The “Night lighting - Terrain emits light?” bug thread has been closed and marked as fixed, yet the terrain still emits light?
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Let’s not be so straightforward. What the developers did with the lights is only suitable for IFR flights. But we know that due to the implementation of photogrammetry, VFR flights are preferred for this simulator. It is just in VFR that flights look terrible because of the monotonous, unrealistic lights.
I do not want reverting night lighting back as it was before this patch, right now it much much better than it was before. But i voted because i want further improvments of current night lighting state. As many guys here already said and provided some screenshots from tech alpha builds (i am not sure if they have rights for it, because of NDA). But anyway, same as this guys, i very want Asobo to revert night lighting to it’s state as it was in early builds.
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And they have rather limited options available to them. They have to somehow procedurally generate and render night textures from the Bing map day textures. The brute force way to do that would be to add all the light sources as actual light sources; i.e., take away the sun (making everything black), add the moon, add all the artificial lights as actual lights, and let all those lights illuminate the ground. And add the reflection off clouds. And then render all that in a disc of tens of miles radius at 60 fps. Good luck with that.
The Black Marble map is such low resolution that it illuminates the entire county wherever there is a city.
So what can you do. At very short distances having lights being actual lights that illuminate the ground could perhaps work. At intermediate distances you can have “light blobs” that somehow try to look like the bright spot on the ground illuminated by a light – hard to make that look good, maybe that is what they are trying to accomplish with the “street lights” that are the size of a small house? Objects and buildings can simply have traditional night textures. At very long distances you can use the Black Marble map as a sepia mask.
But what do you do when users with different system performance need to change their LOD settings. For low performance systems you don’t have much choice but to bring the “ugly”, long-range methods closer to the user. Then we are back at the low-LOD pictures @Grinde81 posted a few posts up, where the lights abruptly cut off and are replaced by the sepia mask just a few miles away.
Even if we (and Asobo) can figure out what it is supposed to look like, implementing that is not straightforward. It is a side effect of getting only day summer textures out of Bing maps and having to render everything procedurally from those, whereas for legacy flight simulators we had up to six sets of handcrafted textures applicable to every spot of the world, albeit repetitive and not locally photoreal.
Isn’t that done already?
I don’t think so. In that case we would not need the sepia mask at all, and it would already look good. I think we have a subset of all the real lighting generated from the streetlights Asobo place, overlayed on top of the sepia mask to emulate the lighting from lights that are not rendered as individual lights.
Maybe you can ask the developers to make a switch (before the patch and after the patch) to satisfy everyone?
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If that had been actually done, then there would not have been so much discussions at all neither did we require sepia masking.But its not so easy to implement.
Thats what I was talking about. The sepia masking could have been pushed farther to a greater height/distance instead of rendering it right from the ground level/immediate vicinity.
And I don’t think what I said has got any relation to optimisation for low performance systems. In that case, increasing the LOD could have pushed the sepia texture farther and rendered only the actual lights themselves. Thats the purpose of that slider which is to support various system configurations. But its not the case in the sim as because in the shots posted by @Grinde81, it can be clearly observed that even at LOD of 200, the overall brown ground texture is there right from our immediate surroundings. Independent of the LOD settings, its there right from where we are. Un-illuminated areas of the ground are not dark.
Changing the LOD only increases primarily the lights visibility range and to a minimal extent the amount of lighting. As I said, what they have done seems just an overlay of extended street lighting and increased intensity over the actual sepia layer and that’s why it doesn’t seem so noticeable as earlier. Nothing has actually been done like pushing it farther or whatever regarding the actual sepia texture.
I can only repeat myself, because I am one of the starter-topics - and I have to borrow a picture (thanks to @ClayishCoast9) - we are discussing something that has worked before, at least better than now:
It seems to me that there might be some performance optimizations (also because of XBOX release ?), so they work with tricks to adapt something similar without any performance decrease, but I don’t notice any significant performance difference on my system since NLights, Tree’s LOD, water changes, etc. have been implemented.
And if this are adjustments to a console release (or some strange “performance optimizations” VR etc.), then I send an appeal to the developers - please adjust the console to the PC and not the other way round (or independent VR settings ) and if you use a console for a FLIGHT SIMULATOR then please with some graphic cutbacks - but not for the PC where surely people spend thousands of bucks to have a better result !!
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Dudes, you guys should stop posting these post-edited photos that looks like an acid trip. That’s not relevant and it derrails the tread. This is not a tutorial to use Photoshop post effects.
And light does spread around. And night shooting is not simple. The result will depend on the camera, the duration of the shot and the lens, distance and whatnot.
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I’ve been out of this thread for a few days but, are people still pretending the lighting looks good?
This is straight garbage. This is my first flight sim where I go out of my way to avoid flying at night.
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Please read the caption on top of the photo or the particular purpose for which I am posting the picture by reading my post. I am just posting for comparing a particular thing which is the same whether we look through our eyes or the camera lens or rather in this picture. I have never asked to make the night lighting look like in the picture. Many have told here repeated times regarding that and many have even given nice long explanations regarding these edited photos on what it should look like, what our eyes see and so on. I understand that. U guys please take the pain to read my post and understand my sole purpose of comparison.
