I do like the night lighting FSDreamTeam has produced, because it is a first. But in my honest opinion, we still haven't gotten to the point where night lighting looks realistic enough.
It's always wrong to post night time pictures to show how a scenery should look like. This because, quite simply, night photos are always invariably wrong, because they don't represent what your EYE sees, they represent how the camera sensor records light, depending on the exposure/white balance settings, which are never correct if the picture was taken in automatic mode, and anyway almost impossible to get right setting them manually, because the digital sensors simply don't have enough dynamic to capture the big difference between dark areas and light sources. A camera exposure usually average giving preference to the center of the image, which means the dark areas are usually too bright, and the light sources are burned out of scale. And of course, the white balance of a night shot it's really a guess, because if the picture was taken with automatic white balancing, the camera will try to make the most dominating light color to be more neutral.
So, one should be very careful to use real pictures as a comparison, because a scenery should match what the human eye sees, not what a digital camera renders. But of course, since most of the users are not aware of how much a digital picture can be misleading, I guess that trying to match a photo instead of real like *could* be a sensible marketing choice, since most of the people will revert to comparisons with photos anyway.
We need a variety of different light colors to be produced, and they must actually be light sources to bounce off of objects. In addition, the light poles look like they are raining and they look too large when zooming out.
Having different light colors it's easy enough, and they ARE "light sources that bounce off of objects" already, the scenery it's already like this.
However, they can't bounce on ALL and EVERY object, they behave absolutely and utterly realistically on the main buildings, because they are all part of the same geometry+textures but, for example, it's not possible to have continuity with the jetways BOTH because the jetways are very few different objects repeated multiple times AND because they move!
Realistic light like this is not possible with animated objects, because the FSX engine doesn't really allow what would be *hundreds* of different light sources in realtime. We can have (and we DO have) hundreds or even thousands of light sources, but only at the static level, because they are not inside FSX, they are placed when rendering the textures.
Same as jetways, we can't have the light sources bouncing on all small detail objects like trees, for the same reason they live in a different texture space which is optimized for their small size. IF we would like to maintain the same resolution for all objects, and allow the whole coherent lighting, the texture memory usage would go up dramatically, because every single object should have its own texture space, since it might get slightly different lighting.
Instead, we usually save a lot of memory by, for example, reusing the same texture for an object (like a tree, a pole, a parked car) that is repeated a lot in the scenery.
So, the scenery HAS realistic lighting which bounce of objects, but not on ALL objects, those that are optimized to be repeated many times and the animated ones are not getting this lighting. But they have manually made night textures, as with any other scenery we and everyone else made so far.
IF we ran under a different graphic engine, we could have way better realtime lightning, but FSX is not really made for this.
OF COURSE, if the scenery wasn't KLAX or another big hub but, instead, something much smaller, we might at least get a fully coherent lighting for all objects (consuming the same or aven more the amount of texture memory of KLAX, on a small GA field), but it just can't be done for such a large airport.
