Night lighting issues still present - The community solutions

I’m not saying I like a sepia mask. I’m saying that prior to the patch the night lighting looked realistic, after the patch it is awful. I couldn’t care less what technique they use to make it look realistic, just that it does.

This is rural England. It simply does not look like this from the air at night, particularly the roads in the distance. The lights in the foreground are FAR too bright. Prior to this patch the representation was realistic.

Whatever they have done has ruined the night environment.

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Let’s make it simple here: Regardless of opinions/taste on the lights… this is a simulator, advertised to be as real as it can get - with that in mind, the new night light system is FAR from real. I’m a real life pilot and I bet there are others here to assure that flying at night seeing every single street with light is not real! And you never see all cities like grids at night, some avenues is ok to have this new light system, but c’mon… rural streets? Highways?

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the runway lights are way too bright! It’s when you ask the TWR to make them full bright, which is very rare

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Exactly!

Some people might think it’s better, but it is nothing like reality. It was so much better before I’m completely baffled as to why they changed it.

I truly wish there was a way to roll back these updates. Flying at night is now completely borked until they do something about it. It might be that they never choose to do that, and that would truly s u c k.

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Exactly my thoughts. Its so bad right now that I am not even going to bother flying at night until they fix this. Its like I am flying in X-plane…A major step down from last patch.

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I just realized I can reply to my own post. I agree with me and think I am absolutely right.

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There seems to be as many opinions about how night lighting “should feel” to be realistic, as there are levels of understanding how light actually works.

Out of the problems with night lighting: lacking lamp visibility range, sepia mask illuminating unlit ground, “fuzzy orb” appearence instead of sharp lightsource textures, the devs seems to have addressed the lamp visibility problem, and postpones the rest until later updates.

Background, dualrated(rotary/fixed) commercial pilot, around 9k hrs flying in various places, from mountains north of the artic circle to now over multi million cities in the US, often at night. And I’ve put close to the same amount of effort into photography and digital processing on my free time. It’s the latter than I believe have given me the most insight in how light works and what is being captured by both the human eye and camera sensors. (Two Astrophotographers in the same thread, I thought we where a rare breed @Crunchmeister71 :P)

Since even though I’ve driven cars hundreds of thousands of miles throughout my life, it doesn’t really make me an asphalt texture artist, that would require some deeper knowledge of light physics and computer graphics.
Anyways

A lot of people apparently buys the somewhat simplistic “trick” of the Sepia Mask and prefers that, while others want light that works more like it does in real life.
Kind of like some find 2d “billboard texture” clouds more realistic while others want volumetric clouds, as with 2d vs 3d trees.
For those saying “this is nothing like real life, older version was much more realistic” , please watch those videos, and think again if you believe this is how cities/roads emit light at night:

Here’s Dubai IRL compared to the old style
(much of the sepia mask sadly still present in current version)
image
Pretty much no lamps, but strangely illuminated daytime-texture using low-res mask with resolution worse than kilometers / pixel. This falsely illuminate tons of features that in real life would be pitch black.

The same low resolution light map from the world map illuminates the game at night, this is not how it looks in real life. But at a distance close to the horizon might look plausible.


This is not a black & white issue, “either this or that”. Some stuff got better, other worse.
Getting the best parts out of both would be the best, so leave those “either the new, or the old” opinions at home since it won’t help the devs the slightest, as well as hyperbolic nonsense like “this is NOTHING like in real world” & without being able to explain the how and why this is your opinion.
It’s these kinds of drastic overexaggerating and feelings without backing up with constructive arguments / photos / examples that might’ve gave us the night issues in the first place.

.

Let’s have a look at Berlin, first a photo, 2nd is current MSFS, and 3rd picture is the older MSFS before latest update.
In the photo, you see the grid-like/spiderweb appearance of illuminated roads being the most dominant features.


In after the latest update, you can now actually identify and recognize many of those roads.

While in the versions before update, street lamps are completely gone, just a brown smudge. How some people find this realistic is beyond me, as no explanations are given.

