night Ambient light Preset , lens dirt effect
- Better Street Lights xp11
It takes some tuning to get right, but looks mind-blowing in certain conditions
3 Likes
Lighting has become like in the X-plane. Somehow everything is on the line. Some kind of squares. Is it normal? There is no individuality now. There is no city soul.
1 Like
I do feel sometimes that we lost a little color variation in night lighting.It sometimes appears in some places that there are too many repetitive white lights only and other coloured lights are missing.
2 Likes
If these are settings that can be implemented in the Graphics Menu so people can choose for themselves, that would take care of a lot of these type of problems/posts.
3 Likes
3 Likes
Agreed, would take care of lot of “issues” that come down to personal preference. And the settings that Asobo seems to be changing don’t appear to be down to code level I don’t think and I’m sure it can be made into a slider setting. I know you can disable sharpening by editing the CFG file so I’m pretty sure they can implement a slider with different values, wouldn’t be hard to do.
I feel, we also lost the intensity variation of lights.The bumped up intensity is ok,looks better at few places, but I think they took all the lights at once and bumped the intensity for all of them to the same level which is evident in the 2nd picture. There was a good amount of intensity variation earlier. And no doubt, now it looks highly repetitive which definitely needs adjustment.
3 Likes
IN SHORT,
Some positives are that the overall night lighting amount / intensity is more realistic and improved in many aspects and does look better especially for cities and also new night lighting partially improved few other night issues.
But again ,considering the reviews, There are few things that can definitely be solved by adding a slider setting like the overall night light intensity, runway lights intensity, night lighting visibility distance, and infact, this is the best way to solve these issues and satisfy the community, because there are mixed opinions regarding these and its best to add a slider so that users can adjust according to their taste.
But there are a few issues in the night lighting which almost everyone here wishes to be modified which I think, though I am not sure, is a code level adjustment and Asobo needs to tweak from their side like:
1. Adjusting the too repetitive and uniform grid placement of lights and make it more random
and varied. !! (THIS IS A MUST) !!
2. Decreasing the density and intensity of lights in countryside roads.
3. Adding a little bit colour variation to lights in the best way possible.
4. Adding a bit intensity variation to the lights instead of all lights in all areas of same intensity.
If all these settings can also be adjusted by using a slider ,well and good, but I think all of these adjustments are not possible using a slider.
MS/ Asobo kindly take a note !!!
4 Likes
I think that too. I don’t think that it’s possible to get these settings or at least most of the them on a slider. They are fixed.
@ScenicAtol3300 Yes,those of which are not possible to implement by a slider, they should adjust it from their side