I think the sepia is due to the fact of how the 3D globe we have while selecting a flight is basically the same globe we fly around in because it now stays in that same ‘view’ of the earth but with a fancy ‘seamless’ transition after selecting your chosen location. This 3D globe seems to use a ‘night layer’ very similar to NASA ‘black marble’ or similar satellite light pollution data as a source ?
This is my exact thinking on the subject, and I haven’t seen anyone point it out before.
It’s practical when you’re in the menu picking a spawn point, effectively seeing the earth from a very high altitude, but it doesn’t hold up, when you are at altitudes that aircraft operate at.
They said there will be some changes in SU4, fingers crossed but I think they will just remove the sepia and that’s about it. Don’t think they will overhaul the whole night lighting system.
The sepia works reasonably well at a distance (and actually looks reasonably good) for giving the impression of the existence of cities and their light pollution. It’s just a bit too strong and far reaching which means close up it spreads too far and lights up deserts, fields and mountains which it really shouldn’t
I agree. The taxi and runway lights look good until you get about 100 yards out of the aircraft and then they look like you are looking at them through a layer of fog. Much too blurry.
@ogu1271 & @Ploodovic
Yes the “Sepia Mask” is based on the Black Marble dataset, and it doesn’t even use the highest resolution for this, since the release of MSFS 2020.
In the early tech alphas, night lighting looked completely stunning and nextgen, but somewhere halfway between the alpha and release, the horrible sepia mask was introduced, first making us wonder if it was just a temporary placeholder / bug, but it was truly baffling they stuck to this night tech, and even made it worse in MSFS2024, around 5 years later!
Here’s and old post from October 2020 discussing this, where I also made a youtube video showing that the Sepia Mask is simply a very low-res mask painting the daylight texture into a monochromatic sepia / brown mess, taking no account to what would be illuminated IRL, like roads, parkinglots, and so on, leaving surrounding terrain dark.
If I understand correctly there is nothing that the community can do to fix it unless the solution is provided by Asobo right? As the main problem lies in the core engine of the sim?
Yes, that’s unfortunately true… It’s “hardwired” into the engine. In the tech alphas, there was no need for the Sepia Mask, ask the normal streetlights scaled very beautifully from ground level all the way up to the high flight levels. Asobo has given zero explanation why they suddenly ditched the Tech Alpha night tech, for the “dumbed down” Sepia Mask… At least now they’re finally listening to the community requesting a streetbased night texture replacing the sepia mask (which will need to be pre-rendered and streamed online, reducing flexibility)… But again, with the tech alpha night tech, we wouldn’t even need that…
AFAIK there where no performance issues at all, as distant lights was just rendered as sprites, and not actually illuminating the ground until getting closer. (just as in real life)
While the current lamps illuminate the ground extremely far away, making the ground splash visible at great distances compared to real life, as well as making it even more demanding on the performance rather than sprites.
So I did look around a bit in the MSFS forums and found that a similar issues were brought up in FS2020 way back. Which leads me to believe that FS2024, with all issues considered, is based on an earlier version of FS2020.
I found the sepia mask issue here:
That being said, I figured how to describe the issue with city lights. Lighting is never uniform as it is right now in FS2024 and previously in FS2020. There are patches of bright and dim lights scattered all throughout.
Yes, in the tach alpha, the night lighting was amazing and next gen looking. As others have mentioned it got dumber down and replaced with a very poor system.
Makes you think that some of the devs have probably never flown at night to see what it truely looks like.
It had to be for performance reasons. You don’t go out of your way to make things look worse for no reason. The idea that it wouldn’t work on the Xbox seems plausible, it does anyone remember whether the might lighting degradation coincided with the release of SU5?
I’m on Xbox so I’m going to weigh in a little here
There are varying regions of lighting depending on render distance. You’ve got the closest region which is quite detailed and has building lights, street lights, traffic lights etc. Then the next region is simplified and is basically just street lights. Annoyingly, there is a gap between these 2 where it’s too far for detailed and too close for simplified so it’s just black (or sepia).
Beyond the simplified region, there is nothing but darkness. So if you were approaching say Miami from the ocean and you know that there is a big city out there that you should be able to see the light pollution from at a great distance, it’s going to look a bit weird when you can’t see anything until you are 10 miles away and the street lights start to render in
So from that point of view, the sepia mask over towns and cities makes perfect sense - it’s just way too bright and should perhaps fade as you get closer?
It does appear that this issue appeared in the release of SU5 based on the comments and closed with a comment saying that it will be updated in SU7.
Now reading more into this thread, it is almost EXACTLY a mirror of this issue, like history is repeating itself. Check out this comment here.
Though it does give me some optimism that they can fix it; if they fixed it once, they can fix it again. And hopefully they can/might implement something better if they’ve learned things from the previous one (crossing my fingers)
This video has also been posted a couple of times on that thread, and I hope Asobo watches this and pays close attention:
The question here; why would you repeat a mistake if it was there before in the first place? It’s taking months/years for them to fix these… There’s still hope at least that it will be fixed in SU4 probably.
It’s seeming increasingly likely that what we have is a cut of an earlier 2020 build that was then modded into what we now know as 2024. If that is true, then it’s not entirely unexpected that 2020 issues that had been resolved later are still bugs affecting 2024. In that respect history did in fact repeat itself.
