I may be wrong, and correct me if I am, but I heard that prior to patch 1.10.x.x, the night lighting was controlled by a probability setting. The further lights were from “developed” areas, the less chance they had to illuminate.
This artificially lessened the lighting in rural areas, while maintaining the lighting in urban and suburban areas.
I understand that there is no “magic bullet” to reflect night lighting in real life. And the lighting now does appear to be more intense. But what really takes me out of the sim is the fact that you have the strings of uninterrupted lights even in very rural areas. I think your original compromise of using probability was about as perfect as you could make it. It provided two things.
It broke up the “string of pearls” individuals now see in rural areas. And this does follow real life, as there are often sections of freeway that are not lit. So having just a few sections of the freeway in the areas would reflect real life better. Also if the database contains “exits and entries” then you could up the probability in those areas so that the freeway is lit primarily at the exits, which also tends to reflect real life.
It gave suburban areas more “life”. I have heard many claim that the previous method seemed more alive. I am guessing this is due to the fact that even in urban and suburban areas, the lighting wasn’t 100% probability. Which meant that every night the nightscape look “slightly” different, but still roughly the same. Just as some nights some people have porch lights on, and sometimes not. While this difference wouldn’t be blatently observable, I think subconsciously we “felt it”. The pattern over our familiar areas changed ever so slightly from evening to evening and so it felt alive and dynamic.
As it stands now, the lighting, (in my humble opinion) suffers from the following
It is too bright in most cases.
It is too omni directional, making airports way too visible at night
It is “all lights on” which gives the fairly unrealistic “string of pearls” across the desert and rural areas.
It is “all lights on” which also gives suburban and rural areas the exact same look night after night, making the night look lifeless and textureless.
I applaud your efforts to remove the Sepia Filter, which I agree with, but I would like a return to the older style of lighting that you had, as I think it was more representative of what we actually see, or at least gives us a better impression of what is actually happening in real life than what the current setting is.
I realize you can’t please everyone, and I also acknowledge that there are even those who will disagree with my assessment, so if you decide not to change it, I get it. But I think your 1.9.5.0 lighting actually set this sim apart from the competition.
I concur with this wholeheartedly. Happy with current but I do agree the original lighting to me was more realistic, particularly when flying across large spans of rural/urban areas. The transition was more realistic. Again, can’t please everyone, but…
Yes, this… so much this. Thank you, and I totally agree. The lighting before patch #5 appeared much more realistic overall than it is now (although it did still need some improvements). After patch #5, the city nightscapes look “synthetic”, as if I’m flying over a scene from Tron, where a computer generated a “mathematically perfect” world that has no flaws, instead of cities made by human beings.
Okay, yes, it is computer generated, but you know what I mean.
Not only are there lights in rural areas where there should be NONE, but I also think that light brightness is too uniform, with the light points of each class (suburb vs. freeway, for example) being perfectly identical. Also, to me, it looks as if they don’t attenuate properly, with lights at a distance of 1 mile being the same intensity as lights at 10 miles, give or take. I would post examples of night photography, but being a photographer myself, I know that you can’t really get a good night shot of a city without using longer exposure times, which tends to exaggerate the brightness of pretty much all the lights in the scene.
But, in patch #5, it seems they at least they got rid of the private 100 foot driveways of farm houses having 15~20 high intensity streetlamps spaced only a few feet apart, so that’s an improvement.
Intensity needs tweaking of course. Everyone’s monitor displays different unless everyone’s monitor brightness and white point/blackpoint was fixed at the factory. It’s not.
Overall this update patch has made the glow very high. Extremely high.
I think the developers monitor is so well calibrated and maybe in their monitor it looks kinda nice. Maybe. But of course they will receive feedback from a lot of us telling them to check it out.
The highways are overbright and glowing too much. The cities are okay. I wish I could disable highway light poles.
In reality, From a certain height you can’t even make out a pole - all you can make out is the halo on the ground.
Also return the distance dependence. Light farther away on the horizon should not be as bright as close lights. It is a basic physical law (inverse square law). The overbright circuits boards that are currently formed by this even illumination everywhere look just silly.
