Night lighting: illuminated roads?

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

Hello @ll,

there is one thing that has always bothered me about the nighttime lighting in our simulators, be it default or addon. In my country, the roads are only illuminated in and closely around the city. There are no strings of lightbulbs along the Autobahn, let alone the smaller cross-country roads. 

While it looks great from an aesthetic standpoint, it is not realistic at all, and to me personally, those endless strings of light kill immersion every time. I know what my country looks like in real life as seen from an aircraft, and this isn't it.

In MSFS, I would like to have some control over the lighting please. So I can switch off lights for example by road types. Better still, if the simulator would do it on its own, according to geographical location. Some countries still have illuminated roads after all. Or maybe there are nighttime satellite images of the earth that could be fed into the terrain processing "AI"?

Best regards

Edited February 10, 2020 by Lorby_SI

[andyjohnston.net 617]

First world problems

[Kopteeni 819]

The challenge with trying to simulate the whole world is that it's always going to be easy to find flaws in it. It's never going to be perfect. We can only hope that Asobo gets it right in the big picture and have the 3rd parties fill in the blanks by providing a nice sdk and api for them to work with.

Edited February 10, 2020 by Kopteeni

[aleex 551]

You are right. It can’t be perfect. But it can always be improved 😉 

Edited February 10, 2020 by aleex

[Noooch 1,084]

I really encourage this kind of features, what is so complicated about it after all?

You have basically 4 types of roads on the planet:

Highways, normal roads, rural roads, and cities.

Depending on the country, each type of road is illuminated or not. For example in the Netherlands, highways are illuminated but I believe in North Korea, even cities are left in the dark.

This is really not a big deal to get it right.

[Kopteeni 819]

3 minutes ago, Noooch said:

I really encourage this kind of features, what is so complicated about it after all?

You have basically 4 types of roads on the planet:

Highways, normal roads, rural roads, and cities.

Depending on the country, each type of road is illuminated or not. For example in the Netherlands, highways are illuminated but I believe in North Korea, even cities are left in the dark.

This is really not a big deal to get it right.

Do you know, or are you assuming that they have such road classification data available?

Edited February 10, 2020 by Kopteeni

[Noooch 1,084]

@Kopteeni I really hope they have. Is this not public information?

Edited February 10, 2020 by Noooch

[Dominique_K 10,149]

3 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

 

there is one thing that has always bothered me about the nighttime lighting in our simulators, be it default or addon. In my country, the roads are only illuminated in and closely around the city. There are no strings of lightbulbs along the Autobahn, let alone the smaller cross-country roads. 

 

I agree with Oliver, something they have to do it right. I was surprised to see, in one of teasers, in Chile I think, illuminated roads in the countryside. I have no idea how to do it but I would surmise that you can set rules for the AI, the probability of an illuminated roads or highways is, for instance, higher closer to a city. It has not to be right it has to be convincing.

 

39 minutes ago, andyjohnston.net said:

First world problems

What do you mean by that 🙄 ? You would be content with a Third World sim  ?

[Kopteeni 819]

26 minutes ago, Noooch said:

@Kopteeni I really hope they have. Is this not public information?

Having such data available in Bing forms the basis of your solution. And then it comes down to how Asobo is prioritizing the autogen features. After all, it's an endless swamp and we all have a different idea about what is important. 

[Noooch 1,084]

@Kopteeni No I never said that was a priority. And the data doesn't have to come from Bing either, the weather isn't for example.

I just said it was not a big deal to get it done right.

Edited February 10, 2020 by Noooch

[Claviateur 789]

I am not sure how Bing data is tagged but the OSM data we use to generate roads for another simulator produce automatically the desired result based on how the roads are tagged (types, lit or not etc.).

As you know. OSM is an open source data and everyone can contribute to the improvement of the tags and data itself. Usually people who do so, take care of their area of interest that happens to be the country / state / province etc where they live...

Now certainly Bing has tags concerning the types of roads but if it has additional tags for the presence or absence of light, then it should be a piece of cake for Asobo... If not, then the presence or absence of lights might be procedural / determined simply by the type of roads... This won't be a copy of reality but then who knows, Bing might have a rich set of tags that will be fully used by Asobo.

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

18 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

Having such data available in Bing forms the basis of your solution. And then it comes down to how Asobo is prioritizing the autogen features. After all, it's an endless swamp and we all have a different idea about what is important. 

There are cars moving on the roads, so there is some kind of vector information in play already. 

Best regards

[Kopteeni 819]

10 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

There are cars moving on the roads, so there is some kind of vector information in play already. 

Best regards

Yes, everything related to routing is there. However, I don't see a lot of road metadata. Road speed limits are there so I guess they could try to draw a rough assumption that the roads with higher speed limits are also more likely to be fully illuminated at night. Or they could try to use the traffic data and illuminate only the roads with higher amount of traffic? 

[vortex681 806]

1 hour ago, aleex said:

You are right. It can’t be perfect. But it can always be improved 😉 

Whilst I agree in principle, even in its current state, it looks to be a major improvement over what’s gone before (and there’s still much more development to be done). The sad thing is that no matter how good it ends up being, there will always be those who still think it’s not good enough. Also, saying that a feature can’t be difficult to incorporate is, at best, a guess unless you actually work for Asobo and use their game engine and associated tools.

[aleex 551]

6 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Whilst I agree in principle, even in its current state, it looks to be a major improvement over what’s gone before (and there’s still much more development to be done). The sad thing is that no matter how good it ends up being, there will always be those who still think it’s not good enough. Also, saying that a feature can’t be difficult to incorporate is, at best, a guess unless you actually work for Asobo and use their game engine and associated tools.

Yeah. I agree, is much better than we have now, and that some people will never be satisfied (humans are nonconformist). And probably features that looks simple aren’t at all. 
 

But 10 years ago we didn’t think about having photogrammetry cities. And look now. Maybe in a few years we have photogrammetry night cities. Or any other feature that now looks unbelievable. 
 

I’m sure AS will be more satisfied as more complete its sim is. But they already said that is a long term sim, so changes will me made I think.