As a real world pilot, yes. They are slightly too bright, but the real issue is the “animation” of the bloom around the lights in 2024 which make each light in the sim look like lit up Christmas ornament balls.
3 Likes
Yeah, after responding in this thread, I played the Night Currency exam and I agree that the bloom is exaggerated a bit. That being said, I find that the night lighting in general has improved significantly.
I agree with the overall improvements, but the bloom in taxiway lights in particular kills it, and sometimes bloom has sharp edges like the bloom just stops being a bloom and darkness starts. It’s not a soft blend.
I tried to find and turn off bloom immediately after seeing this, but I couldn’t find the bloom settings in the graphical settings which was present in 2020 graphical settings option.
MSFS2024 airport lighting doesn’t look remotely close to reality right now, twy edge lights illuminating the whole field from 10,000 feet 20 miles out …?!
Here’s Dallas Fort Worth during a busy night, one of the busiest airports in the world. Pretty dark… While in MSFS2024 every single rwy & twy lamp is blazing like a Christmas tree
(Exposed to match the brightness / light / features I could see with my eyes)
4 Likes
Perhaps the intensity ought to decrease more rapidly with distance than it does in the current implementation. My impression is based on flying GA aircraft fairly close to the ground. But what do I know, I’m not a pilot. Besides, that image is take with a camera which most likely will not reproduce the colors the same way the human eye would, but I see your point.
That sir is the correct assessment 
The actual ‘light’ is probably not too far off in terms of size. It is the insane bloom effect that makes all 2020 and seems 2024 night lighting look way out of proportion and just plain wrong. Along with the vomit brown sepia mask that is.
I really think it might look more realistic if they simply removed the bloom from the ground objects and mask. Probably something easy enough to try Asobo if you are listening. Mock it up and take some screenshots. Then let us take a look, then we can judge for ourselves. Now there’s a concept for real community involvement, I won’t even charge you for it 
1 Like
I think that is also part of the problem, maybe a bigger problem now that you bring it up. Even if the bloom is not too bad at the light source, as we move up and away the bloom is either not scaling down at all or at least not in the right proportion.
The city lights are beautiful, don’t touch them, but the airport lights are really bad.
I think blue lights are the worst.
6 Likes
It seems the actual lights have the correct size, but the glow is exaggerated at night making them look humongous, and visible from afar which is not realistic, and a big step back from 2020.
Also, the sepia mask at higher altitudes are back, this needs to go as well please ! It looks so bad !
The actual city lights at night are perfect at lower altitudes !
Then there is the strobes and landing lights - it looks like you are flying in FOG when its a clear night, so something is very off with night lighting…
3 Likes
Some places seem worth than others. I’ve done a flight from CDG to LHR this evening, and they weren’t too bad but you could see surrounding airports like Le Bourget and Northolt was just a blue section on the scenery. When i did a flight into Dubai yesterday it was a bloom fest.
i’ll also add other-player aircraft lights seem buggy as well, they only render in when really close. Makes spotting a bit annoying!
They do seem to vary, maybe by time-of-day? Dunno. I was at YSHL and the runway and taxi lighting look HUUUGE, and silly, when on the ground at night. They look great during the day and OK at altitude.
Hopefully this is a single light scaling bug fix and not a per-airport fix!
I thought it was just in HDR, so I posted in HDR lighting bug?. I will add my vote here.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to have found this thread, by the way. So many people on Twitch have been saying the new night lighting is brilliant that I thought I was losing my mind 
Please, those that say the city lights are “beautiful” or “amazing”, take a look at this:
It looks like each light source in a city is a mini sun. It’s terrible. I genuinely don’t understand how anyone can think that’s at all realistic or even looks good?
11 Likes
It looks much like the night lighting did in 2020 before they fixed it. There used to be random fields illuminated etc like that.
Feels like they started working on 2024 based on a FS2020 build from around 2021, and is missing a lot of fixes and changes that have been added to 2020 since then.
However I have faith that in 6 months to a year they will bring this release up to a much higher standard.
2 Likes
At high altitude yes, looks terrible. The sepia effect is like it was in 2020.
At low altitude, it looks much better.
2 Likes
Correct, they don’t look realistic. Needs to be way dimmer than it is now. City lights are so bright and needs a tuning!
2 Likes
The night lighting looks pretty nice to me from very low altitudes or when on the ground, except from the over-exaugurated blue taxi lights of course.
Without the sepia masks it doesn’t look too bad from up above I guess and the sepia masks can work for the lights close to the horizon.
What I don’t understand is why they cannot generate a very high resolution light/sepia mask based on the lights they place in the scenery. This should eliminate the light blobs in the dessert and allow large cities to be more realistic from high altitudes.
1 Like
the sepia masks kills the immersion i swear
1 Like
Agreed no one is liking the return of the infamous Sepia Mask, unrealistic pale brown mini sun illuminating huge areas that IRL are completely dark.
What people like is the increased number of sprites / point-light-sources / bulbs being visible at a greater distance and better appearance.
Still not as good as early 2020 tech alphas, but a bit better.
But a huge mystery why the brought the Sepia Mask back, as it was one of the most voted “bugs” of MSFS 2020.
5 Likes
Yes, in the current form they do, but I think they are after this look:
If they tone down the sepia mask and make the resolution higher it might work.
But maybe instead of using some low resolution lightmap they can just use city boundaries to create them. Maybe along with the region and resident count to determine the strength. You don’t want every village in Africa to light up like a christmas tree for example.
3 Likes