Taxiway lights problem

[lambda]

Hi all,

In my scenery i try to make lights but i've got a big problem. I dont want to use effects and i read in some thread that the effects decrease the performance more than bgl lights. So i started to make bgl lights with bgl_nav command. I have already placed about 50 lights and one of my problem is that they are also visible from very far. The bigger problem at night the frame per second is 22FPS without the lights, but with the lights 15FPS. Its awful. What will be if i place the all (about 1000) lights?! Interesting. What should i have to do? I observed in some scenery that they don't use real lights. They make cross-plane double side polys with night texture. Its very very good looking so i took this method for green center-line lights, hold-short lights, etc. The problem that they don't visible at dawn or dusk, just when the other night texture enabled. So it's ok for center lights but not the best for real blue taxiway lights at the edges of the taxiway. Whats the best and FPS friendly way to make the taxi lights?

 

[José Bourgoignie]

. I dont want to use effects...

Hi,

Well... I used the API taxi_edge (available on AVSIM... also for FS9). This is one of the possibilities.
For centerlines: there is probably the choice to enable centerlights in SceneGenX or other programs ?

Greetz. José.

 

[lambda]

Its not okay for me because i use custom made ground polygons and also custom made 3D taxilights so i have to make my own light system.

 

[Shakakoz]

I had a similar question here:
http://www.scenerydesign.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2281

So basically what I did was I created a BGL file containing 3 blue lights of different darkness, all of which were visible at different distances. So, as I approach the airport, I start to see a hint of blue lighting, but it is not nearly as strong as the runway and approach lighting. When I am on the gound, the nearest blue lighting is bright enough that I can navigate properly. It took some fine tuning, and I might tweak in some more, but overall I am very happy with the effect.

Here's the code:

IFIN1 daytime, tod, 2, 4

IFIN1 distance_fail, 033Bh, 0, 1000
BGL_LIGHT LIGHT_NAV, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000, 0, 0.0, 0.0, 0000000FFh, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0
distance_fail label word
IFIN1 distance_fail2, 033Bh, 1000, 2000
BGL_LIGHT LIGHT_NAV, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000, 0, 0.0, 0.0, 000000099h, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0
distance_fail2 label word
IFIN1 distance_fail3, 033Bh, 2000, 4000
BGL_LIGHT LIGHT_NAV, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000, 0, 0.0, 0.0, 000000066h, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0
distance_fail3 label word        
       
daytime label BGLCODE

Remember that we can't adjust the "brightness" of a BGL light directly, but we can darken it to turn it down a little. This worked for me, but I would be interested to see other peoples answers.

- Martin

 

[lambda]

Thanks Shakakoz its really interesting.

I see you are famailiar with lights Whats the best way to make running lights ("white rabbit")? I cannot use effects because i have an excluded area.

 

[Shakakoz]

I actually don't know what I'm doing. I just peruse the forums and copy code snippets and experiment until I get it right.

I think you will need an effect, and an effect controller to make your running lights. Don't worry about your exclude problem - that only affects effects which are placed using an attachpoint in GMax (somebody jump if I am wrong). You can place your effects manually using .xml, which will prevent the effects from being excluded for some reason.

In my original question in the link above, I had placed a whole bunch of effects using this method, but I ran into a problem of there being too many for my scenery. I don't have another link handy, but there are several examples in the forum of placing effects individually using .xml.

- Martin