Night Lights and Atmo X

Ever since I first started flying simulators in 1998, which later led me to real aviation in 2004, I wondered why nobody could create realistic night lights. They were either too dim or too bright, like big blobs, with unrealistically lit areas and huge lamps. There was also no color variety. What we have now in other sims (like MSFS) at best looks like how it appears on camera, but anyone who flies in the real world knows that night lights look different.

I accumulated experience with night flying, and two months ago, I dedicated over 12 hours to night flying to create a realistic product. We flew over big cities like Miami and Houston, smaller cities, and countryside areas. While filming for the product, I realized why MSFS and the majority of products for X-Plane have lights that look like they do—they replicate what they see on a phone camera, which is ten times brighter than what your real eye perceives.

I've changed the camera settings to reflect how the human eye actually sees the lights. The human eye processes information in a complex way, adjusting to darkness so that bright lights appear small, sharp, and needle-like at the source. 

We have also implemented the actual RGB colors of real streetlights, respecting how the human eye perceives them and how the game translates them to the screen.

So, the variety of light types and their true RGB values are the same as what you see outside.

Now let's talk a bit about features.

It's 2024, and sodium vapor airport lights are now rare. In the original XP12, and even since XP11, they kept using these outdated lights. We've updated them to powerful metal halide lights. We have also changed the color and brightness of taxi lights, green and blue, proper color, proper brightness, proper spill.

Basically we have changed all of the airport lights, and how many times I've seen this picture in real world, makes me smile and remember,

We have adjusted the correct Rayleigh scattering to achieve a realistic evening blue and deep daytime blue in the far distance. The light luminosity is also fine-tuned according to daytime and nighttime conditions.

We have also implemented smooth transition between short and long distance, if you were flying in XP, you know this dreaded problem, as well as far cities lights and proper luminocity

The lights are also VR compatible, making them the best choice for VR. As you know, I sometimes enjoy flying with a VR headset. The sunsets and sunrises are now 100% realistic, thanks to 20 years of flying experience and careful consideration of factors like proper Mie scattering and Rayleigh scattering.