More realist is not always better. It’s is a video game, all things can’t be reproduced so some workarounds and concessions can be found by the developers.
And light differences from reality can result which a more pleasant/beautiful game (Like taller trees).
then we need to change both the name (from Flight Simulator to something else) and their advertisement saying ‘‘almost real, but not totally real’’.
Or just Flight Simulator, but not Flight Emulator 
Emulation vs simulation – what is the difference?
100% agree. It looks artifical, robotic, fake. Not like a living world anymore.
Your ‘Berlin Photo’ picture is taken from a camera, it is not how the human eyes reacts to those light and sees them respectively. It is not realistic to depict it in a game like this. What’s next, having a totally blurry and over exposed camera take the picture, put it on screen like this in MFS and call it realistic.
It is this common beginner misconception: a photograph is not realistic, what your eye sees is. Heck, that’s why most screens run on gamma 2.2. Read it up!
While I generally agree with your remarks, I want to emphasize the point that highways (“autobahnen”) in most european countries are not lit at all.
The fact that we still have a debate on the rural/highways lights is beyond me. Just rollback this specific setting and call it done. The rest of the lights are ok-ish, even tho the previous version is what a night flying really looks like.
I think the point @Grinde81 makes is that the rural lights have always been there, just not as visible because they quickly fade out.
I think the patch is a step in the right direction. Again, the developers said in the Q&A they can bring in more randomness so it looks less artificial.
Somehow, they have to work on how roads are interpreted, rural roads, highways (Autobahn), etc. This would give them the possibility to make lighting much more realistic. And, as others said, work on the light bulbs (position, doubling, fuzziness).
That’s the way to go. I just don’t agree on releasing something that is far from reality while you don’t have this solution. The previous version is far more realistic than this one.
I like the slider / different modes idea, whoever suggested it.
Since if you take the over exposed night time photo approach, sure your game will look like a photograph but can be too bright for some. If you take what’s in real life, the game looks too dark (for some). Both sides will say the sim is not realistic.
Rather than giving us a view / color pallet that appeases everyone (which is impossible), give us the ability to tune to our liking.
I mean take my taste for example which has been mostly developed when I am using P3D. In P3D, I use Black Marble add-on for my night lighting. Without going into too much detail, it essentially does what Asobo just did with the update. Brighter bulbs and darker ground/terrain/roads. To me, that’s realism because, looking out at night, you see only pitch black except when there’s a light source (the moon or street or street light). This is what I understand from reading what pilots sees (in this forum as well as previous flight sim forums). People do agree it gets really dark when looking outside of airplanes. However, according to other people, this is not realism because they have a hard time seeing what’s in the darkness.
Also, I know some people will ask, why do people compare previous titles to this modern title? Well, it’s not all bad with previous titles. There are some realism aspects from previous games that are correct and doesn’t need more adjustment. Can those aspect be improved? Sure. But it doesn’t and shouldn’t equate to completely redefining what’s realism and what’s not.
With that said, either Asobo will make the change or an add-on developer will come and make a tool to tweak the visuals in game (i.e. PTA, SimTweak, Realism Shader, etc.) I’d prefer the former. And if it is the latter, I’d rather have a community developer to develop the tweaking tool rather paying for another add-on.
I think you’re missing the point and barking up the wrong tree here, and let’s leave the strawmen out of this. Let’s try again: I’m simply showing that IRL the light comes mainly from streets, and using a low res illumination mask as a big brown lamp illuminating kilometer-wide areas is not realistic at all. No matter camera sensor or eye, and that the latest update of night lightning have started to feature this with greater lamp-visibility, as you now can start to pick up major roads, like you would IRL. (Lots of tuning still needed)
Sure, to make the it more like the eye sees it, the peak brightness would of course be lower than in the current photo and with a wider dynamic range(no clipping), but the general features and lightsources would be the same, you’d be seeing the grids/spider-web of bright roads as well as well-lit parkinglots, and the unlit areas would be dark/featureless. Not an evenly illuminated brown day-time texture like shown in MSFS, where you can pick up lots of features that should be dark.
I’d gladly go deeper than “cameras and eyes react differently” if you’d like, even though that’s not the point of the comparison, it’s more of what’s being illuminated and how, IRL, compared to the sim.
