1 hour ago, wardp said:

I've just had surgery to remove my cataracts and I'd rather not not have Asobo putting them back for me as my sight has been improved amazingly. If a surgeon can turn it off why can't Asobo?

I had them done too - the results were astonishing. You might also need a capsulotomy in a year or two - five minutes each eye, and never needs to be done again. Medical chat aside, I'm firmly in the anti-lens flare camp. You don't see it with the human eye, so why include it in the sim at all ?  At least make it optional again, Asobo, please.

It might be useful for those users who wish to see an alternate representation of the sun and other intense bright light sources in MSFS 2024 to add this request to the official Wishlist maintained by the developers. That way it has a chance to garner additional support from the community and maybe an official response at some point in the future.

In the meanwhile, we do need to recognize that the representation of the Sun in any flight simulator is by necessity just that, a pale representation. I believe that at midday, the Sun can be tens of thousands of times as bright as a sunlit landscape, so bright that someone attempting to look at it even briefly would risk burning a hole in their retina. So none of us actually knows how the unfiltered Sun looks, but it certainly isn't anything that can be displayed realistically on any LED screen, whether HDR or not. So whatever representation a developer might choose, it's unrealistic. Asobo has chosen a photographic sunstar which arises due to diffraction around the aperture leaves of some photographic lenses at small f-stops, which probably isn't a very good choice, but the alternative is a solar image that's just a flat white disk in the middle of the screen. 

For some reason, the UserCfg file in FS2020 contains control parameters for lens flare and bloom, but FS2024 does not, at least on my system. Maybe we'll learn why if a related Wishlist item gets upvoted sufficiently on the official site.

Cheers!

On 8/23/2025 at 7:17 PM, prolixindec said:

I am totally 100% behind making it optional. For anyone who's sim experience is enhanced by lens flare, more power to them. 

For me, I'd like to toggle it off and reclaim the 0.000001 fps.

 

 

But not simply making it optional with a generic on and off switch. 

We need two. One for first person view and one for 3rd person and any outside views. Because first person is your eyes and there is no lense flare with your eyes and 3rd person is a camera, and only bad cameras have lense flare.