FSDS2 Lighting

[Guest norbrook]

FSDS Guru's,I'm developing some scenery which includes blue edge lighting. I've modeled the bulbs and housing and I'm trying to get the bulbs to light. Here's what I've done so far.I've created a duplicate bulb directly on top of the textured one, tagged it as light_nav and set the material to 0,0,255 for all blue. The result is a small light that appears directly above the model, this is fine except I cannot get the color right. I've tried several combinations but the closest I get is a sort of teal color.I can attatch some screenshots later when I get home but is there a better procedure that others are using?-n

[Shaka 2]

I tried making lights like this, but I was unhappy with the results. The problem I saw was when using the light_nav tag, the light appeared to be the same size at different distances, so when you placed a lot of lights, it started to look like a mess. In the end, I created the yellow housing for during the day, and then just used AFCAD2 to create the blue lighting for during the night. I think that this was all we had for FS2002, but in FS2004 there's a better way - unfortunately, it does not involve FSDS2. :(Using the FS2004 gamepack for GMAX, we can atach effects directly to our models. We can do this with the nav lights files found in the effects folder, and the result is much nicer than what I was able to do with FSDS2. The problem is that you have to use GMAX/BGLCOMP to attach these effects - I'm pretty sure SCASM can't handle it (I might be wrong here). Hopefully, FSDS2 will get updated and will be able to use these effects.There are a couple examples of other ramp lights in the library. Maybe you could download these and see how they look, and maybe email the authors to find out exactly what they did.- Martin

[Guest norbrook]

Thanks for the suggestions Martin. In the end I've settled for a blue light api i created with eod (it uses the :lamp call) and placed them with airport. Thanks again-n

[Guest sapper42]

If in FSDS you create the Lamp body and texture it eg: white, this will show night or day. Then create the Lens unit and name it LensDay and texture it accordingly and for its properties, set it to DAY.Make a copy of the Lens and call it LensNight and leave it untextured but set its material to a Blue colour with a high Specular setting ( experiment ) and for its properties, set it to Dark. This will show a taxi light at day with a dark blue lens but at night, you will see the Night version of the lens wich will glow due to the materials specular setting and the daytime lens wont show.Dont combine the 3 elements tho in FSDS, just select all and export direct as a BGL or export as an API for your macro.It would be handy to export as an API for the portion of the source code for your macro call and allso as a SCA file for the portion of the source code required for a custom lib.bgl file so you will be able to place many objects with little effect on your FPS.Another way, tho tedious is to place a taxi lamp in FSDS where required and in the same location and at a set alt is to place an FX file but you will need to place 3-4 x the FX file per lamp in XML code to get a nice effect.the FX method tends to look better from a distance and the distance can be managed by a controller FX file. Info is in the Special Effexts SDK but again for numerous lamps it is very labour intensive.rgds Jeff

[Guest gorchi]

Ehem, side lamps, whether blue, red, white, whatever can be done entirely with FSDS, without effects and they can be visible up to 18nm for example. The tricks are:1. light_nav should be separate part with diffuse color 0,0,255. You must take care where the origin point of the part is. The glass cover should be made almost completely transparent (Alpha around 100 or less)2. to make light visible at greater distance, make a square polygon with side of 7m or so, the same color as the light, maybe even specular color 0,0,255 (to glow in the night) and put condition, that this poly shows when You are 5 km away from the lamp.I used it in my Slovenia scenery and it works very nicely, with blue TWY edge lights, white RWY edge lightst, white and red approach lights.Hope it helps and best regards,Goran BrumenFS Slovenija 2002 teamhttp://slovenia.avsim.net

[Shaka 2]

>Ehem, side lamps, whether blue, red, white, whatever can be>done entirely with FSDS, without effects and they can be>visible up to 18nm for example. The tricks are:Of course it works, but the problem the original poster was having dealt with the colour. He was generally not satisfied with the results, and I explained why the light_nav tag may not be best. My only real problem with it is that there is no diminishment with range, so that the light_nav at 500 meters looks the same as one at 5km. In my screenshot below, you can see the red lights (created by light_nav) are all at the same size and intensity, despite being at different ranges. My blue taxiway lights diminish in intensity with range, which I think is more realistic.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/91002.jpgI originally tried creating all my ground lighting using the light_nav tag, but eventually my airport became washed out with lights, so I changed to using effects. I guess it's a matter of taste, but I would be interested to see a screenshot of your airport at night to see what the result is.Also. to clarify a point - you don't need to place each effect seperately, since they can be attached directly to scenery objects (the taxiway light housing). Actually, there are some negative points about using effects. To start with, they don't seem bright enough, so you usually have to double up. They can be edited though, so you could make them brighter. Also, if you use the regular nav lights effects (for aircraft) as scenery lights (ala FSDS2), then I think we still have that non-diminishing result that I seem to loath.So, I guess it's nice to have a choice between the two methods, whichever you decide looks nicer.EDIT: hmm, my screenshot doesn't look as good as when I was looking at it in FS, before I scaled it down, so the diminishing effect is difficult to see. Just take a look at any default taxiway lights to see what I mean. My point about the red lights is still quite apparent though.- Martin