No matter if it’s an eye or ccd/cmos sensor picking up the photons, it’s still the same photons, emitted by lamps(directly, or reflected on the ground), with unlit areas dark and featureless. Not like a big brown lamp illuminating huge swathes of land like in the sim, with the notorious “sepia mask”. That’s a method best used for the most distant horizon at low viewing angles.
Here’s the higher res version of the data NASA Black Marble data MSFS is using (MSFS uses a blurred lower resolution than this) for city illumination. As you can see, it’s nowhere close in terms of resolution to properly illuminate roads and leave other areas dark, as it simply illuminate the whole city in a monotone brown glow.
This is a very well written and helpful.
Thanks for the insights. I think the developers should take your considerations into account to improve step by step.
Nice to see a deeper analysis in the forums - not only „feelings“.
By the way… the double light bug (lamps hanging in the air) has been solved.
You have to turn Hardware GPU Accleration on in your graphic settings in Windows. After rebooting the bug is no more.
I’m totally with you on that point, and that’s a tricky one at the moment since the lights are based on road-vectors and not really where there are lights or not.
I’d explore the possibility of using the low-res “sepia mask” from Nasa’s Black Marble together with lamp-placing, in other words placing lamps along major roads, if the pixel-value of the underlaying Black Marble data is over a certain brightness-value, which would “in theory” limit highway-lamps in proximity to populated areas.
(For the record, I don’t propose over exposed looks, I merely use photos for comparison of What emits light, not by how much, I should’ve made this more clear in my earlier posts)
This is very similar to how Asobo have placed the lamps, with the exception that MSFS don’t have a “lightmap-texture” based on the same data, but instead use “real” illumination from lamps on the ground, something FSX and early P3d couldn’t achieve (fps-hungry in that poor old engine as well)
This is definately an option I would like to see explored… I’ve done quick & dirty attempts on this using QGIS and OSM vector data to see what it would look like, and it’s definitely more close to reality in terms of lightsources than MSFS method of illuminating huge regions based on lowres Nasa data.
(Those saying this MSFS effect is realistic… Do you see the difference here? Unlit areas doesn’t glow in the dark, regardless of eye or camera sensor)
Here’s some more rendered georeferenced textures trying to implement this at a larger scale.
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/uploads/default/original/3X/1/2/123683caf8c07e6fcfa463ac4ac297309f8b6192.png
&
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/uploads/default/original/3X/7/4/74e3c2e61327c86e42f9110f5270eab5f7293d2c.png
I haven’t been able to get those into the sim due to SDK light mask support and the inability to smoothly deactivate the effect at a certain proximity where the effect would need to be faded out while sim lamp effect on ground fades in.
The new night lights are absurd.
Floating bulbs roughly 100 metres above roads everywhere. Totally kills the immersion.
Way too strong, way too repetitive and uniformly, and because of their height, simply ridiculous.
(area of the lake in Zürich, Switzerland)
It’s like two layers. The normal street lights, roughly at a correct height, and then, 100m above ground, an insane amout of floating bulbs. Seriously Asobo?
I’ve seen the same now in many locations in various countries.
Some of those double-lights fade into invisibility when getting closer, some doesn’t, seems to be somewhat dependent of different road types.
A wild guess would be having one set of lights for long distances, lamp-texture only, which fades away and replaced by texture + light emitting properties, to save fps by not calculating/rendering ground illumination for distant roads. (which admittedly doesn’t explain why they’re 100m up in the air)
Obviously something got screwed up, that’s for sure, seeing both rendered at the same time.
You can see the floating bulbs even at their Halloween challenge as well at their new trailer, for Central and South Americas. They don’t even bother anymore lol
What is is really sad is that this new terrible night lighting reminds of the need to use 3rd party apps like Marble on P3D. Back in the days and using such an antiquated simulator/engine it was gladly acceptable, but removing the nice and realistic looking from this awesome new simulator/engine and basically add the old fashioned Black Marble-like stuff is something that is hard to understand.
Maybe if we start a petition or something for them to rollback this night light. I will be the first to vote the thing
Just have to chime in because of my super disappointment in the new update’s night lighting. I used to love flying around my city at night. It was so eerily perfect and magical. Now everything is so over bright with no variation. Patterns of light galore with major roads looking like beams of light out into the distance. The horizon now just has a regular pattern of light dots. Before, I could totally believe the realism of the scene. Now it breaks the immersion. This is the first time I wish I could roll back to an older version of the sim.
They should just get up in the air at night, then make it look like that. They know that’s an option right? Actually looking outside?
