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Approach lights

A

attben

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102
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spain
Hello everyone,
bit of an odd one, i am actually REPLACING all my approach lights in my project (EFKI - KAJAANI) with custom models and hence, i wont have the full luminosity/glow/brightness of the actual approach lights that come with the sim. pictures below:
lights1.png

lights2.png



As you can see, the custom models have emissive, but that just falls off after a while and can't really be seen. please note im only talking about the approach lights not the runway or taxi lights.
any solution for this? i tried placing the msfs lights, adding msfs lights to the model in 3ds max... no avail..

many thanks
ben
 
Look in your airport object's properties.

At the bottom is a custom light section. This allows you to create your own lights inside the SDK with the correct visibility. It's basically hopeless trying it with a 3d model's own lights.

Assign a non physical mesh to the light like light_warm_medium if you have your own mesh and use the the light support object to set its height.

You have to assign the custom light to a lightrow to place it.

The biggest waste of time is positioning each light with x,y coordinates. It takes ages and it's a very stupid system.
 
very cool, thanks for the reply. i'll try that just now :)
EDIT: so these approach lights should be simobjects? cause right now they are just scenery meshes..
 
Last edited:
No.

All you're doing is placing the light in the right place, it's not interacting with the object at all so they may as well remain standard objects.
 
alright, kind of got this to work. now, how do i do this for models where it's 5 light poles right next to each other in different sizes? also, will i always have to draw light rows? this seems super tedious for me. why not let me place free floating lights and move them around in the world? it seems like i have to create a different profile and light row for each of my approach light. GOD i hate those tools.
thanks a lot for your help.
 
Yes, it's tedious.

I'm not sure what your design is, but I would make it one light row per light. Leave the light row distance at 60 metres or whatever it is and the light will only appear in a single location where you place the first dot. If they're very close together just make very small light support rectangles.

If you have lights in a column on top of each other you would probably need to create one preset with multiple lights at different heights.
 
thanks for getting back to me.
well, i have seperate models for each of "lines" of the approach lights, as seen here
1639425956233.png


this is the actual parts of the approach lighting system of EFKI and it took me a fair bit to model and accurately space/scale all these. so now having to also add lights with the rediculous "relative position" system (which doesnt do my rotation properly btw) seems like a nightmare come true..
 
It looks like one preset would work, just place a lot of single light light rows at varying heights. The light support rectangle will set the height in a much simpler manner that using light coordinates, just set that so they're visible above ground. There's definitely no need to make a dedicated series of them for each model. That would be very boring indeed.
 
ok, thanks a lot mate.
i really dont get the asobo guys. i mean, they HAVE made actual games before, right? we're talking, in this case, directional SPRITES. why is it so hard to just let me spawn a bunch of those and drag them to where they would logically be on the light meshes, or better yet, let me parent them via their sdk tools in 3ds max..
many thanks again.
 
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