Visibility range of aircraft external lights

[twistking]

With DCS lighting tech getting more sophisticated each year, this longstanding issue is getting ridiculous.
I made my first post about it 10 years ago. Since then there have been dozens of posts, a lot of them in the bug section, because people rightfully felt that the current implementation is just "broken"...
Since it's still not fixed i'll treat it as a "missing feature" and -again- do a wishlist post instead...

Proper visibility for nav lights and beacons is way more important than sophisticatedly computed penumbrae while basic sprite lights don't even come with a performance hit: Flight sims in the 2000s could already render nav lights and beacons to realistic distances. It's just sprites!
Tactical night flying is borderline impossible without modern jets' HMCS and buddy tracks.

• Aircaft beacon lights and landing lights should be visible at 25 - 50km
• Nav lights (green/red) should be visible (and distinguishable) several kilometers at least.
• Brightness settings should be respected, so that dimmed lights are less visible (obviously).
• Tanker aircraft should be lit realistically during AAR
• Weather and atmospheric properties would ideally be taken into account, however since opting to use external lights generally comes with the explicit intention to actually be seen, this is not even that important and could be crudely approximated
• There should be AI logic and ME options to control lights on AI units.
• Light status should be taken into account for AI spotting capabilities

All this does not require new lighting tech or complex retooling. The engine can already render sprites at sufficient distances and do so without a hit on performance.
With the upcoming PTO and CW Germany those improvements are needed even more. How would you even do a rejoin at night without all the modern gizmos if your external lights cannot be seen after a few hundred feet?

If you like the proposed improvements, please rate this thread 5 stars:

Thanks!

[Rolln]

+1

[Miglenon3]

+1

[Fitzcarraldo]

+1

[Rolln]

Also would like to add that when in VR, anything greater than 1.5nm away, they glow super bright and big like UFO lights or something.

[Cgjunk2]

 

On 2/24/2025 at 2:20 PM, Rolln said:

Also would like to add that when in VR, anything greater than 1.5nm away, they glow super bright and big like UFO lights or something.

These excessive light orb blooms have been a problem forever.   However, It does not seem to be an impossible problems to solve, because the F18 had huge light orb blooms for years until they fixed them about a year or two ago.   The carrier landing approach lights also had excessive light bloom which made the meatball unreadable. I think they made the IFOLS overlay to address the fact that the light orbs made reading the lights impossible.   Regardless, they fixed the carrier lights for a short time and they became much more realistic, and completely usable.  Unfortunately, they broke the IFOLS lighting again, so it's back to being a completely unreadable bloomy orbs that obscure the landing area once you're initially turning into the groove.   

The problem with the light-orb bloom effect is that the size of the orb remains the same absolute size on the screen, regardless of how far away you are from the light source...it does not scale down relative to the apparent size of plane/ship.   Currently the worst offender is the CH-47.  When you are 7 or 8 miles away, the red flashing beacon lights look light a 2000lb GBU flash-bang grenade.  The nav lights create a orb/bloom capable of hiding multiple Ch-47s behind it.  I'm not saying that the fix should be to properly scale the hazy light-orb with distance...the real answer is to get rid of the light-orb bloom completely.   It's not realistic for most atmospheric conditions, and even when the human eye would see a hazy light blooming around a nav light (for example in foggy conditions), their luminosity would be attenuated by the the fog as distance increases. As far as blooms around the IFOLS lighting, perhaps if the ship is in a marine fog layer, maybe I could imagine the light blooming as badly as they do right now in clear atmospheric conditions in-game. But I don't think that's enough of a reason to keep the light bloom effect, when it makes absolutely everything else very unrealistic.  

It's horrible.  Is this only a problem with VR?  

[Cgjunk2]

I'm not sure if this would make the developers better understand what the light orb/bloom problem is, but attached is a perfect example of how unrealistic it shows up in game.  While this screenshot is of the VR mirror from my flat screen, the blooms actually looks a bit bigger in VR since the pixels are physically closer to your eye.  But by showing what it shows up in flat screen, it should demonstrate that this is not a problem that only exists in VR (as some have mentioned in other threads on this topic).     

I included a zoomed in version that show these lights are coming from the island lighting on the carrier.  I'm not sure how bright these are in real life, but even if they are extremely bright marker lights, luminosity should be rendered via brightness of the pixels.  Right now I'm starting to wonder if maybe devs chose to express luminosity in clear atmosphere via the size of blooms.  This isn't what happens in real life.  Somebody perceiving a distant small bright light (in clear weather) would see a bright point source, not a huge bloom.   The only way you would perceive a bloom is if you had certain eye conditions, like if you have cataracts or extreme amounts of astigmatism.   Or if the light was so extremely bright that it lit up the inside of your eyeball and you start to see the light reflecting off of the inside walls of your eyes.   That only happens looking at the sun or if somebody shines a flashlight directly into your eye at close range.  

 

[Exorcet]

Light visibility is indeed very important and the abrupt lack of rendering that can happen at certain distances is problematic for a number of reasons. I absolutely support more realistic lighting.

[twistking]

Quick reminder that "that other modern combat sim" renders ext aircraft light out to 40 miles or so. (At least that's what I've read - my aging pc cannot properly run it).

ED, please fix!

[Cgjunk2]

The new Mig 29A unfortunately has this problem.  Tiny nav lights and position lights are rendering as very bright and very large light orbs that completely occlude the aircraft once you’re a mile away.   It’s just goofy looking.   

