Night lighting issues still present - The community solutions

I’ve noticed the same indeed. The buildings are not showing as much ‘window’ lighting as pre-alpha.

Amazingly I’ve just realized I’ve left FS2020 running in the background at the very same spot all paused, so now it is the night in the simulator and I’ve posted a new screenshot (with the weather panel showing time of day).

I find update #5 lighting in SFO is not too bad though in the distance. It clearly shows the NASA Black Marble texture further away than #4 as promised (can be seen better in the night shot), and the overall “density” of lights are quite realistic around KOAK and northerly from there.

However up close, in the SFO city, it looks like OSM synthetic streets painted with a repetitive pattern of poles, with the main road to the bridge highly lit and all others almost not. Furthermore, pre-release is showing much present building window lights than update #5 and this makes it as-if there is a power outage in the city as a whole!

This is so disappointing, pity we’ll never know why they changed it. What was the point of alpha testing if they were just going to change it all anyway?

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Additional material to compare my SFO screenshots with

This website has very nice pictures of SFO from the air, some at sunset/night:
https://tobyharriman.com/aerial/

What is nice is the photographer is also commenting about his aperture, speed and iso which helps getting an idea how close these photos are to what you’d see IRL.

#1 I find this one quite close*:

#2 This one as well:

#3 This one is a little bit over exposed I believe but it gives an overall view of what lighting looks like in this city:

It is clear to me the very problem of night lighting is not really how far they are drawing what, rather it is what they are drawing.

When comparing just these shots it seems night lighting is a 2 factor problem mostly when seen from above:

  • pole lights are illuminating the ground.
  • car lights are illuminating the eye.

This means the approach I’d like to see, for lack of experimenting, is combining these:

  1. Use the OSM data as they are doing and as @Grinde81 has been showcasing in order to generate self-illuminated ground texture.

It is the equivalent of the “sepia mask” (which is in fact the NASA Black Marble texture) but restricted to the street and roads. Self-illumined is to be read as a rendering engine material (a texture which intensity does not depend on the sun to keep it simple. Color and width would be based on actual OSM metadata and heuristics if data is missing (near/far city centre, dense/light population area, highway/road etc…)

You can clearly see in photo #2 the “sepia mask” very close representing the highway and parking lot ground, but there is no discernable orange ground at a distance.

  1. Don’t use the “sepia mask” texture at a distance because there is not enough resolution.

You don’t need too much resolution even up close but at a distance, if there is not enough resolution, such texture won’t suffice to discern roads or street which are close. In effect, there could be not enough pixels to represent it all (1 pixel orange, 1 pixel black, 1 pixel orange is the strict minimum under which orange pixels blend together)

This is clearly how it looks like in photo #3 and photo #2 (see my comments above).

  1. Overlay all these roads and streets with actual lights emitted from actual cars.

This is what gives the most wow effect in X-Plane in my opinion and this is depicting perfectly red/yellow lights when seen in the correct direction, unlike the baked-red-dots seen in FS2020.

Photo #1 shows clearly most of the dots are cars, not poles (except on the pier). Photo #2 as well shows this clearly on the highway and in the most luminous streets. Photo #3 on the bridge up close shows the car dots are less visible than the orange ground.

  1. At a distance, because there is no longer the “sepia mask” texture, artificially increase either the car light dot density or the car light dot texture size in order to compensate.

Here is a gross overview of this idea which I certainly can’t illustrate nor validate right now at all, but which makes some sense to me on paper (and this could prove being a bad idea in the end).

*photos and credits from this page: https://tobyharriman.com/an-evening-above-sf/

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Agreed, i thought i was in p3d

I’m posting this one to illustrate the use of OSM data as a basis for street light intensity/density.

It is not meant to be representing correct exposure but I find it clearly shows light density features which are matching road classification found in OSM, as well as light density depicted in my FS2020 SFO shots above.

Here is a photo:

Compare with this OSM “Transport” layer view:


https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/37.7934/-122.4483&layers=T

*credits and source: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/03/these-incredible-aerial-views-of-san-francisco-are-just-jaw-dropping/

@CptLucky8

Here are some images generated from OSM data :




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Very impressive!
That would be a great foundation to build upon instead of the Sepia Mask brown lamp illuminating the whole city’s daytime-texture.
A texture overlay like this could also reduce the lamp-rendering distance required, saving even more FPS, being faded/replaced by “real” sim-lamps and their effect on the ground.

What software(s) did you use?

