100% agree.. The sepia mask effect is an awful choice. Needs to be fixed ASAP. I’ve stopped flying at night, looks too cheesy and unreal.
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With all the various free mods floating around it’s a wonder that no-one has put out one to remove the sepia mask effect?
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I guess that’s not that easy otherwise we would see it already and that’d be day one purchase for me as I don’t think this is gonna be addressed soon
Yeah me neither.. we’ve been talking about Night Lighting and correct Multi Monitor support since 2020 was released.
I understand there are lots of problems to solve, but sheesh… come on.. not even an official time line for these? It’ll be 5 YEARS this year.
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It worked just fine during the tech alpha without cratering any computers, with point lights being visible to the horizon, same way we see countless of trees (much more complex than simple point light sprites)
Distance falloff rendered fewer lights until getting closer. No idea why this was abandoned to be replaced by the highly unrealistic looking sepia mask.
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Back during the MSFS 2020 cycle, like many know, fclem33 and others built a procedural night-map sort of system that completely bypassed the need for a terrain glow overlay.
They used OpenStreetMap vector data to extract road and infrastructure geometry, and NASA’s Black Marble night light dataset to determine the presence, intensity, and type of artificial lighting in specific regions. The process involved programmatically identifying roads, urban clusters, and populated zones from OSM, filtering out unlit or rural stretches, and assigning luminance values based on density and land use. The Black Marble data was used as a mask to block lighting in areas that showed minimal or no nighttime illumination from space — rural, desert, or mountainous regions that 2024 currently lights up like a christmas tree…
These datasets were then used to generate flat texture meshes that matched the geographic layout of real-world cities and roads. These lightmaps were overlaid in the simulator using available scenery injection tools. We had a lighting system that illuminated only where it made sense to: dense urban cores, major roads, and actual inhabited areas — leaving everything else (deserts, farmland, forests, ocean) appropriately dark.
What this showed, very clearly, is that a more intelligent night lighting system is both technically feasible and visually superior — even within the constraints of the current rendering engine. The sepia mask was never the only solution. The procedural approach not only looked better, but offered a scalable, data-driven pipeline that could be automated or even integrated into the sim’s autogen logic.
Results of this project are nothing short of spectacular, there is no excuse for Asobo to not try to do something similar
The nuclear fallout, meltdown ooze of low-res brown glow almost makes my blood boil as much as the airport lighting. It was one of the most voted bugs during MSFS 2020, and while it was reduced a bit post-launch, the actual system behind it was never replaced. Now in MSFS 2024, the rest of the lighting has improved, but this part hasn’t. The mask is being applied globally, not just at the horizon where it might make some sense. It shows up on terrain that has no lights—deserts, farmland, forests, mountains—all glowing like they’ve got floodlights underneath. No falloff, no light source, just a flat brown filter. Anyone who’s flown at night knows this is not how it looks. Real night flying has contrast. Cities are sharp clusters of points. Roads and highways form light ribbons. Villages are isolated. And everything in between is black. The current implementation removes that contrast entirely. It wipes the scene and replaces it with a uniform haze. You can see dunes glowing at night in Dubai. You can see fields in Iowa. It makes the entire world look like it’s being lit from below. And as altitude increases, it gets worse—lit and unlit areas all blur together. The sim looks like someone applied a brown wash over everything instead of rendering actual light. .
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Brilliant post
Unfortunately, not only is this still under investigation, but also the number of votes is off on the dev update list.
We can forget this being fixed in SU02 I suppose.
Here we have a big problem… I would be curious to know what strategy Asobo is implementing… he must necessarily solve this visual ugliness… furthermore on this screen we also have blurry lights!.. double problem! … let’s wait…
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So could they do it for FS24 as well so we don’t have to wait for MS to never fix it?
I just found this Thread by accident. Just did a flight in the latest SU2 Beta and the lighting at night is still pretty bad.
So they actually have not fixed this since i found a similar thread which was closed saying “fixed-on-live”.
Clearly this problem is not fixed xD
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This is “bug logged” but topic was created in December. No progress yet… Does Asobo really care about community? This is such an immersion killer for a beautiful sim that needs to be corrected. Night flying is an ugly mess at the moment because of this sepia mask everywhere…
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is 158 votes significant enough to make this a priority bug? seriously considering going back to x plane, at least for night flying. they also have the problem of night lights popping in as you fly but at least they look good.
Other than night lighting, even entering clouds make my airplane glow really bright
I have to admit, the colours during sunset and sunrise really look as you would expect in real life and the brightness when looking outside the cockpit is realistic as it can get really bright.
But with that, a lot of other stuff with the lighting is broken and I think the lighting system needs a lot of tweaking.
that’s your landing lights reflecting back off the cloud.
Landing lights shouldn’t make the entire airplane glow though 
I posted another picture in the original post above. I’m sure in 2020 the planes would be dark. In the examples, they still look like they’re in the sun. It’s not as obvious in the pictures, but when you see it while playing and compare it to fs20, you’ll know. Wing views inside clouds would look especially weird since the whole wing glows.
I don’t have pictures, but in 2020 I know that the airplane does look like it’s properly in the clouds.
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Is this something that I can download and where can I download this?
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One issue I notice on Xbox with night lighting is you’ve got city lights and you’ve got road lights. But there is a gap of nothing between where one starts and the other one ends. This needs fixed
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Met Life Stadium in New Jersey, and NYC Downtown Heliport are way too bright. Can’t be fixed with contrast adjustment, and was fine at the end of beta 1.
