Yes like ScenicAtol3300 said, I used photoshop to put in some of the tweaks I believe would be beneficial to the current version.
(Coming from the nerdy world of astrophotography, I got quite a few addons for controlling point light sources, stars & lamps are very similar in that aspect)
I reduced the lamps both in size and brightness, pulled some colour from the edges into the core, shifted the yellow lights into a more “streetlighty” amber tone, tuned down the Sepia Mask, and what made the most impact was adding a random brightness pattern to the lamps only, trying to simulate obstruction by houses/trees of various lengths, as well as occasional broken lights, breaking the uniform pattern.
This can all be done by Asobo and when done/polished, we’ll have the best of two worlds much better than pre-patch version, good up close and far away, both realistic and beautiful.
Not to beat a dead horse, but in addition to voting I figured I should restate what’s been said many times before in this thread, just in case they do read each post.
Pre-patch 5 looked so much more real to me for low to mid-level GA flying. I remember being particularly impressed by how the light reflected off the street, and everything looked organic. Now it looks like a 1990’s sim, way too uniform and completely unrealistic. The awesome reflections are no longer prominent because they are overpowered by the overdone primary lighting. This is especially bad in suburban and rural areas, which used to look real but now look like part of one big uniform grid.
I really hope they revert to something like what they had before, because night flying isn’t even fun now.
Would be great if they can share some screen shots or trailers of the current state of night light tech development.
And after they develop features like night lights or water masking etc, do they usually give it to a bunch of beta testers first to obtain feedback, or simply release it and get feedback from everyone?
With the alpha/beta testing phase officially over, I’d assume all testing is now being done in-house.
Since this is a long-term project that’s intended to keep evolving for years to come, things will change over time. And for that reason, I personally think it would be an interesting idea to have a parallel test-build. This to expose the new updates to bigger numbers before release, which for sure would reduce a lot of the backlash when releasing (sometimes game breaking) bugged updates.
A downside would be those updates being released at a lower frequency to slot in extra tests and fixes for bugs missed by the initial test-group. But that way would mostly expose new flaws to users who signed up to be testers, instead of consumers expecting(rightfully so) a less buggy product.
This would also give the devs higher quality feedback from those who want to help instead of just complain through binary criticism such as “nothing like real” , “this is BS arcade” based on subjective feelings instead of benchmarking against the real world first. I’m confident that it’s fully possible to make it VERY close to real life, which is what a simulation should strive for first hand, instead of setting a low bar at just making it “pretty” for those with little to none real world experience of what it actually looks like IRL flying at night various scenery-types/conditions.
Honestly a lot of things were better in the Alpha,performance,night lighting, daytime LOD…Not sure what they chasnged but in alpha I was getting 60PFS and amazing graphics now I’m getting 35 and ok graphics when compared to the alpha. I don’t get why they refuse to fix the LOD and get rid of the blurry mess that is the current state of ground textures at a distance.
I think we just have to face it that they “fixed” to post releases levels and they won’t revisit something they believe they have already “fixed”. And by fixed I mean ruined for most of us.
I totally hate the night lighting.
Used to enjoy night flying so much but it gradually got worse.
Love the draw distance being improved but lights look way too artificial.
They need to watch real videos over and over on repeat and try to replicate that
Could be hard these times due to lockdown in France if I’m not wrong…
But agreed, devs should fly at night and see it for themselves. And it needs to be a real night flight, not one flown at dusk, lol…
I’m pretty sure they did fly at night. The original lighting in MSFS was pretty close. The terrain emiting light that people talk about was perhaps a workaround to mimic the light diffusion at the distance. They could brighten a bit the lamps perhaps? But the rest was pretty good.
I used to drive to the mountains and see Rio de Janeiro down at the flats, some 30/40km away, and it was just like that. A glow in the distance over the whole horizon. In fact I saw nothing wrong with the original lighting in MSFS. Yesterday I did a flight at night after a couple weeks and had to log off. The thing is just horrible now. Literally unplayable.
Yeah we’re just waiting to see what the devs would say about this in the next Q and A. I hope they do tell us more regarding night lighting, particularly what their plan is, and what they’re trying to achieve… Maybe some screen shots of what they have in store for us.
But at the same time, they said a “release” regarding night lighting is scheduled for Update-7… So I do hope that we will see considerable improvements to our night lighting then, for both low-mid altitude GA flight and high altitude airliners.
. This is a thread about night lighting and the issues after patch 5…
