Excellent comparison shots highlighting some of what needs to be fixed.
Lamp visibility range is surely increased to more realistic distances, but overall ground illumination too bright, and bulbs too big as well. And now when more lamps are visible, uniformity becomes a problem too.
(before, by only rendering lamps very close, those often where obstructed to varying degrees by houses and trees, giving a “organic” and random variation.) This will have to be augmented by random brightness for those lamps placed beyond the vegetation/building LOD.
Rural roads had lights before the patch, but one bug of the pre-patch version was lamps disappearing at less then 10% of the real-world distance, hiding them unless very low & close. I even had lit gravel roads outside of my hometown in Northern Sweden before the patch.
This can be fixed using several methods proposed earlier in this thread, using brightness/population-density masks when placing the lights.
As far as I remember this was the reason of the night lighting ‘updates’ since release:
Step1: It was great during alpha, and upon release, it was no longer great in 1080p (better in 4K yet dimmer nonetheless).
Step2: Because people were complaining rightfully, they’ve tried to enhance the results but instead of reverting to pre-release lighting techniques, they chose to nerf the black marble ground illumination effect.
Step3: Ground illumination became too much prominent and people once again rightfully complained. They tried to address this in pushing the ground illumination texture farther away but instead of just doing it, they’ve also increased the brightness and size of the point lights, let alone they are now displaying in tandem instead of in jigsaw.
If you look these two pictures below, I personally find the ground illumination and light intensity is adequate in the first shot, too much in the second one (most likely because they’ve increased the brightness of the point lights too much).
Step4: (fill this with next update night lighting).
. My take: They should revert to pre-release (alpha) lighting to get started, as a baseline. It was really better than any other iteration since release. From there, they should pass the implementation through the art director and see how different approaches are artistically and realistically good. The idea to rendering the ground illumination texture farther away since update #5 seems to be ok, provided they also take in account the angle to which you’re looking at it like I’ve explained in a post earlier, otherwise you get large area of unconvincing ground lighting (in addition to the texture already suffering from blooming which is accentuating the effect negatively). Doing this, in addition to adding some randomness in the point light placement should give a much more realistic look and feel in my opinion, as seen from all the comparative screenshots accumulated in this discussion.
Yep, I think they tried to work around the sapia issue when in fact they need to take a longer term approach to it and deal with the inaccuracy in the sapia mask. There is no quick fix for an aspect of the lighting that they got fundamentally wrong to begin with, it needs to be redesigned.
Exactly… It seems those that fly the metal tubes up high have one issue (sepia) and those of us down low have Xmas string lights as an issue. For us low fliers it’s really ugly now. I’d love to have pre-patch 5 lights again.
Regarding previous version, which used a simple trick to emulate realistic night lighting hadtwo major problems that actually affected both low and high (and mid) altitudes.
Lamps disappear after just a kilometer or two, which is a fraction of realistic distances.
Terrain glowing in the dark, could be seen even as low as 5,000 ft, and in some cases even lower.
In this image, you can see both problems, and it’s at low level too.
Lamps vanishing instead of stretching far away like IRL, to be replaced by a radioactive brown glow that illuminates almost everything that would be dark and featureless IRL.
The night tech desperately needed an overhaul to make it realistic (not only pretty when very low and close) . Unfortunately this was done now instead of during the Alpha/Beta, so we ended up with something fresh out of the oven that needs quite a bit of polishing before being pretty again.
But when that is done, it will be both pretty And realistic.
Those obstacle lights have been completely crazy since release, I remember one of my first flights in august around the Alta Wind Energy Center west of KMHV, which I think is the biggest wind turbine farm in the world (not sure though?)
They seem to be pretty much identical in both size and brightness
(which they shouldn’t, given the big difference in distance)
That’s something we now see in streetlights too, in 1080p they seem to be 4x4 pixels for a pretty huge span of distance, from close/medium to far away, giving us an even more uniform/artificial look.
edit: it still looks the same since release, hopefully this will be fixed together with the rest of the night-lights…
No I took that one just now. too see if there was any difference, but still looked the same… Performance is much better though, I remember my computer kneeling in August over by the insane numbers of red mini-suns illuminating half the valley back then.
Here’s a screenshot from a video posted for comparison by @SeaW0lfBishere , this time benchmarked against pre-patch and post-patch versions, so it’s easier for everybody to see what the Devs are trying to do, and why.
Top-Left: Real
Top-Right: Pre-patch version w. Sepia mask & short lamp visibility
Now the light is more based on illumination from actual streetlights, instead of a huge brown lamp uniformly illuminating the daytime-texture. This is definitely a step in the right direction in terms of realism, albeit not yet polished. Still many adjustments needed, but we’ll get there for sure! Just glad to finally see the beginning of the end of the earlier Sepia Mask implementation.
From these screenshots they do indeed seem to go towards a right direction. However, as you say, there are still many adjustment to be made.
Far way at the bottom right screenshot I can still see the sepia mask , not so obvious due to brighter lights. Also there is the uniformed look which for me is the biggest ‘‘fault’’.
Lets see after update 7…
Don’t take screenshots as the gospel. Night shooting is very tricky. You have to flight in the sim.
And the X-plane thing is a way of saying “computer generated”. Before it wasn’t. I was flying over Rio de Janeiro at night mesmerized at the feeling. Yes, it could be a bit brighter over the distance, have the lamps to be a bit brighter, but boy that ambience was a sight.
Now it is not. It is just an arcade / computer generated grid (with elephant lamps) that made many of us stop flying at night. You either have a dot of light or don’t. The rest is black. That diffusion can’t be generated for all the lights over the map.
“Modded in PS”… What’s “PS” btw? (excuse my ignorance…)
And who modded it?
And yes, judging by those screenshots, bottom left looks better than even pre update-5.
So are those what the devs currently have in store for us?
And this just came yesterday when I trawled through Youtube vids comparing MFS and XP11 night lighting. Apparently there’s this guy uploaded a video of XP11 with tweaked night lights… The results were pretty amazing (for XP of course) and brought it to “MFS pre update-5 ish” night feeling! Although it’s still have XP11’s limitation of course.
And turns out all needs to be done is to tweak some values in a file called “lights.txt”! And adjusting a “dataref editor” in game so size of light orbs can be of our preference.
Just wondering is this possible to implement in MFS? I mean the light orbs etc are there in game… But allow us to tweak them (size, brightness, light projection range) to our liking.
For me personally it is the streetlighting which bothers me the most. It is just overdone and often uses double bulbs and lamp posts at very regular intervals and does not distinguishes between country side and city light density. That gives a Christmas like impression everywhere.
Secondly I think the runway lights are visible too far out. This week I flew into EDDM with RVR550m. I saw the approach lights at 2nm at about 1000agl give or take. It just diminishes the CAT ILS experience. Yes of course another factor could be the fog not being modeled correctly.
That is mainly because visibility in FS2020 doesn’t go below 3 miles or something . You can’t fly a instrument approach down to CAT I / II minimums in the current state.
I can tell you from real world experience that in low visibility the last 300 m of the approach lights are very bright, brighter than currently in FS2020.
. You can’t fly a instrument approach down to CAT I / II minimums in the current state.