Feelings and hyperboles aside, lets look at the facts.

  • Lamp visibility distance have now been increased to more realistic values, instead of fading away after just a few hundred meters like older versions. This is good, but comes with a couple of negative side-effects that needs to be tackled. But it’s a step on the road to more realistic night lighting, instead of a cheap sepia trick that might fool some.

  • Nonilluminated ground shouldn’t emit light like past versions, period. What we should see at night is either the sharp lightsources themselves, or light reflected from those. (plus slight atmospheric glow/lightpollution)

  • Lamps, especially along highways, are visible more than a kilometer, given atmospheric conditions/altitudes: all the way to the horizon. (Yes, they’re even visible from space), while in the versions before update dissapeared after a very short distance compared to real life.

  • Lamp-eating effect of lower resolutions and TAA seems to be fixed as well, great news!

BUT, as many correctly pointed out, there is a bunch of shortcoming that require adjustments. For instance, all roads should not be illuminated, especially in rural areas.
What many people fail to grasp is that we had this problem before too, but with the severely botched lamp visibility range, those where hardly visible up until very close.
We also have lots of duplicated lamps floating in the air.

Since lights are visible a longer distance now, it’s bound to look more repetitive, and hope the devs find a way around that. Since IRL, except for very tall highway lamps, lamps will have houses, trees, obstructing the line of vision to various degrees, giving many variations of brightness for the same lamp-type, but since the lamps now extend much further than the lod for trees and houses, we loose this variation.

As a side note, and these are my personal preferences: I don’t like the scaling of current light bulbs, they become fuzzy enlarged orbs instead of sharp light sources. And the ground “light splash” looks too bright. And I also think highways (at least where I live) should be more amber instead of yellow.
And current lamps is lacking the “glow” around them making them appear more like lightsources than fuzzy orbs.

In terms of realism, I believe it would be best to make it as close as reality as possible, instead of the thousands of different opinions of what “feels” most realistic.
It’s like the color of the sky, should it have a slider too, to satisfy different tastes?

But if it’s such a divider, I guess two modes could be included, the simplified sepia-style and lamp-based illumination?

For more background on what lead to this update, here are some earlier thoughts on night lighting ingame, which has been debated since early alpha lighting got severely degraded isntead of tuned Night lighting - Terrain emits light? - #52 by Grinde81

I’m glad this is engaging a lot of people, and with more input (factual arguments) the devs sure will know how to improve this to as close to reality as possible.
So please, let’s back up our arguments with facts instead of personal feelings.

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Your comparison shots perfectly illustrate my point.

The ‘before’ looks realistic. The ‘after’ looks bonkers.

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More realist is not always better. It’s is a video game, all things can’t be reproduced so some workarounds and concessions can be found by the developers.

And light differences from reality can result which a more pleasant/beautiful game (Like taller trees).

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then we need to change both the name (from Flight Simulator to something else) and their advertisement saying ‘‘almost real, but not totally real’’.

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Or just Flight Simulator, but not Flight Emulator :grin: Emulation vs simulation – what is the difference?

100% agree. It looks artifical, robotic, fake. Not like a living world anymore.

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Your ‘Berlin Photo’ picture is taken from a camera, it is not how the human eyes reacts to those light and sees them respectively. It is not realistic to depict it in a game like this. What’s next, having a totally blurry and over exposed camera take the picture, put it on screen like this in MFS and call it realistic.

It is this common beginner misconception: a photograph is not realistic, what your eye sees is. Heck, that’s why most screens run on gamma 2.2. Read it up!

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While I generally agree with your remarks, I want to emphasize the point that highways (“autobahnen”) in most european countries are not lit at all.

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The fact that we still have a debate on the rural/highways lights is beyond me. Just rollback this specific setting and call it done. The rest of the lights are ok-ish, even tho the previous version is what a night flying really looks like.

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I think the point @Grinde81 makes is that the rural lights have always been there, just not as visible because they quickly fade out.

