I just finished my night IFR flight with A320neo. And I am really disappointed with this night environment.
My PC is powerful enough to handle Ultra graphical settings. But nights reminds me of FSX, or FS2004. An old fashioned flight simulator of 00s. And It’s not acceptable for a 2020 PC game.
On the other hand, the day visuals and textures are by far better than night ones. Even after the latest really bad patches that destroy water and other visual elements.
Just take a look at the next screen shots. It’s really very very ugly. I can’t accept that.
I stick with the superb night environment that X-Plane 11 brings for night flying.
At least until that sim gives me a realistic night scenery.
The good news is that this is high on Asobo’s Top Bugs list as “Night Lighting - Terrain Emits Light?”, and due to be addressed in Update 5, to be released tomorrow. As per this thread:
It will be interesting to see what it will look like with the update.
I really hope we will see that improvements tomorrow.
It’s a pity that a flight simulator like this offers so poor night visuals. I feel like I purchased two games.
A beautiful modern sim during days and an outdated ugly sim during nights.
I try to find an answer how did they built the night textures and environment in general?
Did they just copied the FSX textures and that’s all?
I dont think this is. The problem fixed tomorrow is that some areas like rural fields emit light.
The problem above is more to do with the LOD at night. Only scenery near the aircraft shows in high detail and everything further away is just an ugly orange blur.
Agree it’s very ugly, and I think as a matter of fact P3D, FSX, XP11 etc had better night-lighting and overall feel lol. Thankfully MSFS devs have acknowledged it and I’m guessing it will take quite a few updates and revisions for us to have a permanent solution
If you look at Night lighting - Terrain emits light? then you’ll see that the issue they mention (and the same thread as in the dev snapshot) mentions the issue of faraway night lights being blurry. The issue they’re fixing is not “rural fields”; it’s the sepia mask they apply globally making ground textures glow in the dark.
LOD fixes I think will come in their own issue.
