I just played for a few minutes of low altitude night flight and noticed one thing that might be easily fixed by Asobo to make it more realistic (pretty much adding to my bullet points above)… Asobo you need to chill out in the number of street light orbs per “light point”!
I saw most roads that are supposed to get one street light every 20-50 meters or so actually get TWO or FOUR!! Motorways, tollways or freeways get four on every “light points”!! This is way too much and makes main street lights unrealistically prominent, thick, and not blending well with smaller street lights.
I can see why they’re doing this, because if you see night flight videos, main streets do look “prominent” than smaller streets, but it’s not because they have 4 street lights every 20 meters! They still use at most two street lights at any “light point”, but they are more powerful and illuminates larger area! Not to mention other light sources such as cars, bright shopfronts etc! Doing shortcut to achieve this effect by simply putting extra light orbs is wrong in my opinion. Keep the amount of light orbs REALISTIC is in my opinion might be the easiest step they can take to make night lighting better!
Aka if you don’t render tons of cars, bright shopfronts etc, then don’t try taking futile shortcut to mimic this effect! Stick to reality in the number of light orbs… When you’re ready, then fix the cars on the road so it can add to the effect (like XP11). Bright shop fronts etc just leave it to third party devs to make!
Take a look at Grinde81’s screen shots below that shows red light orbs… The “side road” should only have ONE light orbs per “light point”, not two! And they should be further spaced out! The main freeway should only have TWO light orbs per “light point”, and it needs to be higher up and illuminate larger area… But here we can see four or more there on the screen shots, which is totally unrealistic.
I just did a comparison between the new night tech from the Sim Update 6 preview / Dev Q&A to get a better grasp of the night lighting rework. Around 35,000 ft.
“Some very curative improvements which I think has been asked for along time so we did another big pass of improving night lighting”
Basically what we’ve had for almost a year now but some small changes, not too much difference with the dull brown / pale yellow look. Glad to hear the Sepia is finally starting to get implemented the way they had originally intended. But I’d love to see it pushed back much more, as well as more amber tone.
Here I’m using Devmode to remove Sepia / illumination of ground textures with the current SU5 build, to more clearly see the visibility of individual lights and how far they’ve been increased in the SU6 preview we saw. Long distance, no change at all…? Medium distance around New Jersey seems to have quite a few more streets visible. But it looks like the same tech we’ve had for a long time now, huge fuzzy and undersaturaded big orbs… I thought they where going to do a rework/rebuild to eliminate the shortcomings current tech has, instead of keep tuning it. Fingers crossed for SU7 then…
Finally, here’s SU5 lamps at night using Devmode to remove ground-illumination/sepia, to see the lamps we already have before SU6.
2nd image is the same, just with increased exposure to see more clearly.
It’s all pale-yellow, instead of warm amber tones and great variety of brightness and color range.
Yes what I saw in the QnA didn’t look much of a difference, they really need to rework how it’s done because currently it’s not very impressive. I’ve removed the sepia mask too using dev mode and I could just see the potential, looks much better without it… or just needs to be pushed really further out.
I was hoping they’d show us 35k feet, and also 2-4k feet so we can see what the “updated lighting” looks like closer to the ground.
Sometimes I’m just wondering should we start a new thread for night lighting under “wish list”? But the thing is, night lighting (light orbs size etc) IS also an issue since the beginning of this thread. So do you reckon a “wish list”, or something that needs to be “fixed”?
Enable dev mode and find where it says disable ground illumination or something like that, im not in the sim atm so dont know exactly but its there in one of the drop downs. Its not really a work around as it removes pretty much the whole ground imagery so the lights dont reflect onto anything. It just gives u an idea of what it can look like.
Ahhh man without getting too much into because of NDA, I just watched one of the videos I had of me flying saved on my hard drive, in tech alpha, and the night flying was sooo immersive, it was soo cool. Miss it heaps.
Do you think we should start a new one? Or should we just try our best to get this thread recognized more? I mean you would think after 748 votes they would sift through this thread quite a bit.
Due to the NDA, we can’t. We can only show/discuss what can be gathered from officially released screenshots/videos. And in this case, I think it’s extremely counterproductive and delays the improvements needed significantly.
cant we move all thees votes to the latest dev Q&A and literally ask them to bring the alpha night lighting back in to the sim.
it shows that the code is already there just needs to be implemented back. im sure there is more to it that that but if everyone agrees that it looked better then, it should be an easy implementation
I think for now we just wait until SU6 and SU7 and see what happens to night lighting then. If the issues brought by this thread are not fixed yet, then this thread will pretty much continues on because basically they haven’t fixed them yet, and it gives us insight whether they acknowledged there are issues with city night lighting other than the sepia.
Medium distance around New Jersey seems to have quite a few more streets visible. But it looks like the same tech we’ve had for a long time now, huge fuzzy and undersaturaded big orbs… I thought they where going to do a rework/rebuild to eliminate the shortcomings current tech has, instead of keep tuning it. Fingers crossed for SU7 then…
