Night flight

[Uriah]

Last night I flew in an online game that was a night situation.  The stars had their proper places (maybe some two bright but most of us are use to what we see from living in a city).  The moon was in a phase.  The lights on the planes were great.   It was fun looking for your comrades and having them flash their lights on so you could find them.  And the search lights...

 

Adding landing lights on the airfield would be cool.

 

Anyway, best looking night flying I have ever seen.

[Finkeren]

IIRC even back in RoF it was posible to use the night sky for navigation if you wanted to.

[Finkeren]

Also a reason why we'll need the Po-2 in BoS at some point.

[AceRevo]

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_map2i6BoET1rgsfwro1_500.gif

[kaboki]

 

Anyway, best looking night flying I have ever seen.

 

Dunno, I think the night in BoS is way too bright.

[J2_Trupobaw]

Dunno, I think the night in BoS is way too bright.

It's WW1, no radios and little in way of navigation, they were historically only flying on very bright nights, cloudless and when moon was full; still in long distence flights they had to follow rivers if they didn't want to get lost.

 

There was once a bug in one of RoF career mode night bomber squadrons after it switched planes and changed profile to daytime; bug made them fly normal daytime missions at night hours, regardless of weather. The nights went dark all right, and night missions with overcast clouds were pure madness, 

Edited September 16, 2014 by Trupobaw

[kaboki]

It's WW1, no radios and little in way of navigation, they were historically only flying on very bright nights, cloudless and when moon was full; still in long distence flights they had to follow rivers if they didn't want to get lost.

 

 

It's WW2, and I belive they had radios and even primitive NDB/VOR systems. Somehow I don't belive they only flew at very bright nights, cloudless and full moon....

[J2_Trupobaw]

Why did I read "RoF"  instead of "BoS" in your post? My bad, that's what I get for posting after 2am because brain is to tired to fly sims   .

BoS nights may be bright because of all that snow reflecting moonlight. Winter nights are very bright at ground level, may be brighter when flying, too? 

[kaboki]

BoS nights may be bright because of all that snow reflecting moonlight. Winter nights are very bright at ground level, may be brighter when flying, too? 

 

Where I live we have winters with snow and even in a cloudless sky with full moon it's darker than in BoS..but I may be wrong though because I live north of the polar circle and the winter nights in Volgograd may be different and have a brighter sky:p

 

But anyway, I agree with the OP though, I love the searchlights and the "athmospere" in BoS at night and the expirience is great though:D, I maybe just nitpicking haha

Edited September 17, 2014 by kaboki

[Feathered_IV]

Loitering over a night target, playing cat and mouse with well designed searchlights and flak is such an engaging experience that I'd welcome the Po-2 in the harassment role. If points were awarded for time-spent over the target, as well as any targets destroyed, it would work very well and help represent the nuisance value that these raids achieved.

[HagarTheHorrible]

I'm sorry but I think a Po 2 would be a complete waste of time. In theory taking on the challenges of the Night Witches would be fun, especially without having the risk, or discomfort, of freezing our nuts off on long flights in open cockpit aircraft in the middle of a Russian winter. The only problem is BoS, or any flight sim for that matter, is nowhere near subtle enough to provide an engaging experience that would in anyway recreate the art of finding and attacking a target, in the dark, or the cat and mouse nature of these nocturnal dramas.

[Feathered_IV]

Just trying to think outside the leaden box. Sorry.

[39bn_pavig]

Dunno, I think the night in BoS is way too bright.

 

It is unfortunately impossible to reproduce night exactly in a game due to the reduced dynamic range of monitors as compared to the human eye. This is the same reason we very rarely see convincing night photography. The most "realistic" we can hope for is for the dynamic range to be extended to bring barely visible detail into the range which can be displayed on a monitor.

 

Even so, we are talking about miniscule ammounts of light compared to daytime lighting, as evidenced by the difficulty of tuning some digital monitors to correctly display nighttime lighting. Plenty of folk in the forums will have found that if their system and driver color calibration and gamma is out, it will produce color banding due to mathematical errors showing that not enough bits are being used in the system to represent lighting constrained by a very narrow band of values. Any non-linearity in the way the system deals with color at these low values will produce rounding errors and thus color banding at night.

 

" sRGB is by far the most commonly used RGB color space, particularly in consumer grade digital cameras, HD video cameras, and computer monitors. HDTVs use a similar space, commonly called Rec. 709, sharing the sRGB primaries. The sRGB space is considered adequate for most consumer applications. ... However, sRGB's limited gamut leaves out many highly saturated colors that can be produced by printers or in film, and thus is not ideal for some high quality applications." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space 

 

Unfortunately our consumer technology (and even much pro tech) is not designed to optimize color fidelity at the edges of perception, and instead designed to optimize average daylight viewing conditions. Given these limitations I think BoS does a good job of reproducing an extreme variation in light value, from the white on white of daytime snow operations to the pitch dark of nighttime ops. That this is achieved with minimal artifacts (and thanks BoS team for the built in gamma control by the way) is really quite an achievement. The closer it gets to absolute realism in these extreme lighting conditions, the more it is likely to bump up against limitations in consumer display technology.

