Yep I believe that is the plan and the reason they tackled street lighting this way. Very astute 
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I just don’t think they have got to the second part of this update yet which is making the sepia mask show at much higher altitudes - this may be because they want to tone down the mask - who knows, I’m sure they have there reasons.
yes the ground is dark but theres not lights around the city just the main road like speedways etc the ground should have lights from city lights that at high altitude still miss not like dubai where the ground had his own lights even where theres not lights around
Maybe showing a screenshot and the exact location would help here.
I don’t think anything should have gotten worse than before by the light distance change since they obviously did not change the sepia mask look. So I would be surprised if you found a location that actually got darker than before.
And all, don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely an improvement in the night lighting in many areas! Dubias i just the benchmark for the worst case, but that doesn’t mean it looks that bad everywhere. 
still looks bad. is this a bug?
Not a bug, but they are still not quite there yet. I hope they keep on working on it.
As I said, Dubai is basically the worst case in the sim.
That’s crazy. I thought they said they at least pushed back the sepia mask to the horizon. How can it still be seen so clearly at 5k feet 
They talked about desert areas issues
Yes I thought that was the sepia mask showing desert areas bright instead of dark. But I also thought that particular sepia mask was pushed far into the distance. But I looks as though the bright desert is bright even without that mask present.
They said that is not related to the night lighting but their data source. As they add / improve additional regions, this will get fixed.. which means it could be upto a year as they are looking for data sources for some of this it seems?
I agree, it’s much better looking now. The only quibble I have at this point is that even in remote rural areas many highways are lit for their entire length so it looks silly where you know there shouldn’t be anything visible. I can think of solutions, but I don’t know how easily or if it’s even possible to implement them in the game.
Higher altitude, at lower altitude VFR was overdone with big light lamp size, not a solution.
“Terrain emitting light” , do you mean the sepia filter, or the glow from cities? If you mean the second one , I think it is one of the most realistic things I’ve seen in a long time of a 3d interpretation of light pollution produced by the millions of light sources ,around a city. I also think light pollution should be more prominent when reflecting on cloud surfaces at low altitudes, like fog/low altitude clouds.
Also, there is a weird and totally unrealistic “trick” right now implemented by the devs. Whenever you move near/in the cities (big light sources in general) the whole horizon gets a lot brighter with artificial non realistic ambient light and you can see light emitting clouds even in places without any light source or light pollution. It is not realistic at all, but makes light pollution more prominent on clouds around the city from what I understand. If they were able to improve this by keeping the light pollution as it seems from being far from the city(when in the dark), but with more exposure for the clouds above the city/light source, without the need of implementing the “artificial ambient lighting everywhere” technique , night lighting in the sim would be perfect and far more realistic looking. In reality, you can see light polluted cloud layers from many miles away , but when you are under those layers(in the city) , if you look towards the sea all you see is darkness. This is not the case in the sim right now.
@Living6Dead66 I am talking about the lit up ground texture issue in few places like desert areas (ex: Dubai) as posted by Coppersens, which still exists.
If anybody doesn’t think the lighting is far too bright… take a night flight over Pittsburgh. Hard to even find the city for all of the lighting.
The night lighting now looks almost identical to X-Plane 11 now which is extremely ugly. It’s too “digital” and less analog. At least before it had some sort of variation, and the lights look more natural and subtle. All they really had to do was address the sepia-tone texture while leaving the actual lights alone.
The lights are way too pronounced and overly bright now. I really hope they can also improve on making the airport lights look more realistic, because when flying at high altitudes you can clearly see airports all around you which totally ruins the immersion.
Light reflects off surfaces, but now all you see are just the overexposed light orbs all over the place with no reflection from the ground.
Agreed, need to fix the rural areas. If you see the classification in OSM. There is some options Key:highway - OpenStreetMap Wiki
The challenge is what happens for major roads / highways. Typically in the rural areas there won’t be lights there but I can see classification for I90 outside of Seattle and In Seattle is the same.
It needs some more logic I imagine?
These are long exposure shots. That’s not how it looks in real life.
The sepia in Dubai still looks disgustingly off. How is this issue marked as done?
