That’s a brilliant, fascinating and insightful analysis of the night lighting issue - thank-you!
Clearly shows that the software has gone backwards since early development versions.
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I don’t have that data currently, but here’s a high-altitude screenshot of Dubai from ancient FSX with “Night Environment Dubai” addon, afaik the exact same method of procedural generation of “light splash” textures using OSM road vector data, different lights colors and sizes for different road-types.
In terms of realism, this comes much closer to the photo and reality compared to current MSFS sepia mask. The light comes from streetlights only, illuminating busy highways & smaller streets as well as smaller residential roads, instead of hanging a big brown lamp over the whole area illuminating the entire satellite photo evenly.
And this is most probably how MSFS placed all its current light bulbs, so half the job is already done if they would pursue this method.
If I’m not completely wrong, Night Environment addons was made for most european countries, few asian ones and a couple of US states, by a enthusiast one-person “team” , so I have no doubt the team of skilled artists & developers at Asobo could create an even more realistic version of this.
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Thanks for your reply. The problem with MSFS is that they use warm lights everywhere which is wrong as most of the suburbs are warm lights and then major roads, high ways and roundabout are warm color and those red splash everywhere looks so ugly
I hope they fix this issue or at least make it easy for us to edit lights
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Omg, night lightning needs to be fixed asap!!
Render Scaling at 150 or 200 and you see a big difference but it’s way too hard on FPS on High Settings
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That’s right, severely reduced lamp visibility and the “Sepia Mask” are two separate issues.
And, perhaps the latter was introduced to compensate for the former. I’d rather take the FPS hit and have realistic night lighting than the radioactive wasteland we have now.
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Hope they find the optimal solution for this kind of problem without sacrificing performance and game breaking immersion. 
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@Grinde81 Thanks for taking the time to do the legwork on this analysis here. This is really fascinating stuff.
One thing I’m wondering about the behavior that you’ve observed is this; (and I think we can collect the data to verify this) Is there is a measurable performance difference between the 4k configuration and the 1080 configuration given that it appears the lighting “nodes” are still rendered (but basically impossible to see with the naked eye)? All other things being equal of course.
The reason I wonder about this is because, I am as of yet unable to from an engineering perspective, understand why this change was ever made in the first place from the early alpha, unless it was motivated by performance considerations.
Feel free to correct my ignorance here (there is probably a fair bit), but the way I understand it, is that a very oversimplified “master” rendering loop, might look something like the following:
- Figure out what, in 3d space, is within the field of view of the camera
- From that, determine the distance of the matching “assets” from the camera viewport
- Do a bunch of math to determine what LOD to render assets at various distances should be
- Do other nested loops, perform other fancy-shmancy maths, and spit out a rendered frame.
Given this, it’s not clear why this was done. The points of light are still being rendered, their impact on their surroundings still probably being calculated, or at least determined to be “too far away to calculate”, and so-on - so surely the performance difference is negligible?
What else am I missing here.
I heard that it was because some people complained about the light bulbs being too big, too far visible and unrealistic bright.
Not sure if this is really what happened.
I hope night lighting gets some fixing as its not good especially compared to the other times of day - lifeless and dark including airport buildings all dark - terrible compared to xplane - night flying in xplane is amazing
Its true, it looks like “glow in the dark ortho fotos”. They should really come up with a fix for this
Also playing with a 9900k with 2080Super and 34’’ Widescreen.
You can see with my settings, even on almost High/Ultra settings, the night lights are still average meh. Need a fix for sure!
Edit: I just uploaded the video, youtube didn’t processed it fully yet
EDIT2: Just put it on high setting on youtube I guess?
This is KJFK and downtown NY.
You can hardly see the skyscrapers
You see the whole freakin NY state but none of the skyscrapers, on daylight it’s a different story tho.
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Been doing some experiments today using OSM Road vector data together with freeware QGIS to generate street/lamp based “light splash textures” , comparing with current Sepia Mask illuminating huge areas of the daytime satellite photo. Lots of fine-tuning would be needed, but shows some promise after just a few hours of fiddling.
Here are some generated 4k textures of varying zoom over the United Arab Emirates, showing “mass production” potential. Please check original size, forum resizes images if you’re running lower resolutions lower than 4k. Comparing to this:
Given the results of my initial hit’n’miss attempts today, I believe it’s a method worth investigating more closely instead of settling for current low-res all-illuminating “Sepia Mask”…
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Hello Everyone,
I also think that the stars are too much bright at night. The intensity is not affected by pollution or citylights as it should be in real life.
In a city, we shouldn’t see so many stars (only the brightest ones)
What do you think?
Regards,
Christophe,
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Here is a video I took last night. See how the cars movement on i5 looks like.
(Smoke from fires)
Low altitude shot from Seattle yesterday and a video.I like how well the MSFS does some of that lighting close up… but the highway lights with the red blobs is not what you see. i.e. you don’t see the red lights of the cars… its mostly the highway street lights.
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Horrible, horrible horrible. This is north of Venice looking towards the Alps. Surely we can do something if Asobo don’t… Most settings on high, some on medium. FL280
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There were some complaints in the earlier builds, but I don’t think it was a significant number of users. You never know though, Asobo might have given them too much importance.
Thats pretty sad looking to bad the other times of day are so nice yet night is ugly and unflyable
Also no lights at airports what were they thinking - hopefully they can address these issues
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Yeah this is an issue I noticed right away too. You shouldn’t be able to see the milky way in a city of 10+ million.
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