Totally agree, and that’s what Asobo put together themselves before starting to listen to the non-constructive nay-sayers. sad to say it looked better with more realistic lamps almost a year ago, how amazing it could’ve looked now if improving from there, instead of completely throwing that and creating something drastically different. To realize they shouldn’t have listened to that in the first place, and almost back to square one, close to one year later.
But the early alpha suffered from the same problem of illuminated rural roads, and definitely (but not as pronounced) uniformity-issues, but those can be solved, without the need to kill 80% of the lamps you would see in real life, and replace it with the Sepia Mask trick that only trick ppl not understanding how it looks like IRL and understanding light is emitted from lamps, not the whole city glowing in the dark.
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Hardly… In the video, you see lots of point lights and the rest is black. MSFS before update would look like a brown daytime-texture of the same area, hardly any lamps visible in the distance, and many parts that IRL would be black, would be fully visible due to the Sepia mask.
Don’t get me wrong, the current version has plenty of way to go, but it’s a good start to tone down Sepia mask and bring back light visibility to more realistic distances. But this illuminates new problems like the uniformity, lack of variation, roads that should be dark wrongfully having lights, that definitely needs addressing before it starts looking awesome again.
Somewhere halfway in between the old and new would be a good way to start.
Remove Sepia Mask, increase lamp visibility range.
&
Reduce bulb size, remake bulb texture, reduce size but more sharp and with glow.
Introduce more color/brightness variation to simulate uneven obstruction in distance.
Reduce groundsplash brightness.
@LipeZaitsev, @LovesickChief13, @SeaW0lfBis and anybody else that doesn’t understand what was wrong with the earlier versions: I recommend you to have a look at these posts to better understand why the “old” lights was in the top5 of the most topvoted bugs. It used a very simplistic “trick” to fool some players, but hardly realistic if you look closer and understand how it looks IRL. Light comes from Lamps. Everything else is dark. You’ll never see unilluminated features glow brown in the dark like it did in those earlier versions. Period. It look horrible now, I agree. But understanding what’s being done and why, it will become obvious that this is a step in the right direction, even though it looks bad at the moment (due to postponed adjustments. Yes, it shouldn’t have been released until all adjustments where in place)
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/terrible-night-lighting-after-patch-5/310086/126
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/night-lighting-terrain-emits-light/178647/52