Correct Shading & llumination for Night Missions

[101st Lonestar AUT]

Is there any schedule for a correct shading and illumination model for night missions planned?

I mean DCS does not look very well at night:
- the 3D-Model of for example an F-16 does not reflect any external light source (wether specular nor diffuse, its just ambient -  feels like absorbing any light)
- light sources at airports are no light sources in most cases. Seems they are coloured objects or slt...
- night flying does not feel right for me, it is missing a lot of light sources and simply too dark on Airports

Is there any kind of Phong Shading included in the graphic engine?
And do you use different types of light sources? (Directional Light, Point Light, Spotlight...)

 

I think with just a view small corrections we could have a much better experience.
 

BR

[draconus]

All lights from light poles are just textures due to performance problems. You can add some moon light to improve your lighting "feeling" - it also adds shadows. They have added additional night shadows only for Supercarrier deck objects recently.

Other than that I'd like to see more glow from the cities.

[cfrag]

Night lighting is indeed lacking in many respects. This is because in daylight, the sun's brightness is so overwhelming that we usually don't mind the missing minor light effects. 

At night, close to the ground, that's a different story, and especially for helo, uh, drivers a big concern. We instinctively use the minor reflections and shadows in the ground to gauge our height and judge distances, and since they aren't there, have a really difficult time flying at night.

I suspect that one of the reasons this is happening is because, computationally, in the classic painter algorithm employed by most graphics engines, light sources are *expensive*, with the effort to calculate a texel's color in a scene usually rising exponentially (or at least along a very steep line) with the number of light sources (except perhaps for ambient light). That's why we see the 'painted on' lighting effects for roads and airfields. The look good enough from a few hundred feet up. For Helos, a few hundred feet up is synonymous with 'a few hundred feet too high'. 

Here's to hoping that future GPU power and newer algorithms give us more light sources and jaw-dropping night spectacles in the future.

Edited July 29, 2022 by cfrag

[draconus]

I hope they at least apply recently added "second shadows" for airports now, which is optional and shouldn't "cost" much.

[101st Lonestar AUT]

Do you think there is any chance for those improvements in context with the new Vulcan API?
(did anyone hear some rumors about correct shading and better performance there?)

[Tippis]

Given that the engine can already handle placeable (of sorts) dynamic lights — illumination flares being the most immediate example — it seems like a fairly simple middle way of doing it is to add exactly that: a placeable dynamic light. Even with the limitations of this lighting, eg. lack of shadow casting and only some things properly receiving and being lit up by that light, it would let mission makers decorate their low-light missions to a much higher degree while also being in control over the performance hit (which they have to consider anyway as they add units and scripts and the like).

It would allow for something as simple and obvious as static fire effects actually lighting up their surrounding at night, while at the same time not having any performance impact at day or making airports seem a bit more alive when in use without having to have ever airport light on the entire map suddenly become a potential drain.