I agree 100%, just give us the option to turn off Sephia and reduce the orange color on the clouds and the night environment would super good.
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Are the light orbs open to devs or are they locked away?
I think shrinking them and adjusting the lods could be a simple way to have a dramatic effect.
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Some folks complained about terrain glow after the release. Foe some reason they did a fix that brought MSFS to arcade levels. The rest is history, and the jaw dropping night scene is gone perhaps forever. I still have some old videos with the original night lighting. Yes, it could improve, but the feel, the light diffusion over far neighborhoods is gone. Like you said, TRON like grids.
The way things are, they will never fix it. We have bulbs and dark. This is bananas. When I lived in NY I would go to the roof and watch downtown Manhattan from 86th street and the city had this amber glow to it. Just magical.
That’s what I felt when I flew MSFS at night for the first time. I was just like “wow!”.
Now it is gone. I think they fear the terrain glow backlash.
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It can be seen realistically with x plane 11 night light scripts. Need such scripts in mfs
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All they have to do is return us to a night like the videos they posted in their pre-alpha version
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That is basically what we have now in MSFS - a black canvas with light bulbs in it. No diffusion, no nothing. We just see some light diffusion at close quarters. The guy used a camera effect to glitter, but that’s all. Honestly, it looks OKish, light bulbs are smaller and the grid is better, but far from what we had at the start in MSFS.
And the second video is from too high above. I bet even X-11 could do that. The lighting in MSFS really shone on low-altitude flights.
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Yeah this is what I was wondering as well…
If they want to get rid of that weird way terrain was glowing at night (looks more like a poor choice of baked texture), why can’t they just keep the way light bulbs are (size and look) in pre update-5, but just continue it way further?
Some explained that, the old bulbs stopped at a short distance, then sepia took over… I know that but why can’t they make the old bulbs goes way further?
It seems that the way their “night engine” works is that… light bulbs further away are dimmed, so in order for light bulbs to appear further, they need to crank up their brightness (?) Well there you go, if this is the case, then no wonder why lights look the way they are after update-5.
Plus by cranking up the brightness of bulbs, they appear larger due to clipping etc.
Also night lighting is closely linked to other things such as tree/building draw distance etc… IRL night lights all the way to horizon will have trees/buildings etc blocking some of them… In the game, trees/building stopped being drawn at a particular distance, but night lights continued on… This is what makes it look like the TRON grid.
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Can any third party developer make a night light add-on please? Orbx made one for FSX and P3D. So what is stopping third party devs to enhance it for MSFS? Perhaps our friend @CptLucky8 can make one? I will buy it for sure.
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Apparently Asobo are working on it, but it’s scheduled for Sim Update 6, which is quite the wait.
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I truly hope they take this seriously tho, night lighting is just as important as daytime.
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Flying over the UK at night, where you can normally fly VFR by using the Motorways which stand out compared to the other roads, I didn’t know what was a Motorway, what was a main road, what was a B road and what was a small village track. And when I fly towards big cities like Birmingham I couldn’t tell if they were cities or towns. This is an amazing sim for day time flying but I hope work will be done more in the future on the night lighting. The potential is there! 
We need someone to come up with a way of the default road lights changing colour and brightness depending on the type of road. We also need there to be a way for the photogrammetry buildings to display different brightness of lights on them depending on building size etc… but I think this last one would be a step too far as its all about bing maps. Maybe we are left with having 3rd party devs making the cities for us, which is a shame because they can’t produce every city, town or village with the correct lighting for the entire world. Is there a light map out there, similar to bing maps, that displays the correct lighting around the world that Asobo could use to inject the correct lighting? I haven’t a clue, just throwing out ideas here! 
Xplane had several light fix scripts too. Then the motorway lights were different to the main road lights which made a huge difference. It can’t be beyond microsoft to do something similar surely?
I do have high hopes for this sim though, the potential is surely there with how far we have come in flight siming graphics now.
You are right! But MS has put 100% of their trust on Asobo to develop this sim. It really depends on what Asobo can bring to the table rather than Microsoft.
To be fair, they have to.
To me, what drives the difference between roads is:
timestamp 1:
https://youtu.be/SECiS65jKr4?t=436
timestamp 2:
https://youtu.be/SECiS65jKr4?t=7733
timestamp 3:
https://youtu.be/6gnFDBi_XME?t=147
when you see smooth moving car lights, it tells right away whether this is a major road and adds a lot to realism.
