Up close and nearly vertically top down, absolutely, but for everything else, which is the majority of angles, lamps are very much visible from the cockpit.
In fact, it’s the most prominent night features visible to a pilot for everything except very close to the AC and ground, I consistently navigate Highway lamps are visible for miles and miles, sometimes into the horizon, long before you have a chance of spotting the dim effect it “splashes” on the ground .
I even got normal/under-exposed cellphone shots picking up streetlamps clearly visible +20 miles away, and it wasn’t even that clear outside. (And yes, my human eye could see them as well, sharp bright points, while the adjacent terrain was pitch black)
The lamps effect on the ground is much weaker (asphalt isn’t a great reflector), so that’s usually visible only when getting much closer. (While in the sim, ground splash can sometimes become almost as bright as the actual lamp “bulb”)
Pretty much everything you see here is lamps (regardless of exposure settings, lamps are significantly brighter source of light compared to what’s being reflected off the ground or buildings)
But! I think you have a great point, it would be very cool to have a light falloff angle, (fresnel map?), working the same way as runway lights (visible down along the runway, but not from the side) , but working vertically instead. That’s definitely doable! Although the effect would only be most noticeable close to vertically straight down below the camera/plane. Great idea!
That being said, lamps are currently still definitely too bright / big in the sim, requiring a sharper & tighter appearance.
Good catch, that’s some overly fat bulbs for sure…
The lamp texture definitely needs an overhaul, turning lamps into sharp bright light sources, instead of fat fuzzy orbs… It’s almost light background out of focus / bokeh - lights have been used as reference material.
And the sharpening dark halos (TAA?) is very very prominent as well, but seems to have stopped eating lamps at last!
Here’s a picture of that effect evident up until Update 5:
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I would like to summarise what I dont like and what I maybe like from this differentiated night lighting…
Dont likes:
Unified look
Floating double layered light bulbs
Lit country roads/ Lit areas where they shouldn’t
Large Light bulbs
Overall intensified brightness
Likes:
Intesified brightness of highroads
It would be a good idea if all of us made a list of their own likes and dont likes and summarise it…something like a poll…
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For me biggest concern is
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Double up on most lights on the roads
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Rural roads lit when they shouldn’t be
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smaller lights would be a nice to have
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One thing I think is important to keep in mind: The role of the simulator is to put us in the simulated world. Not our camera.
The eye is different from the camera in (at least) two ways: Our pupil is a lot smaller than the objective used to take many of the prettiest night lighting camera shots, closer to a small cell phone camera, and our retina is quite different from a CCD in terms of “pixel” (rods and cones) interconnects; our retina would probably be rejected for excessive pixel bleed if it was a CCD, but those interconnects serve us. The result is that the point spread function of our eye is quite different from the point spread function of a high end camera. Our view tends to be a bit blurrier – especially at night when our cones are nearly blind for anything but bright lights and we rely on our rods to see.
Something worth keeping in mind when comparing flightsim screenshots with high end camera pictures – unless interpreted carefully, such a comparison shows the ability of the sim to produce screenshots that look similar to camera images, not the ability to put a sensation on our optical nerves in the sim that mimics the sensation of real life night flying. I think some of the posters above, being professionals in their fields, are aware of that; just mentioning it so it is not forgotten.
I think that is where the sepia mask concept comes from, even though it was not well implemented (irradiance was way too high and it was not sufficiently well correlated with the local ground lights that would cause that diffuse illumination), and why the “ropes of lights stretching to the horizon” subjectively looks so wrong.
Agree the early alpha shots is the most convincing night lighting we have seen in this sim thus far.
Edited to add: This is something that bothers me in games, including MSFS. There seems to be a lot of emphasis on adding post processing that makes the sim look like a photograph, with lens flares being the most obvious example. I would like to see post processing that mimics the eye instead.
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I agree. Lamps themselves must be visible and its ok and its the most prominent night feature visible from above. And how much light they splash onto the ground or gets reflected from ground currently can still be tolerated as of now.
The noticeable and distracting problem is with the “overly fat light bulbs” , the “unusual uniformity” and that they are “too many” at places not required. Due to this the lighting looks completely unnatural. The lamps definitely require a sharp and smaller appearance to make it natural.
And in my opinion let them first correct this basic thing, then we can think of having the light falloff angle feature and all.
We need to all send feedback to Zenddesk about the unrealisticness of the latest patch night lighting
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and I noticed many of the lamps/lights are square rather than round
Asobo developers know what night lighting around the world looks like. They can search the internet as well as anyone else. They have access to the same images of city lights that we have. It’s not top secret information.
Now it feels like they’re just trying to appease the community. They’ll never make everyone happy.
Maybe they should stop taking feedback on “artistic” concepts from thousands of users. I can still remember from the early preview videos how blown away I was from the night lighting. So I believe they have great artistic instincts, but have just lost their way because everybody has their own idea of how the environment should look. From the clouds, to the way the moon phases change the darkness levels, and the beautiful lights. Asobo should use their artistic judgement and say “that’s it”.
I think a lot of folks agree that the early Alpha’s had it pretty much nailed down.
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Omg, THIS IS IT !!!
Whoever made this simulation at nigh nailed it. Congrats!
Look at this black areas where light sources blinking like stars on the sky.
And stream of cars with red and white lights. It’s look so real.
This is revolutionary simulations! Finally !
And they made it with only orange, red, blue, green and white colors.
