Is there tweak or mod to set FS2020 night ground texture, runways, sky much darker than default ?
In real life:
look on this 3 picture to see difference between Real FS2020 and Xplane at the same airport:
Real night landing:
FS2020:
Xplane:
Part of the challenge is that all the subsystems working around you as you fly need to keep working - meaning whatever computations to keep traffic going, lights working, activity running, airports functioning, etc., don’t stop even if you overlay a filter that cuts down on relative visibility.
How do you put in a filter that renders nearly any terrain and horizon detail invisible until up close? And how to do it without adding more computational load on the PC which is already doing a lot of work? Do you build a “reduced visibility” bubble around the player’s aircraft? If so, how do you account for say point sources that could be seen very far away in night VMC conditions - like an AI or multiplayer aircraft? Stars?
Definitely a wishlist item. Maybe you want to move it there so people can vote on it. You can’t do that here in General Discussion.
Using a real life picture is very misleading. Human eyes and camera sensors and film see things very differently, particularly in low light.
The camera shot is exposed to not overexpose the lights, rendering everything that’s not light sources much darker than the eye would see them. This is the same reason why when you see pics of stuff in space or pics from the lunar landings, you see all the subjects well lit up, but the sky is pitch black with no stars. The stars are there, but if the camera’s exposure was set to see stars, the other objects would be a bright, overexposed mess.
That said, I’ve never been in a cockpit for a night landing, but for pilots with dark-adjusted eyes coming in for a landing, I’d say it’s likely that the small amounts of light from the runway would actually illuminate the area enough that they’d see more than pitch black. How much I can’t say, as I’ve never experienced it in person. It would take an actual pilot who’s done night landings to confirm which of those pics look most like real life. But I would be willing to wager it’s not the real life photograph. To my non-pilot eyes, I like the X-Plane lighting better. It seems to look more natural to my eyes, like what I’m used to seeing at night.
I’m not a pilot, but I speak with experience in astrophotography and spending a lot of long nights outside in the dark. Even on the darkest night, once your eyes are well adjusted to the dark, even the smallest, dimmest light source will allow you to see things in the dark you wouldn’t think possible.
I’m flight instructor.
I think FS2020 is very real simulator.
the scenery is wonderful and also aircrafts behaviors.
but I think the night is different from real life and Xplane simulate night better than FS2020
the The most challenging thing at night is to transform from light over land to very dark black water. also to estimate the rollout and flare height during landing.
The “tweak” if you want darker ground textures at night is to change the date to a period where there is no full moon. The moon is lighting the ground when it is full. If you fly during a new moon, the ground is much darker.
If you look back at the history of forum posts, the complaints about the ground being too bright always coincides when there is a full moon and no such posts during a new moon.
Tonight’s moon is a 72% Waxing Gibbous heading toward a full moon on 30 Nov. The ground is only going to get brighter as the moon heads toward 100% reflection.
If you live outside an urban area with no light pollution, you’ll see this is a very real effect where the ground is illuminate during full moon’s and pitch black during new moon’s. I can tell you a full moon is bright enough for me to ride my motorcycle off-road without a light. It think the sim is accurate.
Never even took that into consideration in my reply. It’s been almost constant cloud here for the past 10 days or so. DIdn’t even realize what phase the moon was at. lol
But I agree 100%. You can literally read under the light of the full moon. That will have a huge effect on what you can see on the ground while coming in for a landing.
That just boggles my mind! I had assume the moon was just some visual fluff, and although I had observed its various phases before, I didn’t think it had any actual affect on the environment. What next, tides!? 
Yes I also noticed the moon effect … after the last update (6) I was appalled by the bright night sky e.g. over Vienna … unitil I noticed a huge moon and clear sky. Today for example it is very black over the outskirts (north of Danube of Vienna).
I think this is very very cool.
