I get that that's why I say use a texture for far off stuff 

 

That sounds like a kludge that would be difficult to make "plausible" without the same amount of CPU/GPU load you'd get from just extending road and building visibility. If the glow texture didn't follow where actual streets and buildings are, it wouldn't look right. So you're back to needing the underlying OSM data loaded anyway, and at that point you might as well be drawing roads and buildings that light up.

 

Unless Laminar has some tricks up its sleeve, we might just have to wait a few years for stronger computers where a longer LOD for night lights doesn't harm the frame rate too much.

The easy solution would be creating night textures for cities like they created day city texture :) I guess it is a very simple solution and it will be great in performance since no 3d lights would be used when flying high... Who will ever notice that the lights are not 3d from FL300? And also, to avoid the pop up of lights, put the fade like they do with the autogen...

1 hour ago, Malombroso said:

The easy solution would be creating night textures for cities like they created day city texture :) I guess it is a very simple solution and it will be great in performance since no 3d lights would be used when flying high... Who will ever notice that the lights are not 3d from FL300? And also, to avoid the pop up of lights, put the fade like they do with the autogen...

Someone already did it: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36942-night-city-textures-extended-lights-lod/&tab=comments#comment-226589

Before and after:

 

I second other posters here, that the lack of extended night lighting is a major immersion killer with XP11 and is something I hope get fixed soon. Seems like its not trivial, but I do hope the development team prioritizes this.

Night flying is after all one of the key strengths of XP11. Approaching the cities from low level as night is often mind blowing. But being able to see through clouds at night along with short view distance is killing the immersion somewhat.

I did some research into this for x-plane 10 awhile back and even went back and forth with Ben in emails. What I finally discovered was that one needs to tweak a value in the scenery file itself to get distant lights to render. This was the only way I could do it. I only tested it on a few files, but it definitely worked. I don't recall what exactly the change was, but I'll try and look into it for XP11 as I only recently installed 11 and was shocked that this issue had not been addressed. I'll post my findings.

 

On January 13, 2018 at 4:13 PM, Slowdive said:

I did some research into this for x-plane 10 awhile back and even went back and forth with Ben in emails. What I finally discovered was that one needs to tweak a value in the scenery file itself to get distant lights to render. This was the only way I could do it. I only tested it on a few files, but it definitely worked. I don't recall what exactly the change was, but I'll try and look into it for XP11 as I only recently installed 11 and was shocked that this issue had not been addressed. I'll post my findings.

 

Great. looking for some solutions, and I agree that night lighting is one of the main reasons for many of us moving to X plane, and it needs to be fixed!!!

Could it be a hack that simply gives light posts a much bigger LOD? Light posts are way too many along the streets and highways in XP, but during the night they're the ones showing the lights. 

This is maybe a stupid question, but has this problem become worse? I made a night approach and I got the feeling that the light pop in is way closer to the aircraft than what I remembered..? I would love it if they fixed this. Night approaches in x-plane are just pure magic and this is a bit of an immersion killer.

On 21.1.2018 at 9:05 AM, Swe_Richard said:

This is maybe a stupid question, but has this problem become worse? I made a night approach and I got the feeling that the light pop in is way closer to the aircraft than what I remembered..? I would love it if they fixed this. Night approaches in x-plane are just pure magic and this is a bit of an immersion killer.

not really, its just now with xp11 having extended DSF on by default it becomes abit more obvious

On 11/30/2017 at 11:52 AM, Malombroso said:

The easy solution would be creating night textures for cities like they created day city texture :) I guess it is a very simple solution and it will be great in performance since no 3d lights would be used when flying high... Who will ever notice that the lights are not 3d from FL300? And also, to avoid the pop up of lights, put the fade like they do with the autogen...

I'm reasonably certain that if there was a quick and easy solution that had no trade offs then the developers would have done it already.  I'm also reasonably certain that we haven't thought of anything they haven't already considered.

I'm a fan of options.

While it might melt your computer if they gave the option to increase the LOD on the lights, it'd be nice to have the choice because right now it looks terrible.

Same way I felt about P3D and autogen radius. Finally in v4, they gave people the option to greatly increase it.

4 hours ago, bonchie said:

I'm a fan of options.

While it might melt your computer if they gave the option to increase the LOD on the lights, it'd be nice to have the choice because right now it looks terrible.

Same way I felt about P3D and autogen radius. Finally in v4, they gave people the option to greatly increase it.

On the consumer end, I can understand feeling that way. On the other hand, Laminar is a small company and can't afford to support a large tech support staff. The reason they took away the much more fine-grained options settings we had in v10 with the new v11, was because they had so many people whining about how poor the frame rate was, with settings they didn't understand. 

They're on a big move right now for optimization and frame rate including a move to Vulcan, partly aimed at VR support, but also just to keep up with the crazy resolutions people are using in 2D monitors now (4k today, 8k tomorrow? That's nuts). In addition to VR support, it helps X-Plane stay competitive with the other platforms out there. 

The current night lights are individual light sources, something P3D can't get anywhere close to doing with that legacy engine. Laminar knows this needs a fix, and we'll get it eventually... like seasons, better weather, ATC and all the rest. But they're not going to add in something that suddenly, drastically, drops the frame rate as a short-term fix just for visual appeal.

They're aiming for minimal complaints about frame rates with decent hardware. That's something we should all support.