When I am shooting an ILS at night with near zero visibility and I am looking for the runway before I hit minimums and all I can see is the overpowering, huge white triangles on the ground from my own plane and the AI aircraft, then yes, it is pretty important to me.Not to mention that it kind of ruins the immersion factor. I don't understand why they have to be like this when you look at current GPU capability. I guess if you like lighting effects from 1990 its not too bad........

> Is this really that important? Strange.Very important.

Well it does help somewhat if you can actually see the taxyway markings... instead of having them "whited out" by some rubbish .bmp overlays that go around pretending to be lights...

tdragger, Is it possible for third-party developers to add light sources (or is it hard coded)? One of the things I wanted to see was gate lights at night that would cause aircraft shadows on tarmac and itself / reflections on fuselage from gate light, jetway shadows, and other objects to react like the sun would normally do in the day. I'm willing to bet that this would be a framerate hogger if it's implemented, or maybe possible with DX10. And of course, I am still hoping that the night water would appear black and reflect city lights like it does the sun and moon, but since there arent any screenshots yet, I'll just keep my fingers crossed!I really admire what you have done so far with the sim, and wish to extend a big thank you to the entire FSX developer team for all the hard work! -GoldWings-

Folks, for the past three years I've been "preaching on deaf ears" the simple FACT that the brightness and color of both landing and taxi lights are FULLY controllable by the 3d modeler......IF the modeler will simply (a) reduce the color brightness, (:( set the opacity level to something less than 100%, and (optional c) set the actual color of the light(s), then the "wash out problem" simply goes away!Note that this is not something the 'consumer' has any control over; it is strictly a modelling issue, just like "backlighted gauges in the VC" are a modelling issue.

Because that slider isn't hooked up to anything.

Hi Bill,If it's not proprietary, what are your GMAX material settings for such a landing light? Interested developers want to know! :)Thanks,--Tom GibsonCal Classic Propliner Page: http://www.calclassic.comFreeflight Design Shop: http://www.freeflightdesign.comDrop by! ___x_x_(")_x_x___

scratching my head. Stop messing with my brain!

>You know, Mike, you do a nice job of messing with our tea>leaf reading. ;-)I do believe that's tdragger's trademark.:D

LOL!You lads crack me up! :+

I still cannot understand why we have to fly past clouds, or the sudden transition between 150 mile vis and nothing. Even FU2 and 3 did better in that department. If you flew into a cloud your visibility reduced, didn't just suddenly disappear. It's over 5 years on from that title, yet in FS we still effectively have 2d clouds. I'm not knocking FS it's great and I've flown more hours since FS9 than all my previous civil sims put together. Not only because it's been out a while either. I just seemed to really get into this one in a big way, and now love to fly "the line" for Landmark.I just do wish they'd sort out these minor things that spoil it.

When I tried FU2 my clouds were solid white blocks in the sky and the sky itself was made up of several solid bands of purple in different colours.Hardly as good as even FS2000.

On a side note,I only recently noticed the 'Landing Lights' option in the FS9 menu.I always thought this related to something else for some reason, but if you uncheck it, the nasty white triangles go away. The downside is you get no illumination at all, but I can see better this way than with the white washout anyway!I'm happy.......

Yikes. I'd never noticed that. (-: Please ignore my earlier opinion.

>Hi Bill,>>If it's not proprietary, what are your GMAX material settings>for such a landing light? Interested developers want to know!> :)Hi Tom,It depends on the project, but here are two examples. In this first one, the goal was to create a single landing light with a slight 'bluish hue' such as seen by modern quartz halogen lights. Note that the opacity is still 100%, but the HSV is set to lower, more subtle values:In this one, since there are two landing lights and two taxi lights, the HSV is even lower than the example above, and the opacity has been lowered to 50%, so that the combination of the four sources won't be "overwhelming!" ;)What I do is 'fiddle and test' continuously until I've achieved the results I want. Thank goodness we can compile only the needed parts, eh? ;)