Night lighting issues still present - The community solutions

I can only repeat myself, because I am one of the starter-topics - and I have to borrow a picture (thanks to @ClayishCoast9) - we are discussing something that has worked before, at least better than now:

It seems to me that there might be some performance optimizations (also because of XBOX release ?), so they work with tricks to adapt something similar without any performance decrease, but I don’t notice any significant performance difference on my system since NLights, Tree’s LOD, water changes, etc. have been implemented.
And if this are adjustments to a console release (or some strange “performance optimizations” VR etc.), then I send an appeal to the developers - please adjust the console to the PC and not the other way round (or independent VR settings ) and if you use a console for a FLIGHT SIMULATOR then please with some graphic cutbacks - but not for the PC where surely people spend thousands of bucks to have a better result !!

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Dudes, you guys should stop posting these post-edited photos that looks like an acid trip. That’s not relevant and it derrails the tread. This is not a tutorial to use Photoshop post effects.

And light does spread around. And night shooting is not simple. The result will depend on the camera, the duration of the shot and the lens, distance and whatnot.

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I’ve been out of this thread for a few days but, are people still pretending the lighting looks good?

This is straight garbage. This is my first flight sim where I go out of my way to avoid flying at night.

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Please read the caption on top of the photo or the particular purpose for which I am posting the picture by reading my post. I am just posting for comparing a particular thing which is the same whether we look through our eyes or the camera lens or rather in this picture. I have never asked to make the night lighting look like in the picture. Many have told here repeated times regarding that and many have even given nice long explanations regarding these edited photos on what it should look like, what our eyes see and so on. I understand that. U guys please take the pain to read my post and understand my sole purpose of comparison.
I agree that I could have got a better close to real photo for my comparison, but this acid trip one was the closest I could get of the same place.

Edit: I have changed the pic. It looks better now.
Thanks

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Could you rephrase this, I’m not sure I follow. How do you mean lights were tuned for IFR specifically?
Flying IFR involves almost no need to peek outside…?

What the developers did with the lights was one step in trying to make night lighting more realistic, instead of “faking it” using a simplistic trick that although fooling many home simmers into believing it was realistic (eye-pleasing yes, realistic no)
The lamp visibility distance got increased to more realistic distances (before it wasn’t even 1/10 of what you’ll see IRL flying in the night)
This unfortunately exposed several problems, that was mainly hidden by the fact the old lamps had a very short visibility range. (lacking uniformity, highway-style lamps in unpopulated rural areas). But several solutions are available, quite a few has already been proposed in this thread if one have the time to dig through several hundreds of unconstructive hyperbolic posts like “nothing like real, bring back the old” without understanding the shortcomings of previous versions.

Yes making changes of this scale post-release is far from optimal and would have been better suited for the alpha/beta-phase. If I could make a wish, I’d love to see a parallel experimental build where stuff like this could be tried out with a closed group of testers that enjoy tinkering/tweaking for improvement, instead of exposing consumer/users for unpolished changes like this one.
Or like you proposed, having the option of selecting between simplified / experimental until it’s finished would also be great.

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Realistic night lighting doesn’t need any Bing map day textures at all, at least not for long/medium distances.
This has been done even back in the days of FSX addons, by procedurally generating a “light splash texture” as night-map.
Take a look at Dubai in MSFS here… It makes it quite obvious what’s wrong with the previous versions reliance on the “Sepia Mask” / Nasa Black Marble illumination mask.

Compare it to a lightsplash-texture I generated using OSM vector data.

I masked the lamp-generation using the Nasa Black Marble data, restricting lamps only to be generated if within an illuminated area. Random brightness / slight variation in placement could quite easily be introduced as well.

Compare these two and you’ll see what the sepia mask does, and why it’s not realistic for anything else than far away distant horizon. (disclaimer for “not what the eye sees” arguments: This is to illustrate WHAT emits light in the real world. Roads do. Deserts do not. The MSFS in this area is pretty much the opposite of reality.)

So here’s one of the things I propose.
Restrict Sepia Mask to distant +100km diffuse amber-glowing cities in the horizon seen from altitude. Looks very good for that purpose.
For long/medium distances, use a procedurally generated light-map as the one I’ve made below, based on the sims lamp locations (pretty straightforward since categorizing and placing those lamps is the hardest and most time-consuming part), and for medium distance, use 2d “always face camera” lightbulb-textures.
And for closer distances within the LOD distance for houses/vegetation, fade away lightsplash-texture and use “normal” sim lights which illuminates the ground.
(Somewhat simplified explanation to keep post at a readable length)

Three pics:
First, the Nasa Black Marble data.
Second, MSFS moonless night
Third, lamps placed along OSM vector data and light-splash texture generated, masked using the Nasa data to prevent unlit rural roads getting “highway-lamps”.



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I think what you are saying makes a lot of sense, and at this stage is not controversial anymore. That is the way to do it. Also, I think your pictures above are an excellent proof of concept of those ideas.

