Thought I'd start this in a separate thread as the topic is different than where this first came up, so more people would notice this here - If you'll excuse me quoting myself:
I've had difficulty with night missions myself, as the dark areas are totally black for me, at least on Windows with my NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE video card in my desktop. I don't know if the video card or OS makes any difference, although I haven't played around with the settings in the NVIDIA control panel much. Actually, I just might try that within the next few days - If it makes any difference I'll post some feedback.
First I started with the game options, turning on and off graphics options (Shaders, Weather Effects, Lighting, etc.) which did not help with this issue. I also tried adjusting the gamma and brightness, that didn't help either.
Then I went to the NVIDIA Control panel and saw a *long* list of options, which would take quite a while to sort through and play with to see what would make a difference. I didn't experiment with them yet, but I did find out something interesting I made a note of: In the menu where it stores default graphic configurations for various games, NVIDIA apparently misidentifies UFO:AI as being the game UFO: Afterlight, and uses settings optimized for Afterlight when running UFO:AI. I'm still hunting for some option to override this, but I suspect that might potentially be an issue causing graphics problems in UFO:AI.
I experienced this on Windows XP MCE and Vista HP on my desktop with my NVIDIA 7300 LE PCI Express video card. I also have Linux installed, but have not yet set up UFO:AI on the Linux partition.
I'd encourage any others on this forum to post information here, in this thread, if they experience the same symptoms, as it seems that some people have totally black areas dominating night mission maps while others can still see most of those maps.
P.S. - I'm working with the SVN development branch, 2.3.