The night scene is not displaying properly

[=ILS=_Abu_27]

Actually, my game has been experiencing intermittent abnormalities since day one, but I assumed everyone would encounter this issue and it would be fixed in subsequent updates, so I didn't mention it. However, after two updates, my nighttime scenes are still like this. I'm just wondering if it's just my screen that looks like this? In the nighttime scenes, the VR image seems to be overexposed, with large blocks of colors and very abrupt transitions, resembling a simple watercolor painting effect. I would like to ask for advice on how to solve this issue?

In addition, the effect looks even worse in VR, with even more bizarre colors

[Valis]

It's not just you - I was also thinking it was a early access glitch so I didn't mention it.

[Husar]

This effect is know as color banding, it not present in 2D but in VR. 

[Jade_Monkey]

Yeah, it's pretty bad in VR. It's too bad because I can tell there is a lot of potential for night missions, especially with the lit runways, the towns, the chute flares, etc. 

Despite the distortion, you can tell it's going to be gorgeous once it's fixed.

[YoYo]

Reported many time and not only by me:

The problem likely lies in the fact that the lighting effects aren't implemented at all at night. It's not even night, just an oily, gasoline-like tar in the sky and on the ground. Nighttime lighting will likely be added in the future (4.08?). In VR, external lighting is also generated differently for the right and left eye, so there's still a lot of work to be done here.

[Aapje]

On 7/27/2026 at 8:40 AM, Husar said:

This effect is know as color banding, it not present in 2D but in VR. 

The same issue existed for GB and C6_lefuneste made a mod for it that improved the issue. Perhaps the devs can look into to building something like that into the game as a graphics option once they fix the night lighting and such.

[YoYo]

49 minutes ago, Aapje said:

The same issue existed for GB and C6_lefuneste made a mod for it that improved the issue. Perhaps the devs can look into to building something like that into the game as a graphics option once they fix the night lighting and such.

Sorry, but I disagree. The default IL-2 GB already looked much better. Here's an example directly from the campaign I flew; there was no problem. Of course, it still looks worse at night than in MSFS or DCS, but it's not as bad as the IL-2 Korea.

btw. screenshots from VR picture, meanwhile Korea:

There are absolutely no lighting effects here. As I believe, and as someone else has already pointed out, the game engine is ready for this (DX12 can do really beautiful night scenes), but the developers simply haven't added it yet. I suspect this will change on August 4th.

[LuftManu]

This might be something related to VR, because in 2D, night is beautiful!
Also, what is your gamma? If I poush high numbers then Ill see color banding. Nothing near 1.0

(These are compressed pics even)

 

 

[Captain_Trips]

I was working on a night mission and saw the banding.  I had sudden flashbacks to MicroProse F-19 missions in glorious 256 color. 😆

In external view I was also getting flickering in the banding at the horizon like there was distant lightening but it was clear skies.

Sometimes weird psychedelic green light reflecting on the canopy.

I had to remove clouds they were doing weird things with the light.

If necessary I could go grab so screens.

[YoYo]

On 7/28/2026 at 4:25 PM, LuftManu said:

This might be something related to VR, because in 2D, night is beautiful!
Also, what is your gamma? If I poush high numbers then Ill see color banding. Nothing near 1.0

(These are compressed pics even)

 

 

It doesn't look good either, even in 2D. Look at the clouds in these screenshots. There's absolutely zero lighting. Clouds should be lit from above, and sometimes they appear white from below, visible against the night sky. It does look better than in VR, which is unfortunately a complete disaster.

5 hours ago, Captain_Trips said:

I was working on a night mission and saw the banding.  I had sudden flashbacks to MicroProse F-19 missions in glorious 256 color. 😆

In external view I was also getting flickering in the banding at the horizon like there was distant lightening but it was clear skies.

Sometimes weird psychedelic green light reflecting on the canopy.

I had to remove clouds they were doing weird things with the light.

If necessary I could go grab so screens.

Yes, unfortunately that's how it is. We don't have night fighters yet, but I hope this will be resolved by then.

[MajorMagee]

What ever happened to Wartime Blackouts? I'm seeing lights on everywhere, even after the sun comes up.

[Husar]

I really enjoyed flying at night. With a clear, cloudless sky, the distant glow of city lights looked absolutely fantastic on my OLED monitor

[Dash,Polder]

Why wouldn't the south turn the lights on?  They were never under much of any sort of strategic or sustained bombing threat.   

[MajorMagee]

The image is from North Korea's Capital City.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

On 7/28/2026 at 4:25 PM, LuftManu said:

This might be something related to VR, because in 2D, night is beautiful!

