and I’m looking forward to XPnext… 
*
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*so that we can update the XP11 reference shots in this topic of course…
The overall brightness in XP looks more realistic but that horrible glow around the lights in XP stinks. The MSFS bloom does a much better job of atmospheric diffusion, or whatever it would be called IRL.
Kinda sceptical about night lighting update in SU6 & 7, but would be pleasantly shocked if they managed to make it very close to this:
Look at how even the closest street light bulbs are mainly tiny dots that don’t even overexposed! Look at those ocean of random “non-street light” light sources scattered around, twinkling in and out as it peeks between buildings and trees! Look at the lack of “layers of continuous left-right strings of lights everywhere”.
Note the brown-reddish light scattering atmospheric effect / light pollution of city area far away (that MSFS tried to short-cut using sepia) ONLY appear when the far away area is viewed on a narrow angle of view, meaning if the plane is flying 30k feet and you look out of the window steeply down, you shouldn’t see any of these “brown-reddish” effect. It should be dark/featureless with only dot point lights.
We saw all those release and pre-Alpha night lights screen shots so we know MSFS CAN have night lights very close to this video… But will it? One can only hope.
Ohhh man I’m really hoping they do, I cant wait to do some night flights. I don’t bother at the moment tbh.
Apparently there is a config fix which does change lighting…. But also makes things lot less greener during the day?! Color grading from 1 to 0 ?
I can live with the odd colour tint but night flying looks hideous on triple monitors, or widescreen ones, owing to the out of focus blooming of any lighting on anything other than a single standard aspect monitor.
This alone makes night flying a no go for me at the moment.
G
A part of this video illustrate clearly one of the big issues with current MSFS night lighting
Go to 2:25 (aerial view of Tokyo with night lighting). now Tokyo is an extremely dense capital city with buildings stretched all the way almost to the horizon!
But here we can see after 10km or so, baammm no more buildings appeared but night lights continue on to about 30-50km! This what makes the “Tron grid” effect. All the far away lights that are supposed to be blocked by buildings/vegetation are unrealistically visible to us/the observer.
Will this get addressed in SU6/7? This is definitely a “long range lights” issue!
One thing that makes a view of a city at night plausible,at least for me, is also the variation of colours/ hues and brightness of the light sources.
Aside from the street lights, no other light source is exactly the same.
That is what’s missing from me..
and what is the thought behind these giant red light orbs in every big city I am flying?
Soon we will all see whats coming…but I remain cautious
Red lights are usually at the site of wind farms.
For that image to have context you should zoom in to one to show the origin of the red light. I’ll bet they were windmills.
They are not.
So what were they? Perhaps tell us this location so we can corroborate for ourselves?
I have to admit it would be an odd placement for wind turbines, but Cambridge, UK does have one in the city so it’s not unheard of.
I’ve not seen disembodied red light before, either, so you must know what the red lights are attached to to suggest they are not wind turbines.
They are just red orbs above buildings. I will probably send a screenshot of the spots during daylight later
I would like to see the light sources look sharper in appearance yet realistic looking, not blurry as they are now or so sharp they look artificial like a 20 yr old video game. Right now the lights are way too blurry in VR. Your screenshot demonstrates this nicely.
Just posting reference material from another topic:
WU6
Alpha
And look at the vehicle lights reflecting off the buildings!
/uploads/default/original/4X/6/8/d/68df0d7f192f8e751031242a6645f85d665e759b.mp4
Yep they’ve really messed it up since then! I remember flying at night and being like wow this is soo immersive, especially on some nights with bad weather… now its just as bad as other sims or even worse. Nothing special atm.
Having watched the announcement video, I’m not terribly excited I have to admit. I didn’t see any night scenery. The cloud generation looks good but there’s a sharp cutoff at the draw limit I hope they address. The trees are…meh, very copy-paste looking in large numbers. The surface water looks fantastic. They also include seaports, ships, etc. which is something very lacking in MSFS outside the photogrammetry. Dock after dock and harbor after harbor of submerged ships and no cranes.
Well, at least what we need is to go back to this alpha.
Wow the Alpha lighting is very neat! 
Did we ever get a statement from anyone official regarding this after 1250+ posts? I mean, apart from the long range quality fix that, I guess, has nothing to do with the issue talked here.