FS2020 road lights are static light bulbs and when I look at them more and more I believe the idea was to recreate the look and feel of roads with traffic as seen from above (hence the red and white static light bulbs). The problem is that they are static, let alone as demonstrated in this discussion oversized and blurry.
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Yes that was a serious issue and even still is and the release night lighting version was in no way jaw dropping as u say. They had to bring a fix to it and they brought it ,unfortunately it didn’t do anything to the sepia texture issue and also brought about a new range of problems, but atleast the light bulbs draw distance was increased as a first step. Light bulbs terminating at a very short distance and brown sepia texture taking over is in no way realistic. It only looks ok far away near the horizon. Even the dev team admitted back then in an Q&A session, and said that they are working to fix this moody brown baked texture everywhere around (the sepia masking) by searching for some better night data source. I don’t know what’s the present update regarding that!!! We haven’t heard anything regarding that for long.
This sepia masking has to be removed. If they just remove the sepia texture, half of the work is done; half of the beauty of night lighting would come back. Waiting to see whats in store for us in SU 6.
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You miss the point. I was referring to the fact that with Microsoft being so big and having so many companies to call upon (such as they have with Bing Maps) then it shouldn’t be beyond them (or whoever works for them such as Asobo) to sort the lighting out compared to a smaller company like Laminar who don’t have such resources. In fact the lighting issue with Xplane was sorted by just one man who made a script to change the lighting and was just slotted into the lights directory file of Xplane.
But its early days, so fingers crossed! 
@FlightPlanes
You raising a point which is interesting in itself:
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Do you believe FS2020 night lighting is not well done because it doesn’t match some level of authenticity you’d find in X-Plane11?
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Is it possible FS2020 night lighting is like it is because it is exactly recreating the artistic director vision for night lighting and for the game audience?
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Do you find the FS2020 night lighting is being rendered exactly with the same underlying artistic and technical implementation as FSX (when I look closely it is troubling - the fixed size bulb regardless of distance, the light bulb halo used to reduce perceived size instead of perceived intensity, etc…) and they are just not touching it for now (if ever) so that it won’t break apart?
The other issue you’re raising is also as equally important to me:
If you search my post history with “SDK” you’ll find I make a lot of references to how FS2020 is still not departing from the FSX SDK flaws and mindset: Microsoft knows better than its users and only gives you access to a few customization points on the surface only. This shows in the SDK since FS9 at least (compared to X-Plane SDK), this shows in WMR (compared to SteamVR), this shows in many of those apps and games too. And to me, this is just contrary to the spirit and spinal nerve of this hobby and this is limiting 3rd party creativity.
At least, they’re telling they’ll address night lighting over the span of multiple future releases. What we don’t know is what direction will they take night lighting to, because I have no doubt from Microsoft point of view, future versions will have better night lighting, but the question remains: is what they find better, what simmers find better too?
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You raise some good points. My one and only concern is that, as with day time flying, MSFS should be as realistic as possible, regardless of what sims went before it. As a frequent night flyer its just not realistic enough in my opinion.
I know what you say about allowing others to change and improve the sim. I know with Austin at Laminar he always talks about giving the tools of the sim over to the community… something you really have to admire him for. There are so many brilliant people out there who can offer their services, many for free, and make xplane so much more realistic. If MSFS is to take the sim world to a new level then it either has to do all those changes itself or allow others to do it. Its the same with the Live Traffic. One man was able to put such data as that found in programmes like FlightRadar24 into Xplane to allow real traffic to be seen. MSFS was supposed to do the same but built in. Unfortunately the live traffic falls way short of expectation. So, in my humble opinion, either they, or their associated companies, have to make it as good or allow others, like yourself, to do it for them. Otherwise it will promise so much but fall way short on delivery.
Is this a problem with making a profitable sim for the mass gaming community against making a realistic, study level, flight sim? I don’t know. I’m not sure it is as the guys at Asobo are all into flight simming themselves and know the expectations, given whats out there already. You know far more about SDK and what Microsoft and Asobo will or wont allow so you probably know far more about it than me. What is your view? Like I said though, it is early days for this new sim, so I guess time will tell. There is so much potential in this new sim I just hope it matures and becomes the sim we all expected.
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I think it’s something Microsoft still hasn’t come to grips with yet… They failed to realize why the spirit of FS2000 is still alive in P3D today: because users can create content for it. If they opened up the weather system and the traffic system to 3rd party creators, they’d solve about 70% of major issues in a month or so, with 0 effort from themselves.
Oh well… who knows what they’re thinking. All i can do is hope they fix these things.
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