Runway Lights at Night in IMC

[pilot3033 5]

I've been practicing CATII and CATIII ILS approaches in the NGX over the last few days. I've noticed that at both default and 3rd party airports, the runway lights tend to be high intensity visible from about 10nm out until just about 2 or 3nm, where they disappear, behaving like they should where VV is 100ft in 1/4sm visibility and fog. 

 

I'm using ActiveSky Next if it makes a difference to anyone who has run into this before. I'm wondering if it's a level of detail bug. For now I've just kept my head on the instruments, but it can be a little distracting the way the lights behave.

 

That said, flying a CATII approach down to minimums using the NGX HUD and by hand at night is an amazing amount of fun. 

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

You can turn down the intensity by adding the following to your P3D cfg.

 

Add these lines to the prepar3d.cfg file at the end of the Display section.

 

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_SURFACE_SCALAR=0.75

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_VASI_SCALAR=0.5

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_APPROACH_SCALAR=0.65

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_STROBE_SCALAR=0.7

 

The smaller the values under 1.00, the less intense the lights will be. However, this adjustment only works with default airports or addon airports that use the default lighting. Some developers use their own custom lights and this tweak won't affect them.

 

I turn mine way down to like 0.50 to make them less noticeable. I really hate the default values which are probably like 1.00 and you can see the VASI or approach lights from 15 miles away, sometime all the way across a city. In real life when flying at night, airports are sometimes hard to find and aren't lit up like Christmas trees.

[pilot3033 5]

You can turn down the intensity by adding the following to your P3D cfg.

 

Add these lines to the prepar3d.cfg file at the end of the Display section.

 

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_SURFACE_SCALAR=0.75

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_VASI_SCALAR=0.5

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_APPROACH_SCALAR=0.65

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_STROBE_SCALAR=0.7

 

The smaller the values under 1.00, the less intense the lights will be. However, this adjustment only works with default airports or addon airports that use the default lighting. Some developers use their own custom lights and this tweak won't affect them.

 

I turn mine way down to like 0.50 to make them less noticeable. I really hate the default values which are probably like 1.00 and you can see the VASI or approach lights from 15 miles away, sometime all the way across a city. In real life when flying at night, airports are sometimes hard to find and aren't lit up like Christmas trees.

Thanks! I'll start experimenting to see what works. Any idea why they might pop through low visibility and then disappear when getting close? It's like I can see the airport through low clouds, then they go away when I get "inside" of a cloud. Perhaps it's how ASN deals with fog and low visibility, creating a "cloud" or reducing draw distance.