Which leads us to the next level of difficulties, which is what I started thinking about and hinting at above:

  1. How to handle LOD parameter variations between different systems. If there are two borders between the short distance, the long/medium distance, and the very long distance solution, should both borders move when we change the LOD settings? Are there ways to move those borders that look better than others? Or maybe the very long distance border (sepia mask start) is fixed, and it is sufficient to move the inner border?
  2. Dawn/dusk transitions, we still need the Bing map day textures for those. But I we will see once it is implemented if there is still a problem to solve there, maybe fading those out at dusk and fading them in at dawn is straightforward.

Hope Asobo are listening in on this.

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I agree with you - it is a way to start
There should be a setting that you set yourself - besides LOD - night lighting - low, medium, high and ultra or whatever.
so it would be possible to adjust it according to system and “taste” !

20:45 …Those were the days when our first impression of night flying was exactly that…
Now?..a different story…

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In terms of performance, it would free up a lot of resources if they removed all the double and rural street lights.

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Good points!
Just like you said, what I proposed above would require 2 lod distances, or 1 extra lod for the outmost (sepia/artificial-lightmap) , and combine the inner lamp-lod with the “regular” tree/building lod distance.
No point of generating dynamic light emitting lamps outside of the render-range for trees and buildings, as the artificial light map would handle that. But lamps between those lod ranges would still preferably be rendered, but maybe not all the way to the sepia-range. preferably using 2d sprites for that distance, instead of bulb-mesh consisting of 6 or 12 textured faces for each light.

And absolutely, we still need the daytime texture, especially dawn/dusk, I expressed myself unclear last time, since we also need it during night to be “illuminated”/blended with the artificial light splash texture. So we can see for example the football-field texture if illuminated by the light splash texture.
I just meant it doesn’t have to be baked into the generated light splash texture.

Hi folks,

Sometimes there is a double lights on some of the roads but not always. I have hardware acceleration set to On but does not help, is this something related to this bug?

Try with off

Agreed, the caption was even quoted but still missed.
Like for example showing a (poorly processed) photo to demonstrate the height of trees being taller than buildings, but getting the response “overexposed, that’s not what the eyes see”… even though tree vs building height differences were fully visible in the photo.

That’s just a classic argument from fallacy instead of addressing the actual point being made.
Given the number of times this is tried to be applied in wrong situations, it’s almost as if it’s being used to avoid having to discuss the bad parts of previous night-versions to a point it becomes an elephant in the room…

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Of course, as it will for all types photography, daytime as well…?

As both a pilot and a photographer, I can assure you light does not “spread around” in any resemblance to the sims brown ambient illumination / Sepia Mask during night flying, no matter overprocessing or not.
It’s simple physics, no matter taste/preference.

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Kind of like this one below.
This shows what was truly broken with the previous versions reliance on the sepia-mask and why bringing this back would in fact be a step backwards.

Unlit surfaces doesn’t glow in the dark like that IRL while what should be bright is actually dark (complete opposite of real life), no matter what light-spread, llens / camera, exposure-time, distance or what not.

So let’s talk about how to make this right instead .

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Odd solution but I’d love to see it work, anyone got any success yet?

Hi,

Please keep votes or polls within the relevant forum categories that allow them via the forum software. This allows the team to better categorize and prioritize feedback on the forum - we have a vote button for a reason :slight_smile:

If you feel something has not been covered by another issue after searching, feel free to make a new thread within a vote-enabled category (in this case, the bugs & issues category). Many thanks.

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Nope it does not help. I am pretty sure is a bug introduced in the patch #5

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that looks like FS98, I wonder when Asobo will quit those downgrades with each ‘update’, first we’ve lost the perfect water textures and now night lighting turned into a nightmare, too.

I‘m not a fan of the new night lighting either but I think we should differentiate here. While I think before it looked better at low altitudes, it has somewhat improved at high altitudes (sepia mask and draw distance). There are new issues now (brightness, size, variation etc) and it‘s certainly still not where it should be, but I‘m not sure it can be called a downgrade. Regarding water textures, aren‘t they back to „normal“ since the last patch? It looked ridiculous when calm before the patch, now I think it looks good again.

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The advantage of hand rendered objects and autogen objects, is that you can apply different textures to the object based on time of day. So you can add a texture map for night and a separate one for day.

If you look at how photogrammetry works, you don’t have that option. The photogrammetric texture is the one provided and they are ALL taken at daytime. So now you have to somehow apply a “lighting” mesh on top of the building. You can’t replace it’s actual texture, since that is controlled by the photogrammetric data. So you have to come up with an overlay, somehow, and that overlay has to be “draped” over the photogrammetric overlay.

With houses and single story buildings, simply throwing an “orb” above it to illuminate the ground below is mostly ok. The angle that you are looking at single story buildings rarely provides you a good look in their windows. But with cities and skyscrapers, it’s a different story.

The only other option is either to redo photogrammetric data at night, and use that (which will create the EXACT same lighting on each building night after night, which will come under scrutiny as well). Or ditch photogrammetric rendering all together, which opens another can of worms.

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