all the car lights in xp11 are dynamic. (lights up everything the lights hit) The car lights in mfs are also dynamic but they are not bright enough and are missing the tail lights. And the cars are like ghost cars because they look transparent. I hope they fix it this year.
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This is how cars look at night at any given street or freeway:
They all have volumetric light (which is awesome) but the headlights are off, they lack an emissive texture like airport service cars:
Now imagine how it could look if all the car traffic would have their headlights on!
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+90% of the car lights youâll see while flying IRL are mainly sharp bright points. (Completely missing in MSFS)
Not until youâre very up close and low, youâll see the actual lights effect on the ground, still with sharp points of lights from the head lights and also brake lights.
These point lights visible for many miles IRL are unfortunately the lights that are missing from the MSFS cars, skipped for unknown reasons.
Maybe because with realistic car lamps, there would be a lot of popping and weird movements due to the FSX-age car motion tech and short rendering distance? Who knows⊠I remember seeing much more realistic car lights/lamps back with X Plane 10, so thereâs potential for significantly more realistic night visuals if Asobo decides to improve on it.
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I hate to disappoint you all but I just dont see Asobo doing anything about this anytime soon. Its just not a priority for most of the user base, only to those of us who push for as much realism as we can get and we are hugely outnumbered by casual players now. Its great that we have 157 votes at the time of this post though.
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This was discussed last live dev q&a. They have scheduled it for next year i think. The goal is to make a digital twin of the earth in both looks and life.
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I for one isnât expecting a quick fix, since it almost took 2 years for Asobo to fix the âSepia maskâ mess that regressed the night lighting significantly during the early alphasâŠ
Since Asobo is relatively new in both aviation and flight simulators, they probably arenât aware of all the big & little quirks that is very obvious to others with many years in these fields.
So threads like this will hopefully save some time for Asobos artists not yet understanding whatâs missing and what it should really look like.
It would just take a few simple additions to the current road traffic models to make it significantly more realistic, but like you say, itâs probably not that high on the priority listâŠ
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It seems an obvious ommission from what is basically a âmust haveâ when making a realistic scene at night. 
One of the main things, in fact one of the few things you actually see when flying at night, is the cars moving along the roads so surely its quite important? It helps you distinguish between motorways, main roads, side roads and country roads. Also, cities from towns or villages. Imagine if, like mentioned above, they had different levels of traffic depending on the time of day as well. Rush hours etc. If they can change the stars in the sky depending on the time of year surely its not impossible to impliment something like that?
Is it because of fps that they havenât done anything about it yet?
Steve
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2 years ahead, still waiting for this 
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Jepp. Im still waiting me to.
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where is the massive night lighting thread?
did they really think itâs solved and this is what we want?
i still find it a ugly sight in MSFS
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Iâm confused as to why itâs not on any âto doâ lists that Iâve seen.
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Road and traffic lights need work, I would also like to see some work done on the actual roads - ie they look like tarmac when they are supposed to be tarmac.
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At this point road traffic in general need rework. Itâs a bit annoying to see cars driving underground, on the grass or the wrong side of the road.
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and after all this time waiting, we can only hope things like this (among many others) will get addressed, or at least open for a 3rd party to fix, on FS2024.
This has been provided in MSFS 2024! 
The effect of head & tail lights is quite noticeable on the moving vehicles when flying relatively close to the ground. Note that the actual vehicles do not have working headlights or taillights. The vehicles have an effect that âilluminatesâ the road surface ahead & behind them. It is quite hard to capture in screenshots, but hopefully youâll be able to see them in this one:
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This is the first time Iâve seen a necroposting from a moderator 
But to say on the subject: the lights really became very beautiful at night. They even FLICKER!
At FSExpo25, I had the privilege of trying X-Plane again after almost 5 years. The road traffic moves at a believable speed and the lights look brilliant. X-Plane road traffic is still much more immsersive and believable than the traffic in 2024.
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Pretty sure weâve had cars illuminating the ground in MSFS2020, but whatâs STILL missing is the actual lamps , both headlights and taillights, which is what you actually see from the air 99.9% of the time when flying. The effect on the ground is only visible when you get really close. Itâd be MUCH more realistic to have the actual lights instead of the lightsplash on the ground, if we could chose one over the other.
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