Stronger Lights in FS2004?

[Guest luissa]

Hi,It has already been reported here the problem that lights, made either with SCASM Dot()or Light(), have a very limited range.I have a series of "pilot houses" that iluminate at night and worked reasonable well in FS2002. Now the light beams are only visible at less than 2 miles or so. I also had custom runway illuminations that suffer from this low visibility range problem.Do gMax designers get high range visibility for lights as in FS2002?Any tips would be greatly appreciated,Regards, Luis

[arno 1]

Hi Luis,I have encountered the same problems. I was trying to make a custom runway lighting, but because of the low visibility range I stopped with that.The lights made from GMax use the BGL_LIGHT command, which is equivalent to the SCASM Light command. But it suffers from the same range limitations as the Dot command. So I am afraid that this is something hardcoded in the scenery engine that we can not solve.

[Guest luissa]

Hi,Thank you Arno. Default lights in FS2004 are visible very far and there must be a trick that we do not know. I am thinking in making a square that rotates to the viewer. The square would be TexPolyed with the halo.bmp (I think this the name of the texture that makes a point of light).Now what I wanted was a way to set the scale proportional to the distance. If I am very far then a large sacle was used. I know that I can read distance to the viewer in variable 33B (may be it is not this one as I have not the docs where I am). I do not know of an elegant way to set the scale apart from a series of IfVarRanges based on that 33B.Regards, Luis

[Guest luissa]

Hi,Sorry! Did hit the SEND button twice!Regards, Luis

[arno 1]

Hi Luis,That sounds like a good idea. The halo.bmp is indeed used by the default lights (also by the Dot command lights btw). But how would you do that with different colors? Make a different variant of the texture?Maybe you could use the IfHSize and IfVSize commands to check the size of the object on the screen and change the scale with that? But I think just like the 33B, you will need a series of checks anyway.