I don’t think that this a problem with the base graphics engine of DCS, because other nav lights on some other planes don’t have this problem. 

I have heard that some people can perceive “point-source” light as bloomed, smeared, or haloed if they have significant astigmatism.   Could this be a possible reason why some planes or light sources are modeled with excessive blooms, and others without?   

[twistking]

2 minutes ago, Cgjunk2 said:

The new Mig 29A unfortunately has this problem.  Tiny nav lights and position lights are rendering as very bright and very large light orbs that completely occlude the aircraft once you’re a mile away.   It’s just goofy looking.   

I don’t think that this a problem with the base graphics engine of DCS, because other nav lights on some other planes don’t have this problem. 

I have heard that some people can perceive “point-source” light as bloomed, smeared, or haloed if they have significant astigmatism.   Could this be a possible reason why some planes or light sources are modeled with excessive blooms, and others without?   

No, adding bloom to point light sources is the industry standard to show brightness on contrast limited displays. And you don't need bad eyesight to perceive this in the real world too: The sun is actually a rather small dot in the sky.
So some "fake" blooming is needed in graphics to give a realistic impression of a point light source. The issue with DCS is, that aircraft nav lights are just badly done. That's all unfortunately.
It's not just the weird bloom (that scales incorrectly with distance), it's also the lack of rendering distance. In reality the lights should be visible over 50km or so. I would be happy with half the distance already... currently lights from aircraft vanish after few hundreds of meters. It looks unrealistic, but most importantly it makes night flying unrealistically difficult and frustrating.

[Cgjunk2]

19 minutes ago, twistking said:

No, adding bloom to point light sources is the industry standard to show brightness on contrast limited displays. And you don't need bad eyesight to perceive this in the real world too: The sun is actually a rather small dot in the sky.
So some "fake" blooming is needed in graphics to give a realistic impression of a point light source. The issue with DCS is, that aircraft nav lights are just badly done. That's all unfortunately.
It's not just the weird bloom (that scales incorrectly with distance), it's also the lack of rendering distance. In reality the lights should be visible over 50km or so. I would be happy with half the distance already... currently lights from aircraft vanish after few hundreds of meters. It looks unrealistic, but most importantly it makes night flying unrealistically difficult and frustrating.

Yes, I previously made similar comments on the conditions you would see perceive blooming in real life.  A normal flashlight would bloom in your vision if pointed at your eyes from 3 feet away, but would not from 100 feet away.   Unless it was a very focused/directional flashlight beam.   A laser being the most extreme example of focused light, it can result in a blooming perception from miles away if it happens to hit your eye directly.  
 

Nav lights are not really all that directional or focused by design.  I don’t think I’ve ever been able to perceive distinct nav lights on airliners flying at cruise altitude in clear atmospheric conditions (I’d guess that would be 7 to 15 miles away depending on my viewing angle from the ground).  But I bet I could make them out under the right viewing conditions.  You’ve given me a project for tonight!    Strobe lights I’ve noticed, and I think also the white position lights on the tail.  
 

I agree, a slight amount of dim blooming, with an appropriately sized halo that matches with distance, would be a reasonable way to simulate light intensity.  But I don’t think DCS is modeling it this badly because it’s an industry standard, because they are not applying it to all airplanes or light sources, nor are they applying it consistently across builds to the same lights (looking at you supercarrier IFOLS)

Edited 9 hours ago by Cgjunk2

[twistking]

29 minutes ago, Cgjunk2 said:

Yes, I previously made similar comments on the conditions you would see perceive blooming in real life.  A normal flashlight would bloom in your vision if pointed at your eyes from 3 feet away, but would not from 100 feet away.   Unless it was a very focused/directional flashlight beam.   A laser being the most extreme example of focused light, it can result in a blooming perception from miles away if it happens to hit your eye directly.  
 

Nav lights are not really all that directional or focused by design.  I don’t think I’ve ever been able to perceive distinct nav lights on airliners flying at cruise altitude in clear atmospheric conditions (I’d guess that would be 7 to 15 miles away depending on my viewing angle from the ground).  But I bet I could make them out under the right viewing conditions.  You’ve given me a project for tonight!    Strobe lights I’ve noticed, and I think also the white position lights on the tail.  
 

I agree, a slight amount of dim blooming, with an appropriately sized halo that matches with distance, would be a reasonable way to simulate light intensity.  But I don’t think DCS is modeling it this badly because it’s an industry standard, because they are not applying it to all airplanes or light sources, nor are they applying it consistently across builds to the same lights (looking at you supercarrier IFOLS)

I don't want to derail that thread, but in theory every light source gives you blooming. It should be directly proportional to perceived size of the source and perceived brightness of the source (and the condition of your cornea etc). Atmospheric conditions can of course further add to this.
Even high quality photographic lenses struggle to render point light sources at their geometrically correct size. Your eye is optically inferior by a long shot.

The issue in DCS is obvious. The implementation is just done without care. It's inconsistent between aircraft and even on aircraft where it's less bad it still scales weirdly and vanishes too early.
Other light sources (city lights, the ships on PG maps, airport lights) look beautiful, have nice bloom, scale well and have acceptable visibility range - technically still too short, but "good enough" for gameplay purposes in most cases.

Edited 9 hours ago by twistking