Several months ago, I posted details on how to achieve nice, backlighted gauges in the VC at night.The only 'drawback' being that they are tied to the landing lights...Recently, I've learned, that if you create an Alpha channel and save your 'self-illumination map' as a DXT3 file, you can specify whether the illumination should be controlled by the navigation light switch OR the landing lights switch!If the Alpha channel is all white (255,255,255) / landing lightsIF the Alpha channel is all black (0,0,0) / navigation lightsYipee!The only problem I'm having is that it will work for everyone else but me!What I mean is, that while teaching another developer how to create VC gauge lighting, he mentioned this idea. It works great for him, but using the very same file here will not work!Has anyone got any idea at all why this might be? I'd dearly love to get the VC gauge lights moved to the nav lights switch! :)

hey, I am going thru the exact same thing. I created all my lightmaps and placed them in gmax, exported w/ lightmaps. DXT3 with a white alpha, and black This went on for a few days, I know everything is set up right. I was playing with my vid card drivers one night and i pop into my VC and bam! there they are, glowing away! Instantly, I went back to work. All went well, and i had to roll back my vid driver because of instablity issues. I go back to my VC and... no lights! sooo... thats about as far as i got. I just moved on with other stuff, I should have sent the file for testing on a better rig. My card has alot of trouble with chrome and reflections, so i gave it up to that. But hearing you are having the same kindof issues makes me wonder.eyes glued to this thread for a solution.joe

> I was playing with my vid card drivers one night and i pop >into my VC and bam! there they are, glowing away! Instantly, >I went back to work. Joe, this 'trick' is supposed to work for the external 'lightmaps' as well, but my problem isn't that I have no lights......it's just that they will only work off of the landing lights bus, regardless of whether there's an alpha channel - black or white - or if the bitmap is 8 bit, 24 bit, etc.The lights will always work... but won't move off the durn landing lights switch... Dave, the fellow I was assisting, d/l'ed the Socata TB20GT, created a new P1_l.bmp file w/ black alpha (he said he had to add a few grey pixels to get it to work), overwrote the existing P1_l.bmp file in the textures folder......and, voila! It is working off the Nav lights switch...So, I can only conclude that there's no problem with the GMax model, and since it won't work with the copy of the P1_l.bmp texture he created and emailed me......it would seem to be a video card problem, but I'll be durned if that makes any sense to me whatever!After all, it's FS2k2 that detects the presence of the alpha channel used as a 'self-illumination' bitmap, and determines which 'switch' should control them! But, I've tried this on all nine flightstations here with identical results... Even using the Beriev file or either of the two 'other' models I'm developing panels for, the results are the same...