15 hours ago, kerosene31 said:

Lights on rural roads that shouldn't be are definitely a problem, but there's more to it than that.  The magic light bulbs everywhere feel wrong for most areas.  Maybe flying over a major city looks ok, but for a small to mid sized area surrounded by suburbs, the lights are just way too bright. 

The comparison pictures from a few pages ago shows it perfectly.  Before, the lights were natural and followed the terrain.  Now, it just feels very much like some of the early lighting we'd buy for sims like FS2004.  Back then it was an improvement, but now it feels like a massive step back. 

Exactly!

Would you be flying around rural area for night flying? 

Lets go flying for viewing the beautiful night lighting.. Oh yeah..lets pick a rural area around the desert that has a single road ...

 

Or would you pick, LA or New York or London city? eh! to judge, evaluate night lighting?

Edited November 3, 20205 yr by Manny

On 11/1/2020 at 6:42 AM, icewater5 said:

Isnt it kind of nice to navigate though iff rural roads are lit up, especially around

the area you live?

No it is totally annoying.

You know what your local airfield looks like and suddenly having all these backroads which IRL have two houses, one of which is used as a chicken roost and the other is occupied by a redneck couple with 12 dogs and 6 broken down pickups growing dope, all lit up like a xmas tree is extremely off putting. Especially because they seem to have only done it so the "non locals" flying randomly past can fill all warm and fuzzy about the "pretty lights" .

Whats really annoying is this thread keeps popping up, don't like the night lighting fly during the day, IRL or don't fly at all.

Edited November 3, 20205 yr by jbdbow1970

11 minutes ago, jbdbow1970 said:

Whats really annoying is this thread keeps popping up, don't like the night lighting fly during the day, IRL or don't fly at all.

If your happy with total nonsense unrealistic lighting just for the sake of looking pretty in screen shots or simply do not care, go for it  😄     There is no need to click on this thread, or the water thread or the "trees too tall" threads or any of the other ones about unrealistic scenery, just ignore them.

No one is making you click on these threads.

Edited November 3, 20205 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

20 minutes ago, jbdbow1970 said:

Whats really annoying is this thread keeps popping up, don't like the night lighting fly during the day, IRL or don't fly at all.

Lol, what a nerve.

4 hours ago, Manny said:

Orbx Sydney. If you own Orbx Sydney fly around, at dusk and then at night... andenjoy.

Yuck! I happen to live (and fly) in this place, and I can tell you it doesn't look like this at night (or dusk).

4 hours ago, Manny said:

Would you be flying around rural area for night flying?

Why wouldn't you? Night VFR (IRL) is immensely enjoyable and offers some extra challenges over daytime VFR. Just finding a rural/country airport is a challenge. Hint: They are really dark, even when lit. Nothing like what you currently get in MSFS. Some have pilot activated lights (using VHF radio), and one of the most reliable ways of finding such airports is to get close, activate the lights via radio, and see the subtle popping in of the runway lights.

Further on some comments some are wanting pre-release night lighting (aka alpha version), I wanted to see how this really was. In order to find publishable material not under NDA, I’m using this:

Great source of pre-release geo-tagged screenshots

It was quite hard to find some night screenshots and I’ve had to discard a few others (Los Angeles and Biarritz - France) because I could spot any name tag on the screenshots and I wasn’t sure these were pre-release.

Nevertheless here are a few examples of pre-release screenshots:

Aspen:

 

Chicago:

Sandpoint:

San Francisco:

San Francisco (sunset) (FS2020 v1.10.8):

San Francisco (night) (FS2020 v1.10.8):

[update] I've added a screenshot of SFO roughly at the same view angle but I couldn't exactly match the lighting with any combination of time/cloud. This highlights differences between alpha and current versions pretty well though.

[update] there is a good discussion about this in the FS2020 forum where I've posted all of the above:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/terrible-night-lighting-after-patch-5/310086/319
 

 

Edited November 3, 20205 yr by RXP

2 hours ago, RXP said:

Further on some comments some are wanting pre-release night lighting (aka alpha version), I wanted to see how this really was. In order to find publishable material not under NDA, I’m using this:

Great source of pre-release geo-tagged screenshots

It was quite hard to find some night screenshots and I’ve had to discard a few others (Los Angeles and Biarritz - France) because I could spot any name tag on the screenshots and I wasn’t sure these were pre-release.

