Has anyone tried the new Ultimate Night Environment 2007? Its predecessor seemed to be way overdone and unrealistic but based on screenshots this one looks much closer to real life city night lighting as seen from the air. Well done night textures have been very hard to come by, most seem to just display pools of reflected light rather than the lights themselves. Autogen buildings are also often poorly textured at night. From what I have seen, FSX will ne no better and maybe even worse which is a pity. One exception to this is the 3D lighting of Ultimate terrain - but these are only available for North America and Europe. I also notice that an update to GE Pro is about to be released that contains new night textures so it will be interesting to see what that offers although the screenshots are not all that promising as the faults outlined above still seem to be present.Bruceb

I compared screen shots of both GEP and UNE7 and I'm sticking with GEP hands down.

Once you have seen one set of orange,fuzzy lights you have seen them all.This should be a free upgrade to existing customers.IMO my cities look like a lava flow from a volcano but I guess it is better than the default. Just have a problem spending any more money on FS9 especially for lights.

Good points Bruce. One thing I would say though is that if you actually look at the ground at night from an aircraft you do see more than just points of light. It's really a combination of pionts of light and pools of light. It depends on the kind of region. A city for example will have very lit streets and I saw this very clearly from 30,000 feet over Italy just a few weeks agon. It really depends where you are. It's certainly not a simple black and white thing of just displaying pools of light or points of light. It really is an artform to render this and it takes a lot of work to make it look anything like convincing.FSX, to be fair does a much better job compared to fS9 night lighting, at least in some respects. It's still too early to say yet because we've only seen an unfinished beta.GE PRO v1 has very different lights to version 2 out any second now. You can see some screen shots here....http://environments.flight1.net/gepro/Gallery%20V2.htmJust like to point out this will of course be FREE UPDATE to GE PRO

Thanks Peter, I've downloaded the update and will give it a go. Not all that keen to spend more money on FS9 if it is not necessary (although I expect to have FS9 on my system for some time to come as it seems most of my favourite addons are unlikey to be updated for FSX in the short term at least). I've based my comments re FSX night textures on the demo but if anyone who has the beta would like to post some night time screenies on the FSX forum that would appreciated.Bruceb

-------------------------------------Once you have seen one set of orange,fuzzy lights you have seen them all.-------------------------------------http://www.clicksmilies.com/auswahl/lachen001.gifTotally true!