“Landing Lights Illuminate Ground”

[TomCYYZ 210]

I notice the “Landing Lights Illuminate Ground” option is no longer available in the Options || Display Menu. It used to be a check box below “Dynamic Lights”, which I do have checked. The reason I ask is, for some payware aircraft, namely Carenado, the Exterior lights all work fine, but the landing lights do not illuminate the ground when in Pilot view. I may be wrong, but I thought that was the function of the “Landing Lights Illuminate Ground” option. Anyway, hope everyone has a Great Holiday Season!

Regards,

Tom

[SKEWR 364]

I was wondering the same thing. I've been doing the PMDG 747 -8 tour of Asia, and I've noticed that the taxi lights don't show anything. In external view they are on and bright but from the flight deck they aren't noticeable. Wonder what happened....

[Jazz 1,046]

1 hour ago, SKEWR said:

I was wondering the same thing. I've been doing the PMDG 747 -8 tour of Asia, and I've noticed that the taxi lights don't show anything. In external view they are on and bright but from the flight deck they aren't noticeable. Wonder what happened....

That makes two of us.

[Nemo 1,305]

1 hour ago, SKEWR said:

I was wondering the same thing. I've been doing the PMDG 747 -8 tour of Asia, and I've noticed that the taxi lights don't show anything. In external view they are on and bright but from the flight deck they aren't noticeable. Wonder what happened....

Poor illuminated ground is an issue since quite some time. Its like ping pong between both, LM and PMDG to the disadvantage of the customer.

[chapstick 2,757]

You can search the PMDG forums for some fx file tweaks to improve DL. 

[raymie 81]

4 hours ago, TomCYYZ said:

I notice the “Landing Lights Illuminate Ground” option is no longer available in the Options || Display Menu. It used to be a check box below “Dynamic Lights”, which I do have checked. The reason I ask is, for some payware aircraft, namely Carenado, the Exterior lights all work fine, but the landing lights do not illuminate the ground when in Pilot view. I may be wrong, but I thought that was the function of the “Landing Lights Illuminate Ground” option. Anyway, hope everyone has a Great Holiday Season!

Regards,

Tom

I too have experienced this same issue unfortunately with both Carenado aircraft and several other addons such as the Real Air Turbine and Piston Dules. I looked all over for the "Landing Lights Illuminate Ground" check box until I discovered that is no more in 5.3. My Flysimware addons work fine regarding the landing lights illuminating the ground so I know it is not a P3D problem. Unfortunately, these aircraft in our P3D 5.3xx hangar probably will not be updated for all functions to work properly. 

[Jazz 1,046]

I bought "747 Imersion" from Parallel 42/ORBX to fix this and add some other immersive aspects. I think it's a little overpriced but It really makes the the entire 747 experience much better, I must say. Besides, what's 15 quid these days? Three beers if I'm lucky.

[blaunarwal 432]

I also realized that a lot of planes have strange landing lights now. The light is illuminated but it does not illuminate the ground somewhere in front of the plane but just underneath, as if it was a position light. One of the planes that still have working landing lights is the Captainsim 737 Captain, a FSX plane which was updated to P3D4. Unfortunately a lot of planes have no longer landing lights defined in the aircraft.cfg but attached in the model and when I investigated the CS 732s attached objects with MCX, I could not find an effect file with the name referenced there. So where are these light effects then?

One thing is for sure, developers will not fix their models for us, we need to do it ourselves. I hope some people share their knowledge of these things, which seem to be kept a secret to earn money with it. 

Dan

[Sabre57 46]

I've been playing around with one of the effect files for landing lights. I was able to find something a few days ago and while it's not perfect it definitely improves it for me. What I ended up doing was modifying one line in the landing lights effects file that comes with the default sim. The process that I followed for doing this is as follows:

1. Navigate to the effects folder in the main application directory. For me this was in D:\\Lockheed Martin\P3D V5\Effects

2. Find the file fx_landing.fx and make a backup copy of it

3. Open the fx_landing.fx file using notepad, wordpad, or editor of your choice

4. Scroll down to the section [ParticleAttributes.0]

5. Find the line "Falloff Exponent=2.0"

6. Modify the number in that entry to something less than 2.0. I use 1.25

7. Save it and try it in the sim. As always YMMV.

I'm on V5.2 and I haven't tried it yet with V5.3. My guess is that the higher the number the more the "light" intensity reduces over a given distance. 1.5 didn't seem to be a lot different than 2.0.

For your reference, I've copied that section of my file below and marked the line I changed with an arrow:

[ParticleAttributes.0]
Color Start=0, 0, 0, 0
Color End=100, 100, 100, 128
Bounce=0.00
X Scale Goal=0.00
Y Scale Goal=0.00
Z Scale Goal=0.00
Falloff Exponent=1.25 <----- This is the number I changed
Inner Cone Angle=50.00
Outer Cone Angle=70.00
Intensity Day=0.00
Intensity Night=2000.00

I will be interested to hear if this helps anyone else.

Edited December 26, 2021 by Sabre57

[IanHarrison 521]

On 12/25/2021 at 5:03 AM, Jazz said:

I bought "747 Imersion" from Parallel 42/ORBX to fix this and add some other immersive aspects. I think it's a little overpriced but It really makes the the entire 747 experience much better, I must say. Besides, what's 15 quid these days? Three beers if I'm lucky.

Half a tank of petrol. (Vw Up!)