I agree that I could have got a better close to real photo for my comparison, but this acid trip one was the closest I could get of the same place.
Edit: I have changed the pic. It looks better now.
Thanks
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Could you rephrase this, I’m not sure I follow. How do you mean lights were tuned for IFR specifically?
Flying IFR involves almost no need to peek outside…?
What the developers did with the lights was one step in trying to make night lighting more realistic, instead of “faking it” using a simplistic trick that although fooling many home simmers into believing it was realistic (eye-pleasing yes, realistic no)
The lamp visibility distance got increased to more realistic distances (before it wasn’t even 1/10 of what you’ll see IRL flying in the night)
This unfortunately exposed several problems, that was mainly hidden by the fact the old lamps had a very short visibility range. (lacking uniformity, highway-style lamps in unpopulated rural areas). But several solutions are available, quite a few has already been proposed in this thread if one have the time to dig through several hundreds of unconstructive hyperbolic posts like “nothing like real, bring back the old” without understanding the shortcomings of previous versions.
Yes making changes of this scale post-release is far from optimal and would have been better suited for the alpha/beta-phase. If I could make a wish, I’d love to see a parallel experimental build where stuff like this could be tried out with a closed group of testers that enjoy tinkering/tweaking for improvement, instead of exposing consumer/users for unpolished changes like this one.
Or like you proposed, having the option of selecting between simplified / experimental until it’s finished would also be great.
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Realistic night lighting doesn’t need any Bing map day textures at all, at least not for long/medium distances.
This has been done even back in the days of FSX addons, by procedurally generating a “light splash texture” as night-map.
Take a look at Dubai in MSFS here… It makes it quite obvious what’s wrong with the previous versions reliance on the “Sepia Mask” / Nasa Black Marble illumination mask.
Compare it to a lightsplash-texture I generated using OSM vector data.
I masked the lamp-generation using the Nasa Black Marble data, restricting lamps only to be generated if within an illuminated area. Random brightness / slight variation in placement could quite easily be introduced as well.
Compare these two and you’ll see what the sepia mask does, and why it’s not realistic for anything else than far away distant horizon. (disclaimer for “not what the eye sees” arguments: This is to illustrate WHAT emits light in the real world. Roads do. Deserts do not. The MSFS in this area is pretty much the opposite of reality.)
So here’s one of the things I propose.
Restrict Sepia Mask to distant +100km diffuse amber-glowing cities in the horizon seen from altitude. Looks very good for that purpose.
For long/medium distances, use a procedurally generated light-map as the one I’ve made below, based on the sims lamp locations (pretty straightforward since categorizing and placing those lamps is the hardest and most time-consuming part), and for medium distance, use 2d “always face camera” lightbulb-textures.
And for closer distances within the LOD distance for houses/vegetation, fade away lightsplash-texture and use “normal” sim lights which illuminates the ground.
(Somewhat simplified explanation to keep post at a readable length)
Three pics:
First, the Nasa Black Marble data.
Second, MSFS moonless night
Third, lamps placed along OSM vector data and light-splash texture generated, masked using the Nasa data to prevent unlit rural roads getting “highway-lamps”.
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I think what you are saying makes a lot of sense, and at this stage is not controversial anymore. That is the way to do it. Also, I think your pictures above are an excellent proof of concept of those ideas.
Which leads us to the next level of difficulties, which is what I started thinking about and hinting at above:
- How to handle LOD parameter variations between different systems. If there are two borders between the short distance, the long/medium distance, and the very long distance solution, should both borders move when we change the LOD settings? Are there ways to move those borders that look better than others? Or maybe the very long distance border (sepia mask start) is fixed, and it is sufficient to move the inner border?
- Dawn/dusk transitions, we still need the Bing map day textures for those. But I we will see once it is implemented if there is still a problem to solve there, maybe fading those out at dusk and fading them in at dawn is straightforward.
Hope Asobo are listening in on this.
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I agree with you - it is a way to start
There should be a setting that you set yourself - besides LOD - night lighting - low, medium, high and ultra or whatever.
so it would be possible to adjust it according to system and “taste” !
20:45 …Those were the days when our first impression of night flying was exactly that…
Now?..a different story…
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In terms of performance, it would free up a lot of resources if they removed all the double and rural street lights.
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Good points!
Just like you said, what I proposed above would require 2 lod distances, or 1 extra lod for the outmost (sepia/artificial-lightmap) , and combine the inner lamp-lod with the “regular” tree/building lod distance.
No point of generating dynamic light emitting lamps outside of the render-range for trees and buildings, as the artificial light map would handle that. But lamps between those lod ranges would still preferably be rendered, but maybe not all the way to the sepia-range. preferably using 2d sprites for that distance, instead of bulb-mesh consisting of 6 or 12 textured faces for each light.
And absolutely, we still need the daytime texture, especially dawn/dusk, I expressed myself unclear last time, since we also need it during night to be “illuminated”/blended with the artificial light splash texture. So we can see for example the football-field texture if illuminated by the light splash texture.
I just meant it doesn’t have to be baked into the generated light splash texture.
Hi folks,
Sometimes there is a double lights on some of the roads but not always. I have hardware acceleration set to On but does not help, is this something related to this bug?