I’m not sure when this has crept it, or indeed if its an SU2 beta issue specifically or not, but there is something odd going on with the lighting. I have documented this elsewhere, but duplicating that here in its own thread.
Street lamps have a large halo around them, and it probably applies to other light sources too.
Here’s a drone cam shot at night, zoomed in. You can see the point where they change from star shaped lights to circular halos. That distance is probably affected by LOD.
It looks a blurry mess at any kind of range, really, unless you are right on top of them, and even then I think that star effect is probably overdone.
Here’s the same shot with TLOD changed from 200 to 400. No difference.
I then turned dynamic settings off, which I have posted at 50fps due to head tracker use, and anything lower than that feeling horrible, and only noticed a 4fps drop, so I may stick with TLOD 400 for a few flights to see how I get on with it.
Noticed how the lights of the city in the distance seem sharper.
It’s not an artifact of the drone camera either. Here is the external camera, zoomed all the way in with mouse wheel, with the plane shifted to be in line with the lights. You can see the halo lights appear in the middle distance.
If I had to guess I would say this is an attempt to improve brightness at range by effectively pixel doubling, making the lights appear larger. But the lights in the city beyond are plenty bright. Can we not have those instead?
I was about to post another image comparing those above with street lights, then observed something really weird that I cannot convey without video, so bear with me as I record a short clip of something truly odd!
After a few seconds there is an additive effect, like the lights are being drawn over multiple times and the lights get larger, and brighter. You move the camera, or even rotate it, and they reduce to point lights again. Is this maybe a TAA thing I’ve never seen before?
Whatever it is its horrible, and possibly also affecting performance negatively.
I just realised what it reminds me of. If you are using the spray paint tool in a paint package, and you just hold the button down, the paint will keep building up until you get a circle, and it kind of looks like tha when you see the lights brighten, and get larger from their roughly pinpoint source.