beyond 4.13

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Tolwyn

One of my long-standing complaints is the way DT has "made things darker" is too dark.

For many missions, I think you're right.

On the other hand, us folks living in areas of significant light pollution forget just how dark the night can be.

Realistically, if you're flying at midnight, in January, under a thick overcast, on a moonless night, over the blacked out skies of London, Berlin, Moscow or Helsinki, the sky is going to be pitch black.

In the summer, the night will look a bit more like the current IL2 default.

Under a full moon on a clear night during the summer, there should be a bit more light than IL2 currently allows.

IL2's night sky graphic could also be more realistic - with far more stars in the sky (even if they're not realistically modeled). Under really dark, moonless skies, clouds above you should appear as black silhouettes, and there should be enough visible stars that you should be able to detect nearby aircraft above you because they're silhouetted against the stars.

As to human vision, IL2 doesn't model the effects of dazzling and loss of night vision which occur when someone is exposed to very bright lights at night. Furthermore, it doesn't realistically model the loss of color vision that humans experience at night (we lose more of our ability to see colors at bottom of the color scale - red, yellow and orange), and our loss of ability to track moving objects in dim light.

IL2 also doesn't model the effects of high altitude and injury on night vision acuity. The eye is an oxygen-hungry organ, and when oxygen is in short supply, it's one of the first organs to be shut down. Even mild hypoxia can play hell with your night vision.

The simplest method of modeling the night sky might be to give mission builders or players some control over how dark the world is, and how much sunlight appears over the horizon.