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Vertical Separation Plane

6maynew

6maynew

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unitedkingdom
Hi Jeffrey

In FS9/ASM I used to be able to do a vertical separation plane for switching runway lights from one colour to another when you passed them. Can SODE do the same thing? I've come across an issue where the edited mipmaps of the textured lights work correctly until you view the plane from the side and FS thinks you are miles away so displays the highest mipmap and so you get a "flare". I was hoping to combat this by limiting the display of the textured plane to 178 degrees either side, so for example the red side would be 1-179 degrees and the white side would be 181 to 365. Is there any way to do this with the current SODE and if not is there any way this functionality could be added in?

Cheers
Will
 
Hi Will,

That was exactly what I have seen when using the mip map technique, the flare phenomenon that is, when viewing from a 90 degrees angle. So it must be considered a limitation of that technique. Or have other developers who employ mip mapped lights been able to tame that flare?

While it would be possible to achieve separation using separation planes (you can set them up in any position), it would come with a performance cost: The computation must be done for each and every lamp (or pair of lamps in case of runway edge lights) and that's not something I'd recommend. However, if it is only for a handful of lights, like threshold lights, using a SODE separation plane for those is fine performance wise.
 
I had tried to tame it by using LODs alongside the mipmaps but that also didn't work correctly, so if someone is using them it'd be good to know how they got around it.

It should only be for a max of 12 lights that will need this. The threshold/ends and papis will be left for now as they are not noticeable when flying. The runway lights are rotate to user so only have 1 plane instead of 2 crossing.

Is the process the same as it would be for the PAPI lights in GMAX? Is there anything in the XML file that I'd need to change (i.e. elevation or azimuth)?
 
Yes, the process is the same as for PAPI's (attaching the visibility tags). You'd need to set the elevation to 90°, azimuth can be left at zero.
 
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