I think the patch is a step in the right direction. Again, the developers said in the Q&A they can bring in more randomness so it looks less artificial.

Somehow, they have to work on how roads are interpreted, rural roads, highways (Autobahn), etc. This would give them the possibility to make lighting much more realistic. And, as others said, work on the light bulbs (position, doubling, fuzziness).

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That’s the way to go. I just don’t agree on releasing something that is far from reality while you don’t have this solution. The previous version is far more realistic than this one.

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I like the slider / different modes idea, whoever suggested it.

Since if you take the over exposed night time photo approach, sure your game will look like a photograph but can be too bright for some. If you take what’s in real life, the game looks too dark (for some). Both sides will say the sim is not realistic.

Rather than giving us a view / color pallet that appeases everyone (which is impossible), give us the ability to tune to our liking.

I mean take my taste for example which has been mostly developed when I am using P3D. In P3D, I use Black Marble add-on for my night lighting. Without going into too much detail, it essentially does what Asobo just did with the update. Brighter bulbs and darker ground/terrain/roads. To me, that’s realism because, looking out at night, you see only pitch black except when there’s a light source (the moon or street or street light). This is what I understand from reading what pilots sees (in this forum as well as previous flight sim forums). People do agree it gets really dark when looking outside of airplanes. However, according to other people, this is not realism because they have a hard time seeing what’s in the darkness.

Also, I know some people will ask, why do people compare previous titles to this modern title? Well, it’s not all bad with previous titles. There are some realism aspects from previous games that are correct and doesn’t need more adjustment. Can those aspect be improved? Sure. But it doesn’t and shouldn’t equate to completely redefining what’s realism and what’s not.

With that said, either Asobo will make the change or an add-on developer will come and make a tool to tweak the visuals in game (i.e. PTA, SimTweak, Realism Shader, etc.) I’d prefer the former. And if it is the latter, I’d rather have a community developer to develop the tweaking tool rather paying for another add-on.

I think you’re missing the point and barking up the wrong tree here, and let’s leave the strawmen out of this. Let’s try again: I’m simply showing that IRL the light comes mainly from streets, and using a low res illumination mask as a big brown lamp illuminating kilometer-wide areas is not realistic at all. No matter camera sensor or eye, and that the latest update of night lightning have started to feature this with greater lamp-visibility, as you now can start to pick up major roads, like you would IRL. (Lots of tuning still needed)

Sure, to make the it more like the eye sees it, the peak brightness would of course be lower than in the current photo and with a wider dynamic range(no clipping), but the general features and lightsources would be the same, you’d be seeing the grids/spider-web of bright roads as well as well-lit parkinglots, and the unlit areas would be dark/featureless. Not an evenly illuminated brown day-time texture like shown in MSFS, where you can pick up lots of features that should be dark.

I’d gladly go deeper than “cameras and eyes react differently” if you’d like, even though that’s not the point of the comparison, it’s more of what’s being illuminated and how, IRL, compared to the sim.
No matter if it’s an eye or ccd/cmos sensor picking up the photons, it’s still the same photons, emitted by lamps(directly, or reflected on the ground), with unlit areas dark and featureless. Not like a big brown lamp illuminating huge swathes of land like in the sim, with the notorious “sepia mask”. That’s a method best used for the most distant horizon at low viewing angles.

Here’s the higher res version of the data NASA Black Marble data MSFS is using (MSFS uses a blurred lower resolution than this) for city illumination. As you can see, it’s nowhere close in terms of resolution to properly illuminate roads and leave other areas dark, as it simply illuminate the whole city in a monotone brown glow.

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This is a very well written and helpful.

Thanks for the insights. I think the developers should take your considerations into account to improve step by step.

Nice to see a deeper analysis in the forums - not only „feelings“.

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By the way… the double light bug (lamps hanging in the air) has been solved.

You have to turn Hardware GPU Accleration on in your graphic settings in Windows. After rebooting the bug is no more.

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