Disappearing Gauges at night!

[Guest]

I'm about burned out on trying to solve a mystery...At night, all the gauges on my VC panel simply disappear! During the first part of dawn, they will suddenly appear in the VC view.I've searched backwards, and apparently as of last May, no one had figured out how the Falcon 50 manages to have lighted gauges at night... :(I've addedlight.5=4, -3.326790,-0.986815,1.640420, fx_vclightto the aircraft.cfg, and now have a soft glow in the cabin that will illuminate the panel, but...without any freaking gauges it just looks silly! :)Help! I'm going blind from all the reading I've done so far.

[Guest]

ZERO VIEWS???Shameless BUMP... :)Come on guys, somebody must know the 'secret!'

[Guest bones]

Nope.. Mine don't either.. :-)

[Guest bartels]

Have you tried your gauges on an aircraft with working night-lit panel e.g. the stock Baron? To see if it's a gauges or a lighting/VC problem.Arne BartelsP.S. do you use any lighted bitmaps (LM_.. or what it was) in the VC? I'm not sure but I think heard that there are problems with dissapearing gauges then, just as you described.

[Guest]

>Have you tried your gauges on an aircraft with working >night-lit panel e.g. the stock Baron? To see if it's a >gauges or a lighting/VC problem.>P.S. do you use any lighted bitmaps (LM_.. or what it was) >in the VC? I'm not sure but I think heard that there are >problems with dissapearing gauges then, just as you >described. Thanks Arne!The "P.S." provided the needed clue!Although I don't (currently) use any _LM bitmaps on the model - exterior or interior - a check on the options available through the pipeline GMAX -> MiddleMan -> ModelCommander -> .mdl allowed me to locate the problem.In the MiddleMan Options, the box "Has Lightmaps" was checked ON by default. Unchecking that option has now allowed the gauges to appear at night.You see, to facilitate more rapid development of the model, I'm using ModelCommander's neat feature to 'autogenerate' an [interior] for me, without having to go through the time consuming step of grouping parts into separate [exterior] and [interior] views before creating a new .mdl file.Obviously, I will eventually have to do this, since I won't want all the parts not normally seen from the VC to be used for the [interior], and also so that I can use _LM bitmaps on the exterior...Once again, my 'hero' Arne has saved the day... :-bigangel

[Guest bartels]

By the way, if you need some exterior light effects, there is the additional "LOGO LIGHTS" available. If I recall that right the [LIGHTS]//Types: 1=beacon, 2=strobe, 3=navigation, 4=cockpit, 5=landingsection isn't limited to five different light effects, there are more, don't ask me how much.Arne Bartels

[Guest]

>By the way, if you need some exterior light effects, there >is the additional "LOGO LIGHTS" available. If I recall that >right the >[LIGHTS] >//Types: 1=beacon, 2=strobe, 3=navigation, 4=cockpit, >5=landing >section isn't limited to five different light effects, there >are more, don't ask me how much. There is a maximum of 8 light effects that may be used on any one a/c. This is apparently a hardware limitation. I'm currently using beacon, strobe, nav and cockpit.The 'material name' LIGHT_RECO provides the nice, steady white anti-collision lights, while LIGHT_TAXI and LIGHT_LAND provide the other needed lights.There is another 'material name' that has special meaning, LIGHT_NAV which will obtain it's color from whatever is applied in GMAX, but that seems useless for actual Nav lights, since one is green and the other is red!Hmmm... perhaps you can have two materials LIGHT_NAV_R and LIGHT_NAV_G for the two colors needed? No matter, using the effects files seems to work out just fine... :)

[Guest cwright]

Bill, I also suffered disappearing gauges in my VC and it was indeed due to the use of _LM textures for night lighting. I got the solution from Tom at Freeflight - and as a bonus I got self-illuminated gauges! Because I needed to use _L textures I had to get rid of the _LM ones. You might be interested. Here's his (brief) post.... Best regards, Chris Wright bright gauges in the virtual cockpit (gmax) Posted by tom (project airbus) on Thursday, 6 June 2002, at 3:29 a.m.dont know if that has been posted before, but yesterday i managed to light up the gauges in my virtual cockpit. you only have to assign a texture as a "self illumination" map to the material for the gauges in your VC (the material which has the $xxx.bmp as a diffusemap) the texture name for the illumination map must NOT have a "$" in front of the name but a "_l" at the end (xxx_l.bmp for example). create a fs2002 lightmap texture same as the ones for the outside model and move it into your aircrafts texture folder. thats all.

[Guest]

>Bill, > I also suffered disappearing gauges in my VC and it was >indeed due to the use of _LM textures for night lighting. I >got the solution from Tom at Freeflight - and as a bonus I >got self-illuminated gauges! Because I needed to use _L >textures I had to get rid of the _LM ones. You might be >interested. Here's his (brief) post.... Thank you Chris! That's outstanding!Oddly enough, I had begun exploring this particular line of experimentation yesterday, having spent some time studying the Falcon 50's implementation.I noticed after some time, that somehow the $xxx.bmp images were being switched when the lights were turned on, but couldn't quite figure out how it was accomplished.I also noted that the Falcon 50 uses the landing lights switch to close the door