I agree it could use some refining and tweaking before it reaches the level we would hope for from the marketing... but I don't consider it "fatal"... there are miles to go before Asobo sleeps... perhaps one of them will improve this... but it's certainly not unacceptable at the moment... lots of other fish to fry first...

Edited November 1, 20205 yr by cavaricooper

9 hours ago, Bosco19 said:

Wanted to think you guys were wrong about the lighting, but the life has been sucked out. No subtlety. No variety. No color. No sense of atmosphere or distance. Every point of light seems to have the same regimented intensity. Airport approach lights jump out at you 40 miles away. Sadly...they took the "art" out. Out of the gate, even with all it's faults, one of 2020's most impressive accomplishments was it's portrayal of night flights. This was a ham-fisted step backwards IMO!

Couldn't agree more! I waited for the Hotfix to update and hoped it wouldn't turn out so bad, but oh my!

This is what Northern Germany looks in the sim. IRL there are no lit up roads between villages. Yet another regression. This resembles FS95, so I now have a daylight-only-mostlyVFR-sim with occasional lightning.

21 hours ago, Richard Sennett said:

Just use geforce experience lots of settings to play with - that will change to your liking - not all monitors are the same 

trouble is i dont want to make the day darker which i think that will do

 

Too many get hung up on how "realistic" something is - This AC doesn't fly realistically (it never will) - this scenery doesn't look "realistic" (it never will). In it's current state, ones and zeros and the existing technology are NOT going to perfectly simulate reality. The best we can hope for is to be "convinced." Somewhere there is a middle ground that doesn't make us constantly go....Oh, that doesn't look right. That should look more like this. We just get immersed and go with it. Consider the flight experience: From any altitude, it's an experience of movement. From a thousand feet we look down and can see someone's clothing hanging on a line in their back yard. We can see colors and vague shapes, but we are moving too fast and are just a bit too high, and are having to pay to much attention to flying, to ID whether that patch of blue is a skirt or a shirt. There are no "screen shots" available. From higher altitudes everything blends together even more, smoothing together visually and making ID of individual elements difficult-to-impossible. A hyper-realist painting is a good example. From a distance you are awed by the fact this is NOT a photograph. It's so real-looking it couldn't possibly be just paint! If you get close enough, the materiality of the paint is revealed. You can see strokes and blends. But an actual photograph could not have been more convincing.

Realism is not required to make something convincing. All that's required is "just enough - presented in just the right way" to cause us to accept without judging. Our brains accept it because it "feels right." It fits in with our experience of reality in such a way that we just go with it. I have said this before - IMO designers can get too hung up on the numbers to the point where the "art" is taken out. They should be creating an "experience" - not just a representation. Honestly, I can't tell you what it was about the night flight experiences I had before they made this change that made that experience so enjoyable. I didn't start analyzing what made the experience so believable. I just went with it. The designers should be asking - " what makes you feel like you just had that experience?" - not, "what, exactly did that experience look like?" This, my friends is what we call ART.   DISCLAIMER: I am a professional artist.

I did a night flight taking off from Twentyninepalms in California at night, and the roads are so bright it is distracting, especially at low levels.  The only way to describe it is if you've ever seen road crews doing night time construction work on a highway, and they get those giant portable lights that are super bright.  Every road looks like that in the sim now.  It is like the Griswolds Christmas lights.  If real life street lights were this bright, we'd all need to board up our windows to get any sleep. 

It is bad enough that I'm usually doing all my flights during the daylight.  I'm not one of those finicky people who needs to have things "just so".  This just looks completely wrong to me, at least on my monitor. 

1 minute ago, kerosene31 said:

I did a night flight taking off from Twentyninepalms in California at night, and the roads are so bright it is distracting, especially at low levels.  The only way to describe it is if you've ever seen road crews doing night time construction work on a highway, and they get those giant portable lights that are super bright.  Every road looks like that in the sim now.  It is like the Griswolds Christmas lights.  If real life street lights were this bright, we'd all need to board up our windows to get any sleep. 

It is bad enough that I'm usually doing all my flights during the daylight.  I'm not one of those finicky people who needs to have things "just so".  This just looks completely wrong to me, at least on my monitor. 

What was the weather? Unlimited visibility and no clouds or any atmosphere?

I do agree that there are problems with rural roads being lit up brightly and no housing lights. I think dim house lights should be added at night to a random number of houses and rural areas should have road lights turned down and there numbers several reduced. Lighting in cities looks good enough (building should still be lit though).

9 minutes ago, Bosco19 said:

All that's required is "just enough - presented in just the right way" to cause us to accept without judging

Yep, and i sincerely hope they will be back on that "right way" asap! Unfortunately there's a lot of subjectivity, especially when it comes to art. I think that's why they felt they had to change something we deemed good - people voted for a thread over at the FS-Forums that started with the terrain emitting light and evolved into a discussion on how to make the whole lighting "more realistic". The downside of "We are listening" in this case - at least for me. There's another thread called "Terrible night lighting after patch"  that I voted for already, but there's of course different opinions in there as well. And people can't stop to compare with videos on YT, not understanding that the look of a video is very much dependant on exposure and postprocessing. So that leaves us with the usual trinity: Zendesk-Vote-Hope...

7 minutes ago, Manny said:

What was the weather? Unlimited visibility and no clouds or any atmosphere?

Weather has nothing to do with it, was flying at low levels (weather was clear with light winds).  The roads are brighter than the runway.  You keep posting dusk shots, which dusk looks a lot better, but at night things look a lot worse, at least on my monitor. 

 

I posted an entry in Wishlist to work on stars and planets especially at dawn/dusk.  They are too big, fuzzy, and look like they exist on the same plane as the colored dawn/dusk atmosphere, like splatter paint on a colored canvas, versus light-years out in the distance where they live.  Even though P3D's are arguably too bright, at least they are discreet and twinkle a bit and look far far more plausible than these ugly things.  You can see some of these as planets in the video by Manny above.  I'm wondering if this has to do w/ how things like stars are created w/ this graphics engine.   They don't seem to be capable of being tiny, high resolution, sharp objects as real stars look on a clear night. 

Edited November 1, 20205 yr by Noel

29 minutes ago, Manny said:

 

Nice notice parking spots lights are white - which is how its done in Xplane - in MSFS if there are even any lights there they are yellow / orange not a fan

30 minutes ago, Manny said:

 

Nice Video!

 

Does prove that the minor back road new lighting is way too overdone and way too bright.

 

Even in the city the major street lights are not that precise and bright compared to the other lighting of homes and buildings, not to mention a heck of a lot smaller in size!

 

The new lighting feels more like a step back to FSX than previously.  Hopefully it gets tweaked further!

On 10/31/2020 at 7:00 AM, Andreas Stangenes said:

So this dramaqueen thread about FATAL night lighting has gotten 13 pages of replies, while my thread about fundamental flaws in the navigation system in the sim had to be pulled by its nose to get anywhere. I see. 

When one is "blinding by the light" and cannot even see the navigation system due to the overbearing orbs, first we need to either tone the light down or put on some virtual sunglasses! 😁

I think this comparison tells it all.....(yes, not the same spot, but before the update it was scenic, yet maybe a bit dark in the distance, but afterwards it's just bulbs)