Night lighting issues still present - The community solutions

[Grinde81]

@qowiboy

for distance, the sepia mask should be addiditonally used: I would add two features for it:

1. Sepia Mask should be generated based on the in future perfect done (with help of NASA night map) Sim vector light (instead of directly the NASA night data). Generating those textures, based on the dots we (will) have, and reducing pixels for each bigger LOD for far distances (i am really not shure, how many LOD they actually use for the sepia mask). This would avoid iluminated desert or mountain or other dark rural areas
2. Sepia Mask should be shown more and more overlaying the scenery, but not based on the view DISTANCE , They should apply based on the view ANGLE… so for very down almost ground position, they could apply these masks close to the viewer point, but the higher you get, the farer the sepia mask applies (might be not a hard rule definition but an visual apporach to get good value algorithm)

the only question for #2 , can texture effect work, based not in relation to distance but to the angle of individual view point?

Very insightful suggestions, and pretty much exactly what I’ve proposed in some other posts I made a while back. Regarding your question in the end, this is certainly achievable, I think even FSX had it implemented back in 2009 (for 3d models, not ground texture though), called Fresnel Ramp.
Where the alpha/transparency is directly controlled by viewing angle. Using this method, it would be possible to limit the effect to shallow viewing angles (only found close to the horizon as you said) , and a distance range wouldn’t be needed. Side note though, although Fresnel Ramp / angle falloff works painfree on 3d models, I personally don’t know the GPU demand for global scene calculations, but I’m hoping it will be negliable, 'cause that would be awesome.
:

@Grinde81

I personally believe the now infamous “Sepia Mask” should either be reduced to below 30% when not viewed at a very shallow angle (far distant in the horizon), or more preferably, replaced with a night texture layer consisting of baked light splashes based on existing MSFS lamp bulb positions. This would save a lot of FPS compared to letting each lamp in the distance illuminate the ground. This would only need to be done at very close proximity where trees and buildings are present.

@Grinde81

I’m more thinking in terms of a Fresnel map, transparency/intensity falloff the steeper the viewing angle. This will keep the effect limited closer to the horizon.
Since it does actually look good/plausible in the very far horizon, where the viewing angle is just a few degrees.
Wish we had control over these parameters, so we could try different settings to see what actually works.

.

Regarding replacing the Sepia Mask with a generated hybrid texture, I’ve been trying to brainstorm this too in the following post. (Note that this is only from my first day of trying, have learned a bit more now, for instance excluding rural road lights based on Black Marble global illumination data)

Night lighting - Terrain emits light?

Been doing some experiments today using OSM Road vector data together with freeware QGIS to generate street/lamp based “light splash textures” , comparing with current Sepia Mask illuminating huge areas of the daytime satellite photo. Lots of fine-tuning would be needed, but shows some promise after just a few hours of fiddling. [image] [image] [image] Here are some generated 4k textures of varying zoom over the United Arab Emirates, showing “mass production” potential. Please check origin…