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.
Well we hope they have been reading this thread and taking notes. Thats what were all worried about, night lighting is on the list of things to be fixed in the coming update, but it only says Long Range Quality fix… which we dont know what they exactly mean by that. Yes Alpha night lighting is the way to go!!!
I was not in the alpha, but when I saw the development videos before release, I was impressed with how realistic the lighting looked. However when I bought the program the lighting seemed very dim and lifeless. Later the lighting was brightened-up, which I was very excited about and puzzled by the complaints about it being too bright. But this alpha shot is interesting to me as it shows how the lighting looked in the alphas. Whatever they do, let’s hope it best simulates reality, gives a reasonable approximation of it, and looks great in VR as well. Some of this is rather subjective as it becomes like stylized artwork or an impressionist painting. Not every area of the world is lit exactly the same way in every detail. So decisions have to be made in the algorithms that covers most places reasonably. So I can see it difficult pleasing everybody on every little point.
I agree and this is why I wrote a long time ago the following so that the users can choose what feels better for them:
Maybe if someone has the capability to create a poll on these forums with these two screenshots, the votes would certainly give a good indication about what direction the community prefers:
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The idea of making a Beta version for everyone to use might work. Then a pole could be taken on what the majority thinks of the change. As you well know as a VR user it’s hard to vote on posted images as they look different in VR in practice (on different headsets too).
The other problem in deciding what the majority wants is do we want 1. Lighting that resembles a photo with long exposure and not necessarily what an actual pilot sees flying? or…2. What a pilot actually sees with his eyes in flight?
This can be a bit difficult to capture in photos or video at times. Personally, I’d opt for version 2. But that’s just me; and a little subjective from pilot to pilot.
+1 not only for the rendition that I also find more “pilot view” but more importantly for the light bulbs which aren’t making me wanting to grab my glasses, especially in VR…
Indeed. As for my earlier suggestion of a beta, it sounds (from the Q&A in progress right now) like this idea would be extremely complicated on the team and would severely slow-down development role-outs. I guess we need to have faith in the team’s decisions here and be patient. They are hard at work for sure.
From current Q@A Night light have been improved for next Sim update 6, on higher altitude, rendering is future away, more detailed, sepia mask is less used if I understand, not sure what will be overall, you can listen on current Q@A when available.
Also LOD is now going to 400, before it was not possible without major hit, before Simupate 5
Trees now rendered more far, on different part of the world there was random result.
They explained all this on last Q@A etc…
yes they explained a lot of things in the Q&A indeed, but not sure whether this is positive or not. I mean pushing the black marble texture farther away is good, and offering a UI slider for something you could already do manually in the UserCfg.opt file is good. However if the light bulbs don’t change and are still fuzzy, or if the street lights as the one we’ve seen in the Q&A are still non-realistically looking because of their color, placement, and types… What I did see in the Q&A is the same lighting, just drawn farther a little bit, nothing else. But this was most likely an alpha preview, and they’ll certainly surprise us, so like @SPilot95 is saying. let’s hope and be patient.
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I missed live broadcast. At what minute they are talking about night lighting?
I tried asking a couple times about the size of the light orbs and how in the alpha they were point like even up close, but it wasn’t directly answered by anyone. I mentioned there were comparisons here in this thread. Hopefully one of them saw it.
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yeah hopefully they’ll also see Jorg is saying having 250 3rd party devs onboard, but not Reality XP… (sorry if this remark is off topic, but there is still a difference between what is said and what it is - there is a development about the Q&A and the shimmering bug speaking about just this and more, starting from this post)
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Yup, this is what I’ve been fearing for quite a while now looking at the dev roadmap. We’re still seeing the same oversized overexposed undersaturated fuzzy bulbs with incredibly reparative lamp placement and brightness, lacking color variation since all cores are washed out. Small variations of pale brown instead full of variations of colors seen IRL.
And since they say the sepia mask was only intended for extreme distances, why leave it completely erroneous implemented for over ~18 months until now, instead of letting us enjoy the superior / very impressive early alpha lamp tech…?
Which already had all these features that’s “new” now plus even more? Visible for very long distances without the sepia mask and much better bulb textures, small and sharp, colorful to the core, surrounding glow, instead of the fuzzy semitransparent orbs we have now…?
(Although too many orange lights, but this could be worked upon instead of going back to square zero over and over again)
I was hoping for something at least bringing night lights back to as good as it was almost 2 years ago looking at the pre release videos and december 2019 alpha version…
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Early alpha lamp distance ~2 years ago, lamps/roads visible into the horizon without the sepia mask:
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Baked night-texture overlay proposed many times throughout this thread, and well tested technique since FSX, here done by a single person(fclem33) & not a whole team, generating those textures procedurally using OSM data fixing pretty much every single problem MSFS is struggling with since 18 months:
I sincerely wish they would respond to these questionmarks asked for over a year now…
Why we took a really bad turn mid alpha that after 18 months of small changes still isn’t on par with what was shown & experienced ~2 years ago. Doesn’t make any sense…
If early alpha night tech was abandoned because of performance, I’d LOVE to at least have the option to get back the early alpha lightning and let me decide for myself…
Lots of gfx options can be reduced during night to make up for the eventual fps hit. But at least I could choose to have next gen gfx at night too instead of just during the day.
I mean, I can select 4k & renderscale 200% in the options even though it gives horrible fps, so why not give us the option to experience realistic night lights like we used to?
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Or at least release night lighting editing capability to 3rd party devs via SDK, so 3rd party can build mods for night lights (night texture replacing sepia, different light orbs, colours etc).
Funny how if they give us the ability to edit night lights ourselves, this thread would probably not even a thing!
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On one hand I hope they see this thread and at some point acknowledge the excellent suggestions made, or at least explain why they are not workable in the post-release builds. On the other I hope they mark this issue as resolved and close this thread so we can open a new one and have them look at addressing more than just the draw distance. They seem to have blinders on about anything other than pushing out the sepia mask and making the existing system simply draw farther like the trees.
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Yeah I think the Dev QnA actaully confirmed my fears, its just the sepia mask pushed out pretty much and the lights get drawn further out… Nothing about the light differences and sizes etc. You would think a thread with 1272 replies would be a good read into what people are actually thinking.
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