I understand that completely. I just find the effect more noticeable in MSFS than in any other sim I’ve played, generally speaking.
But I had a look back at some DCS and Arma 3 screenshots - overall they look fairly similar and also get larger with zoom, so perhaps it’s just they don’t come out as ‘early’ during twilight, and that they’re a bit less soft. I certainly noticed them less than in MSFS.
It will likely be improved with time and is certainly no priority for now.
For sure. I’m not questioning the accuracy or relative brightness levels, it’s partly down to my monitor and partly down to where I live. I’m not in a particularly light polluted area, but on a clear night there is seldom that much to see here - central UK. Our atmosphere is usually fairly damp and clear days are usually hazy.
However, I have been abroad and seen the Milky Way in clear, dry climates and it’s quite something, but that’s almost the typical MSFS experience so I feel it needs toning down a little for the ‘average’ night. It could instead become more pronounced with altitude, and darker/clearer nights. All in good time
Just for rough comparison purposes, I thought I’d throw these up to give a point of reference. You need to open full size to really compare, of course.
MSFS - stars readily visible in the darkening-but-still-quite-light skies, but too soft and fuzzy as we all mostly agree:
Here’s DCS World around a similar time of day, the stars are barely noticeable (even viewed full size) but they are much more tiny & precise as dots. There’s also a high altitude contrail that’s still catching the sunlight - can’t wait to see how MSFS’s contrails will look
And finally a really old Arma 3 shot from 2013. This is from the Alpha version I think, so may not represent how it looks today. Stars are quite ‘hard’ and are too big, but by not having that soft fuzziness of MSFS, they look less wrong and don’t catch my attention.
Not trying to prove any point or bash MSFS. It’s a great sim in so many ways and continually improving. Just thought some visual comparisons might help to go with the overall discussion. (Assuming it’s OK to post up images of other games here!)
Those are some pretty hardcore projects Cambridge have. I’m vaguely familiar with most of those facilities / scopes. That’s light years beyond what I do with my modest gear, that’s for sure!
I don’t know how they project the stars onto the sky in this iteration, but in FS2002 and FS9, it was definitely not a texture. There was a stars.dat file that supplied all of the information regarding position and brightness for every single star. The stock version was highly inaccurate, but there was (and still is) a replacement available that was compiled from from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue. The real problem back then was moon phases - they were horrible.
They nailed that part with this iteration of the sim. The moon looks great in the sim. I would agree that having data like that on the stars would be better than just a static background as it is now.
I’d say do a combination. Getting the entire Milky Way “cloud” in the summer night sky would mean a data file that has to be stored on a server farm just to hold it. But put the subtle stuff like that on a texture and then make the stars more dynamic on top and you might have something. The trick would be to line it all up…
You’d need a texture to get the gas and dust clouds of the Milky Way and other nuances of the night sky that can’t be represented by a single pixel.
The stars themselves could certainly be point objects. But to get most of the visible stars would require tens of thousands of these objects, in addition to the sky sphere texture. The objects themselves are simple, but they have to be drawn and shaded against the atmospheric scattering and clouds which could get costly on the GPU. Past versions of the Flight Simulator were right to use point objects, as a low res sky sphere texture needed for the older hardware would look like a cheap video game. FSX just gave us a smattering of stars compared to what’s up there though.
However, I like the approach the dev team took here using a large, high res HDR image. If you change the exposure settings on the drone cam, you can really bring out the detail of the Milky Way and the fainter stars. It looks a lot like my own photographs of the night sky. Here’s a shot I got from the Badlands in South Dakota and then the same spot in Flight Simulator:
@tclayton2k’s combo idea could be worth a try. It might work to just keep the Milk Way on the texture, and the fainter stars as a single pixel speckle on the texture, and then draw a couple hundred of the brightest stars as point objects.
But on the HDR texture we have now, I like that the brighter stars are spots rather than points. That’s how they photograph, and it gives them more weight against the fainter stars than simply varying the brightness could. It’s a balance between what looks good and passes for real, against the limitations of what the computer can display and what your eye perceives. I think a switch to point objects for the stars would look regressive, like a Windows 95 starfield screen saver, whereas Flight Simulator looks more like what you’d get on film with its spots and grain.
Nice picture! I suggested spots because Elite Dangerous does that. Though maybe that’s too much for a game that isn’t about space simulation. Is the moon also a part of the picture or the moon moves and changes phase as you change the date, time and location?
The moon and sun are both their own separate textures and objects. They probably use an astronomical model or look up tables to set the positions of the starfield sky sphere and the astronomical objects like the sun and moon. You can change the date and time to anything and you will see the correct position and phases of these objects. Solar eclipses on the right time and date are even visible, although not 100% accurate.
You can use Nvidia freestyle to dial back some of the brightness, contrast, gamma as well as playing with the curves in order to dim the stars a bit. Unfortunately, these and other tweaks also change the whole scene in the sim- so it takes some trial and error. I use one preset for day and one for night on my system. Try it out and see if it helps you too.
It’s true, I very often realize it’s a full moon out because I’m flying in FS
Here’s a really bad picture I took with my phone through a scratched up windshield on the plane I was renting while parked at KLEB Lebanon, NH last November. Compared to a screenshot I took in FS where I set the time to the same moment I took the picture and where I was sitting where I was parked that day
It was a freakin gorgeous moment in real life, wayyyy better than the photo shows…
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