 

This is not just an issue for BoS, but for every game which seeks to represent night realistically without artificially introducing noise to the color values. Banding can also be seen in Arma3 night missions for example, but not in Thief - which uses artificial processing to produce the "impression" of night without physically correct lighting fidelity. I think BoS strikes a very good balance here.

[andyw248]

Well, try x-plane (there's a free demo) and find out how dark the night can be in a sim...

[39bn_pavig]

Well, try x-plane (there's a free demo) and find out how dark the night can be in a sim...

 

Point taken about XPlane, I can hardly see a thing in this pitch dark.  

[kaboki]

Now that is how the night should look like:D

[39bn_pavig]

The problem with BoS simulating night like xplane above is that Xplane only works due to the presence of electric lighting. This is not appropriate for the historical wartime setting of BoS. Also if you look at the areas above which are not lit by electric lighting they contain no detail whatsoever. This is inapropriate for how the human eye would see in a situation which is in reality (via ambient lighting) quite a well lit nighttime panorama. Though it looks fine as a photograph, that is with the limitations of photography in mind. Most photographic and reproductive equipment has about 7 or 8 stops of dynamic range, whereas the human eye has 12 to 14. There is no way a sim can reproduce what the human eye sees given current technology, so we have to rely on an artistic impression on behalf of the sim makers. 

 

It makes perfect sense I think when we have a moon that we should see a snowy landscape quite well at night, but even with the moon out it is incredibly hard to spot other planes. I think this is consistent with the limitations of night sight in a poorly lit environment which is mostly white below and black above. 

[LLv34_Flanker]

S!

 

 I think a German nightfighter pilot nailed nocturnal combat pretty well, was it Peter Spoden, saying: Sit in a dark room and try to catch a fly.

[Sparrer]

S!

In another thread i complained about this very bright night and a dude that made military operation on snow said the bos night is accurate.

I really don't know how the snow night must be  (is about 30ºC over here by winter lol), certainly if wasn't in snow landscape i would say this bos night is incorrect .

 But really seems way too bright night now, i would like to hear some snow pilots opinion

[39bn_pavig]

I have got better colour from going to windows - color calibration, and setting my monitor to a default generic srgb profile. 

 

The brightness at night does seem to be using high dynamic range lighting, but the less-awful contrast compression algorithm rather than the often hideous local tonemapping algorithm. (see the example image on the left in this article). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dynamic-range_imaging 

[Sparrer]

S!

 

 

wow, it's complicated.......i thought it was just a scroll bar setting:  Bright night....to....dark night  

[PA-Sniv]

In Bos, if you look carefully, you can notice stars do shine! This adds to the feeling of "being there"!

[kaboki]

S!

 

In another thread i complained about this very bright night and a dude that made military operation on snow said the bos night is accurate.

 

I really don't know how the snow night must be  (is about 30ºC over here by winter lol), certainly if wasn't in snow landscape i would say this bos night is incorrect .

 

 

But I know how winter nights look like because I live north of the arctic circle and it's way darker than in BoS, but the winter nights in Volgorad may look different though... I just find it weird that I can read the instruments without any ilumination, the cockpit is bright as daylight, making the lights unnecesary for anything than just nice visuals...

Edited September 19, 2014 by kaboki

[Finkeren]

Yeah, it's important to keep in mind, that Stalingrad is pretty far south (around the same latitude as Venice)

 

That being said, the middle of the night should still be pretty damn dark, though the snow will do something to enhance contrast and will reflect a certain amount of Moonlight. Still I think that BoS night could be darker.

[oneeyeddog]

Where I live, on a clear moonlit nite it is very bright out , especially when the ground is blanketed in snow (144" + last year). So I think the night mission with the sparse cloud cover was pretty accurate. However, I know from my RoF experience that folks with different monitors and /or video cards would perceive the darkness in very different ways, even when adjusting their monitor settings to try to compensate.

[FuriousMeow]

Snow reflects a lot of light back - depending on its freshness it can reflect up to 85% of light back.

[39bn_pavig]

One of the reasons you can read the instruments at night is because they are radioactive.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioluminescence

[Finkeren]

Yep. The radium/phospherous paint was nasty stuff to work with but posed no significant risk to the pilot.

[kaboki]

One of the reasons you can read the instruments at night is because they are radioactive.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioluminescence

 

Yeah maybe one of the reasons, the other is that it's to bright, I can see everything in the cockpit just as good as daylight.  I see everything that is not even illumunated by that radioactive stuff. I also tried setting up a flight with full overcast at night, and it's just way to bright.

(the moon seem to lit everything up even in overcast).

Edited September 19, 2014 by kaboki

[Finkeren]

No it's not, I can see everything in the cockpit just as good as daylight. I don't even see that radioactive shit you are talking about:p

Not sure if you're joking, but he's talking about the radioluminescent paint that makes the iron sight and dials glow phospherous green in the dark.

Edited September 19, 2014 by Finkeren

[kaboki]

Not sure if you're joking, but he's talking about the radioluminescent paint that makes the iron sight and dials glow phospherous green in the dark.

 

I wasn't:p, but then I had to check it out because it's so bright at night that I hadn't even noticed the radioactive stuff:D, so that's why I changed my post after discovering that indeed he's right:p