Genius !
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Another thing… How many were around in FS2002? In those days, night was dark. I mean Dark dark. You basically couldn’t see anything at night other than lights, and maybe the outline of mountains against the star lit sky.
Pretty much the way it looks in real life.
I was looking for screenshots of that but I don’t seem to have any left; in those days there was no point taking screenshots at night because there was basically nothing to see.
Then it became fashionable for games to simulate night same way old movies do: Dim the lighting ever so slightly from day time, add some blue-ish tint, wash out the colors a bit, and call it a day. I mean, call it a night. By FS2004 that paradigm had reached the MS flight simulator franchise as well, and from then on “night” has basically just meant the color palette is different, you can still see terrain and major features almost as well at night as you can in the day. I’ve tried messing with the gamma to get real nights, but you have to pull it down so much you start losing the panel lighting.
I would like for the dark nights to come back. At night, especially under a cloud deck or with no moon, and especially with the limited night adaptation you get from panel and instrument lights and outside lights, you basically cannot see anything. At all. Except for the lights, and what little ground illumination comes from the lights, and what comes from clouds backlit by city lights. That is another area where long exposure night photographs can give the wrong impression compared to what our eyes can see in real time.
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This video is way more similar to what we had before the update 5 than after. I’m not sure what are you implying, but I’m sure it is not what we have now.
Also, now it seems the light bulbs are duplicated in several streets, hovering dozen of meters above the real ones.
The diffuse lighting that before gave the red, amber tone to streets and large areas is also gone or crispier after the update 5.
And now the light bulbs shine as if they were the size of a car. If you look at the print below, details in ultra, the slides at 150, I’ve never seen so many light bulbs in an avenue. Perhaps the number is the same as before, but they weren’t near as big as they are now [you have to click on the image to see it full size].
So in general the lighting is way, way off.
NOTE: I have no time to put prints side by side and compare what really changed and what is off, but as soon as I started a flight yesterday I new the lighting was way off. I have been comparing prints and videos since then and what we have now is just horrible in comparison.
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that picture you posted… it’s horrible… so unnatural… so fake…
I have to watch this clip again just to forget that picture
Asobo team has to watch this clip at list one month 24 hrs a day, again and again, and then make/recreate this beautiful simulation!
Asobo forget Japan, North America, South America, Europe and just watch this video. Again and again and a little bit more… and, eventually, you will get it, and make it… properly
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I was a fs2020 supporter before this patch. But what was done with the lighting is very disappointing. If you want to get lost on a plane in the wilderness at night, it won’t work. Garlands of lights in the Amazon from the Indians or in Africa in the desert. It’s impossible to look at cities at all. For IFR it will still do, but I don’t want to fly over the city lights arranged in a row and at an equal distance from each other. Feels like the cities lost their individuality at night, lighting became artificial, monotonous. Everything is the same. That is, bing and azur during the day, and X-Plane at night. (
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So I think I got it. They just enlarged the bulbs. Not only that, but to mask the trick, the bulb has the same size when you are zoomed out and zoomed in, so when you zoom in, they don’t get bigger, which otherwise would make them huge in scale.
See the prints below. You can see from the cutout (down the avenue) on the print above that it has the same size of the bulbs on the print below, but just that on the print below the scale of things is bigger, so the impression is that the bulbs are small, with more or less the right size. Although when you are zoomed out, the bulbs have the scale of a small car.
You gotta click on the print to see it full size.
I have some videos from before the update and when you zoom in the bulbs get bigger, and when you zoom out they get smaller, as it should.
And this is the new bulbs (cutout) compared to the old ones. The size difference is clear.
You gotta click on the print to see it full size.
This is so weird… If that’s true, and it seems to me, what a lame job. Are they going to fix it and bring it back to what it was before? Or are they going to keep this grid of oversized-car-like-bulbs that don’t change size with the zoom just to trick us?
I might do some other tests down the road, but I think this is it.
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Far too bright and too many… there is lighting even in extremely remote areas… I liked it much better after the last patch. All they really needed to do was improve water reflection. I hope they didn’t crank up the lumens to get the reflection back. Hopefully they can keep the current water reflection, but turn down the light intensity and quantity.
Good job… we have to shed some light at this problem 
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The point is though, if they’re trying to figure this out from camera images it will never work.
Someone from the team responsible for night lighting needs to actually get in an aircraft and see it for themselves.
Online images are no good.
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I’m pretty sure they know exactly what they did. The question is, are they humble enough to admit they pushed the BS too far and need to go back to what it was before? Because either they tweak it properly or they will get it back from us.
It is baffling that no one in the crew vetoed this BS. Light bulbs the size of a Volkswagen? Just nuts.
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‘‘I hope they didn’t crank up the lumens to get the reflection back’’
Even though it sounds completely logical I hope that’s not the case…
I think that probably they are two different things…
At earlier builds the reflection was fine with less brightness on the ground.
I’m not following their Discord or any other official channel. Are they talking about this problem? Did they ever recognize this was a bad decision? I’ve sent them a suggestion via Zendesk with some real life pics I took while flying at night.
I had to uninstall the official and original game just so I could play the very first version with proper lights. I was already feeling like an idiot to buy a product they advertised so much about the ‘‘Live Weather’’ thing and it never worked. Now they are removing the good features that the simulator had… This is unbelievable. This and the fact that we actually have some lunatics fervently defending the devs.
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