9 hours ago, MatthewS said:

That XP11 screen shot does look good... but what is it that makes it so?  The lights seem to have more "bloom" and be "hdr"?

It's visually impressive but I'm not sure it's completely realistic. The lights further away on the horizon look too bright to me. Light follows the inverse square law of propagation. Assuming more or less equal brightness, more distant lights shouldn't be the same brightness as those closer to the aircraft.

I think that's also an add-on effect, isn't it? I don't recall the default night lighting in XP being that bright on the horizon. 
 

9 hours ago, Noooch said:

I agree with @aleex it would look fantastic if the night lighting had some random ads coloring the landscape, especially in cities. Some blue, green, red lights in addition of the yellow and white from the default city ones. The intensity of each one shouldn t be the same to add immersion.

One way to get a little color variety is with illuminated street signs and highway signs. You can see overhead green exit signs on major highways lit up at night in XP. It's not very obvious unless you're flying at a very low altitude, but then other colored lights like billboards or neon on buildings shouldn't be seen unless flying that low also.

ETA: You also get some color variety in XP with every moving car showing white headlights and red tail lights. It adds a nice contrast to the amber-colored street lighting when you see a large number of cars on the road.

Edited August 21, 20196 yr by Paraffin

20 hours ago, MatthewS said:

Lets hope so... But the main reason I think their code is based on FSW/FSX is the way the airports are rendered at night, looks identical to FSX.  Honestly if it was completely new code base I would expect the airports to look quite different.

For heavens' sake! All we've seen thus far are stills and 3 second clips from what is essentially a pre-Alpha sim. What makes you think it will not or cannot be improved in the next ~18 months?

Please quit being such a wet blanket...

To my eyes that screenshot of the NL in XP looks unrealistic. The lights further away appear brighter than the lights in the foreground, rather than dimmer as they would in real life from that altitude.

14 hours ago, rjetster1 said:

The title of this should read "Night lighting not so spectacular YET"

But coming soon^TM

2 minutes ago, n4gix said:

To my eyes that screenshot of the NL in XP looks unrealistic. The lights further away appear brighter than the lights in the foreground, rather than dimmer as they would in real life from that altitude.

There are two different settings for lights in XP, one for far and one for near. The default settings has the far lights brighter otherwise you lose a little detail far away. I use FSEnhancer which allows control over the lighting though Lua scripts, which allows me to tone down the far lights I.e.

set( "sim/private/controls/lights/exponent_far", 0.32)
set( "sim/private/controls/lights/exponent_near", 0.24)

Thanks for the information. It is quite likely then that whoever shot that screenshot has their lights configured improperly - by my standards at least.

13 hours ago, MatthewS said:

That XP11 screen shot does look good... but what is it that makes it so?  The lights seem to have more "bloom" and be "hdr"?

I would agree with this, also I'm convinced they've built on top of the FSXI/Flight codebase. I don't have an issue with that at all.

Some of the lighting therefore has characteristics it shares with FSX particularly looking at the ground from the air but a lot of the lighting also has changed dramatically.

There is still a long way to go and I think the particlar lighting that we're seeing from these screenshots can improve a lot and probably wouldn't be done until later in the development process anyway once the rendering pipeline and world assets are more or less stable.

The deepdive episode in "World" should hopefully provide some more HDR and bloom illumination on the subject!

36 minutes ago, n4gix said:

For heavens' sake! All we've seen thus far are stills and 3 second clips from what is essentially a pre-Alpha sim. What makes you think it will not or cannot be improved in the next ~18 months?

Please quit being such a wet blanket...

18 months if you are considering just the inicial (v1.0) version. Unless they quit the development of the simulator again, we will have a lot of updates and new MSFS versions to improve the features. 

To my eye this looks the most natural without being over exposed.

http://youtu.be/lL5RPnXyklk

 

Edited August 21, 20196 yr by n4gix
Fixed the link.

8 minutes ago, skully said:

To my eye this looks the most natural without being over exposed.

http://youtu.be/lL5RPnXyklk

Well yeah, it's hard for the real world to look unrealistic!

1 hour ago, n4gix said:

Well yeah, it's hard for the real world to look unrealistic!

 Good one sir!

Of course you know that not all videos look realistic compared to what we see with our eyes- I meant what we see in that vid would be a good approximation of what the new sim could strive for. 

 

1 hour ago, skully said:

To my eye this looks the most natural without being over exposed.

http://youtu.be/lL5RPnXyklk

 

XP looks the closest to that... The XP lights are "bloomy" and "hdr" but in FS2020 they are not.

MS can take a giant step forward here. Xplane is good, but very far from realistic. It uses a lot more lights in big cities, not just street lighting. many different colors, and different intensities. look at this 

 

16 hours ago, MatthewS said:

That XP11 screen shot does look good... but what is it that makes it so?  The lights seem to have more "bloom" and be "hdr"?

Am I missing something? There are no X-Plane screenshots in this thread.

2 minutes ago, HughesMDflyer4 said:

Am I missing something? There are no X-Plane screenshots in this thread.

Yeah probably, for a moment I thought the OP's pic was an XPlane screenshot... anyway just have a look at any XP night shot, the lighting surpasses anything seen in FSX/P3D/FS2020 IMO.