On 7/29/2026 at 9:33 PM, YoYo said:

It doesn't look good either, even in 2D. Look at the clouds in these screenshots. There's absolutely zero lighting. Clouds should be lit from above, and sometimes they appear white from below, visible against the night sky. It does look better than in VR, which is unfortunately a complete disaster.

Yes, unfortunately that's how it is. We don't have night fighters yet, but I hope this will be resolved by then.

It's definitely not related to VR, but might be otherwise related to hardware. In my case, on my RTX2060 in 2D the nights looks completely buggered (see my post here) but on my 4080 in VR it looks simply awesome. Yes, there is still some slight banding, but not worse than in GB, and overall I think nights look much better. This is in VR:

11 hours ago, MajorMagee said:

What ever happened to Wartime Blackouts? I'm seeing lights on everywhere, even after the sun comes up.

AFAIK, there never was any systematic blackout system in Korea.

[YoYo]

8 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

It's definitely not related to VR, but might be otherwise related to hardware. In my case, on my RTX2060 in 2D the nights looks completely buggered (see my post here) but on my 4080 in VR it looks simply awesome. Yes, there is still some slight banding, but not worse than in GB, and overall I think nights look much better. This is in VR:

AFAIK, there never was any systematic blackout system in Korea.

I'm running an RTX 5090 and it looks exactly like your screenshot. In VR, it looks awful, like a game from 2000 with severely limited RGB values. I have no idea or clue. I have the latest NVidia drivers (release version, not beta). Do you use DLSS? Maybe there's an additional problem here besides the lack of lighting implementation? I don't use it.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

5 hours ago, YoYo said:

I'm running an RTX 5090 and it looks exactly like your screenshot. In VR, it looks awful, like a game from 2000 with severely limited RGB values. I have no idea or clue. I have the latest NVidia drivers (release version, not beta). Do you use DLSS? Maybe there's an additional problem here besides the lack of lighting implementation? I don't use it.

Yeah in my case it's 2D that looks awful. That's why I think it doesn't have anything to do with VR per se. On my 4080 PC it looks fine in both VR and 2D. On my 2060 laptop it looks awful (obviously only tried 2D on that PC).

Yes I use DLSS, on both PCs. I switched it off to see if it'd make a difference, but it doesn't. On my 4080 PC, I had driver version 595.97 but I updated to the latest one (610.88) to see if that'd mess it up, but it still looks fine.

One interesting observation is that on my 4080 PC that otherwise works fine, I do have the messed up colours in the Mission Editor (yes, the ME uses my dedicated GPU).

Edited July 31 by AEthelraedUnraed

[Juri_JS]

On 7/30/2026 at 12:34 PM, MajorMagee said:

What ever happened to Wartime Blackouts? I'm seeing lights on everywhere, even after the sun comes up.

It's even worse. The lights remain on when the buildings are destroyed.

[Husar]

[YoYo]

Is the difference due to the settings? There's a problem with HDR Off, but HDR On is more or less okay? VR, for example, doesn't use any HDR (OLED only) so maybe that's the problem? 

Edited July 31 by YoYo

[Husar]

HDR on or off the results are similar, there are no banding colors in original footage - yt compression

 

Edited July 31 by Husar

[YoYo]

Okay, thanks for the comparison. So, HDR isn't causing these strange, oily colors. I hope this will be part of the investigation into the developers' concerns and why there's such a noticeable drop in visuals, although it still doesn't look right even in these screenshots or slightly better quality videos. Notice the lack of reflections even on the clouds. I'm talking about reflections from the moon and stars. Even the IL-2 GB had this implemented, so I suspect that night in the IL-2 Korea is still some kind of placeholder.

Btw. I still suspect it looks good with DLSS on, but if someone isn't using it, then the color scheme is the problem. I'll have to check that when I have a moment, although we actually have the answer here:  

19 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Yes I use DLSS, on both PCs. I switched it off to see if it'd make a difference, but it doesn't. On my 4080 PC, I had driver version 595.97 but I updated to the latest one (610.88) to see if that'd mess it up, but it still looks fine.

Edited August 1 by YoYo

[Valis]

You can see the same kind of 'posterized' banding in parts of the cockpit that are 'fake shadowed'.

 

[Husar]

4 hours ago, YoYo said:

. Notice the lack of reflections even on the clouds.

 

[MajorMagee]

Two things make the posterization worse. HDR Enabled and Higher Gamma Settings, with Gamma having the greatest effect.

Any post processing that increases the contrast will really make the banding stand out. 

Even with HDR Enabled you don't see this if your Gamma is way down at 0.75.

My testing was on a calibrated 8 bit IPS ultrawide monitor.

HDR Disabled, Gamma at 0.9

After Photoshop Auto Contrast

Edited August 1 by MajorMagee