Night time Appearance

Steam seems to do screen captures in 8 bit/256 colour. The original quality is smoother. This is JFK 31L. The inside image is good as the ambient cockpit and instrument group lighting is adjustable. Outside aeroplane lights switches also work.
The outside artifical lighting gives runway edge lights and faintly illuminated 3d buildings with lit windows. There is no night lighting menu and streets, roads and taxiways are dark.

It is a bit lighter than these two images suggest, it is also of quite low contrast.
There was a consensus in the mobile forum a while back which favoured that look. The idea was that the eye adapted perfectly to night darkness, I've done a lot of night flying and the view outside was always pitch black in rural areas, must be because of the instrument lights and of any occasional chart or plan checks preventing perfect dark adaptation in the eye.
Built up areas can have a diffused illumination from street and industrial lights reflecting off cloud or mist/fog.
With the adjustable cockpit and instrument lighting in PC FS2 it might be possible to adjust the graphics card or monitor settings to have a prefered environmental darkness and still have very good instrument visibility.

Quote from Overloaded

It is a bit lighter than these two images suggest, it is also of quite low contrast.
There was a consensus in the mobile forum a while back which favoured that look. The idea was that the eye adapted perfectly to night darkness, I've done a lot of night flying and the view outside was always pitch black in rural areas, must be because of the instrument lights and of any occasional chart or plan checks preventing perfect dark adaptation in the eye.
Built up areas can have a diffused illumination from street and industrial lights reflecting off cloud or mist/fog.
With the adjustable cockpit and instrument lighting in PC FS2 it might be possible to adjust the graphics card or monitor settings to have a prefered environmental darkness and still have very good instrument visibility.

My experience of night VFR flight is that you dim all internal lights as far as possible until you hardly can see the needles, in order to maximise outer vision.
In any case everything that isn't lighted is pitch dark : fields, lakes, hills, forests, mountains, most houses, roofs, street without public lightning or traffic.

Even lighted windows are hardly to be seen. What you see in first position is crowded highways and street lights.
There's unfortunately no night in either FSX/P3D or AeroflyFS 2.

The only current simulator featuring a realistic night is XPLANE 10. Try the default Seattle scenery at night, it's amazingly accurate.
It's actually the only point IMO where XPlane is better than other sims...

Cheers
Antoine

I agree that FS2 needs photoreal night textures with simulated street lighting (or as XPLANE does, light points), but I hope you are flying in downtown DLC New York City at night - at least the buildings themselves look very nice. For FS2, I would really like the airports to have some taxiway lighting and the static aircraft to have their tail logos lit + my aircraft to have the taxi and landing light cones available - coming soon?

Well NYC at night is probably where the DLC gives the poorest results IMO. There's nothing but buildings. It's all dead...

The XPLANE night lightning is excellent because ground textures are actually dimmed down to black, and only lighted by Street lights. Buildings also get totally black except where specifically lighted. Cars have realistic lights. Street lights have a beautiful haze cone.
The default C172 gets totally dark like in real life, you can dim instrument lights in a very realistic way, the taxi/landing light are pretty accurate, closer to the torch lamp than the BMW Xenon headlights...

I don't like XPlane that much, but I immediately felt that specific Night VFR touch trying the stock Cessna with the default Seattle night situation. Something which is unfortunately impossible with either FSX/P3D or AeroflyFS 2, because there is only a dim light mode instead of night.

Cheers
Antoine