Nevertheless here are a few examples of pre-release screenshots:

These are a perfect example of the "probability" setting for lighting in action.  They had a probability setting which was adjusted for proximity to populated areas.  Roads running through higher population areas had a greater probability of being lit, while the same road had less chance of being illuminated the further out it radiated from the population setting.  From what I understand, even in urban areas, the probability was never 100%.  Now it is, which makes it so jarring.  Not to mention the seeming extra "layer" of light mesh that seems to be overlayed a couple 100 ft off the ground.  

You can see both on the horizon and in the foreground where there is the occasional lamp is not lit in major highways.  This is especially evident in Sandpoint and near the Horizon in SF and Chicago.  

This probability helps "break up" the lighting and makes it look more organic.  You can also see as the lights get further away from the urban areas, they are more sporadic.

I really found that their previous "method" of determining lighting may not have been completely accurate, but have "felt" accurate and dynamic at the same time.  Really, in my opinion, all they had to do is remove the Sepia filter and It would have been all Good.  I think it's important to understand that we'll never get 100% accuracy because the night environment by it's nature is dynamic.  But what they were doing seemed to be a good compromise, and since each areas would look just "slightly" different between nights (different lights being off and on), we all felt that the area was more dynamic than it actually was

I really hope they go back because in SoFla, we don't have the benefit of natural landscape that can obscure some of the lights, so the entire Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach county area looks like the set of Tron.  Not to mention A1A becomes this huge ribbon of light in the Keys, which is only broken up on the bridges that connect them, which ironically is typically where most of the road lighting is present.

Edited November 3, 20205 yr by wthomas33065

Those screenshots that RXP posted up above look much better than what we have now in the latest version with the ugly overexposed light grids. It feels like I'm flying over a pacman board or as some others have said tron. If those screenshots are from the alpha then they should work from that point on and improve on the lights. The night lighting in update #5 is extremely unrealistic to the human eye and atrocious looking. and possibly the worst I've seen in any of the updates so far.

The lighting in those screens look much more natural and subtle and varied, you can see the light reflecting off the surface of buildings and homes. But the lights now looks like complete blackness with overly bright glowing orbs all over the place.

There's too much contrast between the darkness of the ground and the lights now. It needs to be somehow balanced. Lights are way too overpowering and the ground is way too dark.

 

Edited November 3, 20205 yr by captain420

I find update #5 lighting in SFO is not too bad though in the distance. It clearly shows the NASA Black_Marble texture further away than #4 as promised (can be seen better in the night shot), and the overall "density" of lights are quite realistic around KOAK and northerly from there.

However up close, in the SFO city, it looks like OSM synthetic streets painted with a repetitive pattern of poles, with the main road to the bridge highly lit and all others almost not. Furthermore, pre-release is showing much present building window lights than update #5 and this makes it as-if there is a power outage in the city as a whole!

Further comments, suggestions and comparison shots:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/terrible-night-lighting-after-patch-5/310086/333
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/terrible-night-lighting-after-patch-5/310086/335

3 hours ago, wthomas33065 said:

...I really hope they go back because in SoFla, we don't have the benefit of natural landscape that can obscure some of the lights, so the entire Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach county area looks like the set of Tron.  Not to mention A1A becomes this huge ribbon of light in the Keys, which is only broken up on the bridges that connect them, which ironically is typically where most of the road lighting is present.

I live in South Florida as well and agree 100% with you.  

Have you had a chance to check out Tamiami Trail heading West, out into the Everglades, lit up like a string of LED pearls?  Not to mention that after taking off from Miami Executive Airport, heading West, while at under 1000 feet, I can easily see the perfect and brightly lit lights of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition airport...  Simply ridiculous.

At the very least, the lighting has to be considerably toned down.  At best, return it to how it was.  Night flying, as it currently is, has been ruined by unrealistically bright and "Pac-Man" tiled lighting which blows out all other lighting effects.

 

Just landed in Brussels and I think it actually doesn't look too bad.

Sadly though it doesn't always look like that. Yesterday I did a night flight in the UK with clear weather and it looked absolutely horrible.