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Too dark in the night?


Limaro

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Hi,

 

 

I have a question about graphics, settings,.. I dont know.

When making night missions, I agree it has to be darker, but I can't see anything.. barely the instruments, but non of the switches - SU25. I've uploaded a screenshot. Compared to tutorial videos at knight this looks not normal.

 

Are there some hidden settings? My gamma is set to normal (2.0) and at day everything appears normal.

 

 

Please can anyone give me a hint?

 

 

Limaro

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... Compared to tutorial videos at knight this looks not normal.

 

Check the dates of those videos, most likely they were shot on DCS v1.5 or 2.0 ... since the advent of v2.5 the night lighting of DCS sucks quite a bit .. the only thing you can do is up the gamma to 2.4, and that helps just a bit.

 

Also, you can equip your aircraft with Night Vision Googles, that helps a lot.

 

As I mostly fly single player, rather than edit missions for deep night conditions, I set the time for twilight .. that allows me to at least see the cockpit when not using NVG.

 

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Check the dates of those videos, most likely they were shot on DCS v1.5 or 2.0 ... since the advent of v2.5 the night lighting of DCS sucks quite a bit .. the only thing you can do is up the gamma to 2.4, and that helps just a bit.

 

Also, you can equip your aircraft with Night Vision Googles, that helps a lot.

 

As I mostly fly single player, rather than edit missions for deep night conditions, I set the time for twilight .. that allows me to at least see the cockpit when not using NVG.

 

 

Ok thanks for the advices. Now I am wondering why this has been made up that way :cry:

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As someone mentioned change the date of your flight to match full moon cycle. You'll get some lighting from the moon. Try 21 June 2001 around 2am to see an example.

 
 

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It is too dark, or, to be more precise, the lighting from the cities, ambient lighting, reflections, runway lighting, does not carry over distance.

An example is checking the runway lighting and lights over Dubai without a moon.

 

 

At 10nm in clear night, the runway lights and airport are not visible!

 

 

That is the problem, the lighting, rather than the absence.

 

 

Full moon makes NVG impossible. But it's good without

 

Twighlight/dawn is nice, but the bands exist to ruin it.

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Moonlight makes a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge difference in night lighting! Change the date of the mission to a day where the moon is up and you should have a much brighter night!

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Thanks for the advice with full, but for me not actually relevant. When I want to see something, I'll play during the day.

Just wondering now that this situation is as designed.

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Thanks for the advice with full, but for me not actually relevant. When I want to see something, I'll play during the day.

Just wondering now that this situation is as designed.

Well, if it's not relevant for you then why're you asking? :huh:

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Thanks for the advice with full, but for me not actually relevant. When I want to see something, I'll play during the day.

Just wondering now that this situation is as designed.

Then what you are seeing, is what everyone is seeing, if that's what you wanted to check. The extra details are there for your benefit if you were not aware.

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Well, if it's not relevant for you then why're you asking? huh.gif

 

 

I am sorry for the missunderstanding. I am thankful for the advices how to improve possibilities to fly in the night. :thumbup:

 

 

It just was not my very initial intention. I just was concerned, that I broke my settings somehow.

 

I flew the advanced training mission of landing - There, it's dark, and with bad weather - no moon :)

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This needs to be addressed.. I can't believe huge servers like TTI have 2 hours of night time at every reset, no one can see a damn thing... but of course if you complain about this some blowhard tells you "Learn to use ILS, welcome to Winter, its dark... blah blah blah"

 

with regards to night lighting, all I want is a DCS megafan to admit that its not the perfect lighting solution, rather than hot air excuse of "well thats night time, trust me, night is dark!"

 

case in point, sit in dark plane, turn on flashlight, point it at mountains 10km away, somehow mountains light up? or at least somehow the landscape seen through that light through canopy is brighter

 

Step outside IRL. if you live near a major airport, you will see planes in the night sky, you can see blinking airliners going over 30k feet. step into DCS and you can't see any blinking lights on any plane, let alone the insanely bright nav and taxi lights that you would see IRL, that are blinding even in real life. The snowbirds come flying at you with lights on in broad daylight, and the first thing you see is the lights, before anything else!

 

and what is upsetting, apparently its going to get worse before it gets better seeing as updates like to break lighting on stuff like black shark, huey, and things generally seemed to get darker over time in DCS for whatever reason - see some of the missions made for dark are almost unplayable according to some (SU25 difficult landing mission) since Chizh confirmed, that new night lighting tech will be in new maps only, as it requires significant changes to the maps. Some planes are straight up not useful for night ops because they have no way of getting around the darkness, such as F5-E. :(


Edited by squid1

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  • 2 months later...

This is a persistent problem in pretty much all computer graphics programs. During the day the _vast_ majority of lighting comes from the sun. In general, during daylight, you get ~20,000-100,000 lux of illumination from the sun at any given point, and most of the light that reaches the eye will have come from the sun, bounced off "the object" and reached your eye.

 

At night the "natural" illumination (primarily from the moon) is <1lux. This means that individual human light sources contribute more to what you can see. It goes to show how much dynamic range our eyes really have that we can still see things even in pure moonlight.

 

Anyway at night you might have streetlights putting out ~10000 lux and directly lit areas (about 5m away from a streetlight) are lit at 400 lumens, as light bounces around this drops off at 1/d(=distance)^2, as you might imagine during the daytime the contribution of the sun will very quickly outshine (heh) the contribution of any indirect lighting (light that has bounced >0 times). At night, because the total "ambient" light in the sky is so very much dimmer it takes more bounces for it to dominate. This means in simulations that don't simulate many indirect lighting bounces things will appear really quite dark if you use appropriate values for "ambient" lighting and for the power of individual lights.

 

Additionally at night our eyes shift to scotopic vision, which we can't really emulate in a game because of how monitors work. Maybe with emmissive displays.

 

Maybe some improvements could be made by, for example, making the ground a weak area light in areas with lots of streetlights.

 

This is the core reason why most games use quite a lot of ambient lighting at night (after all, ambient lighting is our computer graphics knob for faking this stuff), and why mods that change things to be more "realistic" usually do the opposite. Heck you can see this effect just by going outside with a large flashlight, it's very easy to see that the flashlight illuminates things beyond it's actual cone of light.

 

I wonder if there are any aerial photometric experiments

 

Besides the issues with indirect lighting you also have dynamic range and resolution issues with dcs. With respect to those "blinding lights" DCS is limited by the dynamic range of our monitors. It would be super cool to get real HDR support, however.

 

tl;dr good night lighting, esp in rural areas, is a total nightmare for computer graphics, and particularly for rasterization.

 

 

ah https://doi.org/10.1086/142448 has some interesting data from all the way back in 1919!


Edited by barcharcraz
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  • ED Team

We will start to see lighting improvements with 2.5.6

 

thanks

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