The issues everyone reported after the last patch are still present. Did a flight over Orlando Florida to preview Disney World, Sea World, Universal Studios, and downtown Orlando only to find they look like their suffering from a power outage due to Covid. With the ground lighting removed now there’s nothing luminating these well defined areas at night. Fun Spot and International Drive is just lost in the darkness. The annoying highway lights on I4 overpower everything close by. Same for the highways and rural roads in general. Another thing is many office or downtown buildings have no light. Window lighting on buildings is very sparse and that may play a factor in why the night lighting now looks worse than older sims in some cases. I hope Asobo get’s back to work on the night lighting because in many ways now it’s an eyesore. It has been well reported/documented the shortcomings of the new night lighting. With all that was said I was hoping a some kind of fix would be at play in this update but that wasn’t the case. Many of the other new adjustments to the sim are nice to end on a positive note.
Edit: Why is airport lights (runway/taxiway) lights on in daytime now? I could see if it’s densely cloudy out affecting the daylight but on in clear skies at 12pm is crazy. Night lightings floating at night is another issue. All byproducts of issues started when they tweaking the night lighting. That being said v1.10.11.0 seems to be the first patch release improving things without breaking something else.
The night lighting opinions are quite subjective. I find them fairly acceptable.
MS/Asobo will never please everyone when it comes to night lighting appearance.
I would prefer they spend more time on fixing the flight model and aircraft that haven’t worked correctly since release.
Not sure why you were expecting a change in the night lighting in this patch. It wasn’t on the to-do list and it’s not in the patch notes.
Night lighting definitely needs some serious tweaking. It’s too bright, there are too many lights, and lights out where there shouldn’t be, but overall it looks a lot better than that glowing ground we had before.
I agree with you! Asobo’s focus should be on passenger aircraft, especially third-party passenger aircraft. MSFS2020 without a third-party passenger aircraft cannot be called a simulated flight.
I am avoiding night flights now due to the overdone lighting. I can’t believe some people think this is ok. I’m not a pilot, but I’ve done a lot of night flying in my profession… and these do not resemble anything in my experience.
Stop comparing apples and oranges. XPlane 11 is a standalone game. MSFS is not. The entire graphical database is stored in the cloud and the client must fetch all but the base DEM from the cloud servers.
For this to continue, all clients must be at the same version, because many times changes are made server side as well as client side. Updates, the end user never see’s and is never aware of.
So can we all stop with the optional update nonsense? Does Blizzard allow diablo players or WoW players play with older clients? No? How about Rockstar and GTA online? Nope?
I suppose Asobo COULD instead of requiring you to upgrade, it would simply allow you to upgrade, or allow you to deny the upgrade and open up in full offline mode and allow you the beauty of your standalone scenery. But we know how well people would love that.
Especially those who’ve never experienced just how much a difference there is between turning bing map data and photogrammetry on, and turning off all online activity.