Thanks you ! I will publish more images of other places to come very soon on my twitter account (MSFS forum is not the place for this, I posted the images here just to show the potential of OSM data). I can give my twitter by mp is you are interested, just ask me :wink:

This is generated by a C++ software I developed that is still work in progress. The objective is to cover the entire globe since the OSM data is very accurate and complete enough to do it.

In MSFS, these kind of baked OSM images would certainly do the job for high altitudes (in place of the sepia mask), but there is still a difficulty in the transition between low altitude levels (where you can see light bulbs everywhere), and high altitudes.

Night lighting is a very complex subject. The other day I generated some night cities pictures in a totally dark room and was satisfied with the luminosity. When I looked at them the day after, with the shutters opened, I could barely see something on the images because the ambiant luminosity ruined it completely. :thinking:

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I have read the exact opposite …if you turn it off…

Early build on alpha there was no colour variation, big bulb lamp on ground larger then cars\windows on city, too much bright, a lot of complain not realistic that why they changed. Light are very hard to do, you improve things you degrade another things on others area, reducing, increasing will introduce another things questionable, dealing with graphics engine and code with procedural is not like photoshop.

Until there is no XML or CFG tweak for night lights, no one will be happy, this was always the case on tweaking for taste with sim, and this will never change, you have the camp of IFR or VFR, you have the camp from camera view or in flight view etc…how to fix for all = XML or CFG files tweaking.

These tango dance with Asobo will cease until it’s more open to users for tweaking, include water, reflection and others texture, and they could move to others area without distraction of vote anymore, at the moment it’s all locked and compressed on big files not editable.

I offered some suggestion previously like this to avoid all issue from users taste or more work for Asobo to move on from night light for once: Option is to add xml files or CFG, users could edit to their own taste, this is the only solution to meet all users taste. Editing is know for popular mod.

NightLight XML or CFG file.
Street (house\condo)
R,G,B; 0.0,0
Lamp size; 0.0
Brightness; 0.0
Contrast;0.0
Ground reflection; 0.0

Street (Manufacture\store)
R,G,B; 0.0,0
Lamp size; 0.0
Brightness; 0.0
Contrast;0.0
Ground reflection; 0.0

Boulevard
R,G,B; 0.0,0
Lamp size; 0.0
Brightness; 0.0
Contrast; 0.0
Ground reflection; 0.0

Highways
R,G,B; 0.0,0
Lamp size; 0.0
Brightness; 0.0
Contrast;0.0
Ground reflection;0.0

Others etc…
R,G,B; 0.0,0
Lamp size; 0.0
Brightness; 0.0
Contrast;0.0
Ground reflection;0.0

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I tried with off…no change for me.

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The thing is that at some point there are going to be Xbox simmers out there and they are not going to be able to tweak files…I think that they could add a subsection in the options menu where you would be able to use sliders for tweaking Brightness/ Lamp size/Variation…
If that would be feasible I think Asobo would sleep calm at night…at least in terms of night lighting…

I’ll tell you second photo looks so fake and unreal OVERALL. Just make that unpleasant feeling of fake and dead scene

How do you do that? Any tutorial around?

Although this is not the ideal / to be modding everything, creating bugs and crashes. If they create something realistic, 99,9% of the players would not bother to mod the lights.

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Asobo need to add that option like they did on others area.

Notice the glow or halos around the lights in the pre alpha version where the lights are concentrated & even far away at various areas and there are occassional obstructions / breaks in between which is as it looks IRL. The distant lighting in particular was no doubt remarkable and much realistic than now.

Unlike the current version where the distant lights are just the uniform series of fat lamps running from one side to the other without any thing obstructing them and without any glows around them, and not to mention the lamps visibility range which is still less.

Btw something has happened to the tall building night lightings!! Whatever little amount of window lighting was visible from a distance in the pre-alphas, that has also completely gone.

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It’s quite frustrating, i hope asobo reads through this thread and fixes this in patch #6

I agree with all of the above apart from the star map, which is great but with a 4k monitor, the resolution way too low for me. Moreover the contrast is often not great resulting in a not completely black sky. At its darkest it’s dark blue. Even with a full moon, the sky is black at night.

Maybe you should add this topic (Terrible night lighting after patch 5) to your wishlist?

Agreed on the star map, missing the sharp points of lights and the brightness is quite linear. In MSFS with worsening transparency/light pollution I was hoping to see the milky way fade out without fade of brightest stars, but they fade pretty much simultaneously on my screen…
Nerdy details absolutely, but I think it looks believable enough for the majority of gamers.