Night Lighting

I'm probably late to the party here, but... KUDOS to Matt and the team on the night lighting. It is looking much improved!

Thanks for ALL your hard work!

Yes indeed fantastic improvement one of the biggest problems solved! Great hope for the future thanks devs!

loving flying at night

I definitely noticed some promising improvements on the PG map. Has that translated to NTTR yet? Last I checked NTTR a few weeks ago you still couldn't see city lights unless directly overhead at low-ish altitude. The city of Vegas itself was actually darker than the surrounding terrain.

i flew the Mirage on NTTR yesterday ...

time 0:00am ...

and i think the improvements of night lightning on NTTR are not available ...

compared to PG :music_whistling:

Still really poor for me in VR maybe just a limit of the headset though.

VR or not, I guess Caucasus and NTTR could use some serious improvements:

(Tbilisi)

I don't mind poor lighting on the ground but I can't even see the navigation and strobe lights from my wingmen.

The light halos still use the billboard rendering technique and I think that might be a serious limiting factor with the new PBR integration.

It's a shame because the overall lighting is just gorgeous. EDGE just fail at city lights and navigation lights.

Related question: is Vegas ever going to get, y'know, Vegas lighting? Pretty hard to feel like you're really flying anywhere near the brightest city on Earth when it isn't.

I know this is a pretty fringe thing but hey, it wasn't my call to make a Nevada map!

They should be the same, but also its dependant on the moon phase as well.

yes ... i have tested that ...

with full (little :)) moon the overall night is brighter, but Las Vegas itself seems too dark ...

and without the moon LasVegas seems even darker ...

what i have to test is

the taxiways @ Groom i.e.

i can't find the taxiways under dark conditions

Related question: is Vegas ever going to get, y'know, Vegas lighting? Pretty hard to feel like you're really flying anywhere near the brightest city on Earth when it isn't.

 

I know this is a pretty fringe thing but hey, it wasn't my call to make a Nevada map!

I completely agree. :thumbup: Also the runway lights are too dark. :(

I'm surprised this topic does not get more traction from the players. Are we such a small part of the community to fly by night ? :noexpression:

I'm surprised this topic does not get more traction from the players. Are we such a small part of the community to fly by night ? :noexpression:

no, there has been much complains and debate about night lighting, but since ED stated multiple times that night lighting is still WIP, people calmed down a little bit.

i don't yet own the Persian Gulf map, so i can't say, if night lighting is already improved much over there, but at least nevada (and especially las vegas!) is still not "good enough" i would say...

It's been a constant issue ever since 2.0 introduced deferred shading, and that was, what? A year and a half ago? Since then, all lights have been pretty much permanently broken in some way or another — failing pretty much completely to light up the world has been the most consistent of those ways.

It's been so long that people don't complain any more because lights not working at night is the norm. It would be really neat if flares and illumination bombs and taxiways and whathaveyou actually made it easier to see, but we've gone from v2.0 to v2.5.2 and it still hasn't been addressed so no-one even bothers any more.

Lighting has received a lot of love since 2.0 first dropped, especially with the Persian Gulf map bringing a lot of improvements.

Too bad that it's the one that needs it the least, compared to the universally available, ubiquitous, and not-at-all-functioning Caucasus (and even NTTR) map(s). It doesn't really help that some parts work for a very rare early-access module with no content attached when there's all this commonlplace release content that remains broken.

At least before, you could choose to use the broken deferred rendering or not — now you don't even have a choice.

Well, for one, the lighting remains pathetically weak — just like before.

I would expect groom lake to be lit up by something more incandescent than a dynamo-driven bike light, and taxi lights to actually be bright rather than just a couple of medium-blue pixels.

Yes, those buildings look nice but that doesn't change the fact that the lighting in almost every form remains broken: that the world is not properly illuminated by anything; that lit-up cities are dark; that search lights, flares, and illumination bombs are pretty much useless; that landing lights do not help with landing; that fires do not so much glow as “stick out against the black like fullbright Doom 2 textures”; that many cockpit lights are darker when “illuminated” than when turned off; etc etc etc.

I'm sure there have been improvements, but that is still very very very far from it actually working properly — it hasn't done that since before deferred lighting was a thing, and it would be nice if it came back before we hit the two-year mark.

e: For illustration – a hotel lit up by 5 fires; the same hotel also lit up by an illumination bomb; the same hotel lit up with a double dose of search lights from 10m away.

It’s kind of weird at NTTR for me. I made a small intercept mission a few days ago at 00:30 and flew directly over Las Vegas. The city was almost impossible to see, the lightning was extremely faint.

Static fires from the ME don't give off light, its a performance issue, and really nothing to do with the topic of night lighting.

Just because it doesn't work doesn't mean it has nothing to do with the topic. Quite the opposite. Stuff not being lit up by fire is a pretty good example of why the lighting is silly, especially since we know it can be done.

I have nothing against deferred shading — I have something against it having broken how lights work, and it remaining in that state for a very long time now. It's the non-functional lighting that is the problem, and the process is just the cause of it. We know what the root cause is, and it has been the root cause for a looooong time — so long that people have stopped bothering and just gave up on asking to make it work. If things that used to work have suddenly become performance issues, then that's a a pretty big warning sign, but that's for another topic.

My sim is set up without mods and just using the highest setting. This results in night lighting being so close to non-functional as to make no difference. At the end of the day the problem is clear as day (ironically enough): the lighting is broken. Night combat suffers immensely because of it, and entire sets of equipment (and aircraft) are rendered useless because of it. “Improvements” do not make it any less broken, nor do they suddenly make the equipment useful again. Trying to construe any of this as being about me or some fanciful and baseless assumption about my preferences is just silly.

It does not work. It is broken. It's as simple as that.

Until it works, “improvements” are meaningless because it still does not work, and it just becomes a rather feeble excuse that doesn't actually explain or resolve any of the myriad of problems that still exist.

Everyone should try to give some constructive feedback to prevent this topic being closed. NineLine gave some indications about what he's expecting : settings, game moded or not, screenshots.

I suggest that everybody experiencing lightning issues should post screenshots of the exact same location, same date and time. Let's define this exact location :

• Set the date to 10th of July 2006 (full moon)
  
• View from your cockpit
  
• 5nm from Nellis AFB
  
• Aligned with runway 21R
  
• From 10.000 feet
  

Here's my settings and screenshot :

• Textures : High
  
• Terrain Textures : High
  
• Civ. Traffic : Medium
  
• Water : High
  
• Visib Range : Extreme
  
• Heat blur : Low
  
• Shadows : Flat
  
• Resolution : 3440x1440
  
• Monitors : 1 screen
  
• Res. of Cockpit Displays : 1024
  
• MSAA : Off
  
• Depth of Field : Off
  
• Lens Effects : Dust + Flare
  
• SSAA : Off
  
• Clutter/Grass : 1500
  
• Trees Visibility 100%
  
• Preload radius : 100.000
  
• Chimney Smoke Density : 4
  
• Gamma : 1.8
  
• Anisotropic Filtering : Off
  
• Terrain Object Shadows : Flat
  
• Cockpit Global Illumination : On
  
• Raindrops : On
  

Mod(s) installed :

• Tacview
  

Look for the red circle, this is Nellis AFB at 5nm. Vegas is not even visible. Better viewed at full resolution.

Nineline,

Have you ever been to Las Vegas?

Have you ever flown into or out of, Las Vegas at night?

Everyone that has flown into and has been to Las Vegas knows the light pollution from the city is massive at night.

Nineline's example to compare at Full Moon