Comments on: That’s One Powerful Landing Light

By: Adolfo

Adolfo — Wed, 18 May 2011 23:27:56 +0000

Ben, speaking about lights, 3 ideas:
1.-About the PAPI, right now lights changes in a binary manner from red/white, depending on the flight path, but in real life, you fine tune your descent much more easily, as the lights transition from one color to the other smoothly, I think the new lighting system may allow to simulate the viewable angle of the PAPI lights more realistically..
2.-The same concept on the Navigation and Strobe lights, actually on X-Plane 9 you can see these lights -from the exterior- from any angle (that’s against the law!!)
3.-Would it be possible to reflect the landing lights on both the clouds and rain (that would be awesome, it would give you a real sense of speed)

Adolfo

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:58:21 +0000

Actually it isn’t so ridiculous that landing lights light up the place. Once I was walking somewhere in the dark, about 8k feet under an approach route. Suddenly there was this dim search light, and it turns out an airplane turned on its landing lights. That was at, I don’t know, 50 degrees up? I was half a kilometer away from street lights, but it’s still a very strange experience.

Can’t say anything about the experience of a pilot though, or whether their average eye condition plays a role. Just that as a casual, ground-based observer, night is far from pitch black (that’s moonless; full moon is even reminiscent of sunshine), and airport lighting looks really bright.

By: Antonio

Antonio — Tue, 17 May 2011 12:50:04 +0000

interesting, but what about the bump grass and water?
see here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrlVSAiu4Ag&feature=player_embedded
and here
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2007/Habel_2007_IAG/

By: qumake

qumake — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:07:08 +0000

1st Keyword : ‘development’… of course!
2nd keyword: “Light attenuation”

The intensity of a light traveling through the air decreases with distance.

How long is that track? Can you see a little light -white, blue, yellow…- (edge, center) from opposite end of runaway … not just in a “horizontal plane” (without the irregularity of the terrain and termal effects that came from asphalt…) but when you are in APP, you are even further and there may be some cloudiness.

Like Curt said… normally everything is dark and you only see the closest lights… just check out landing videos (not need to be a foggy night) in YT, Vimeo,…

Anyways… it’s nice to see/read how XP10’s develop goes in its various areas.

By: Scott Gabriel

Scott Gabriel — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:21:31 +0000

In reply to Curt.

I agree with you about glaring taxiway and centreline lights! A while ago, I modified the lights.txt file to address this, and the results are reasonable. It’s posted at X-Pilot if you’re interested in trying it out.

http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=1861.0

By: vonhinx

vonhinx — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:50:18 +0000

I Get Your Fail: Considered a failure if less than 85 metacritic. The picture is interesting, yes, even mildly humorous. Informative? We’ll take any scrap and eat it. Without jam. Or butter. On moldy bread. Mouldy for some of you…. Nice post, Curt. It was a sticky shutter.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:29:17 +0000

The post was supposed to be in the spirit of this:
http://igetyourfail.blogspot.com/
In other words, I posted the pictures because I thought the city lit up by the landing light was entertaining. Alex hasn’t tuned the airport lights since I took a whack at the shader, this picture is heavily zoomed, and no one has had a good look at night lighting and ambience levels. This is why we keep on not posting pics despite the gajillion requests a day.

Now in terms of landing and spot lights and global lighting: I believe there will be a way for authors to leverage global lighting to get correct spot lights, taxi lights, and landing lights when the user is running with global lighting enabled; indeed the whole point of the feature is to let authors get these lighting effects right. I do not know what the interface will be yet, and there is no guarantee that it will be possible in Plane-Maker alone; you may have to make an OBJ.

(Remember, there are already a number of rendering features that we require an OBJ for, and we will build starter OBJs for you to help you get there.)

By: Dboy

Dboy — Mon, 16 May 2011 11:43:04 +0000

Keyword : ‘development’

By: Curt

Curt — Mon, 16 May 2011 06:59:03 +0000

One of my biggest complaints of flightsims vs real life is nightime lighting.

In real life when I’m flying in my Piper Arrow III, the ground is very dark except for perhaps a few roads here and there, and parking lots that have bright lights. When on approach, I can rarely see taxiway lights except for a very faint outline.

I remember one time coming into Vegas. The runway edge lights were turned up, and I couldn’t see taxiway lights. LITERALLY! I had no idea where to turn off at and ended up asking the tower for help finding a taxiway (via progressive) even with a ramp map.

I’ve never flown near airports at 2,000ft and more than 2 miles that I think I could really see taxiway lights.

If anything, can we have a way to tune them and turn them down?

By: vonhinx

vonhinx — Mon, 16 May 2011 06:27:28 +0000

I second Nelson’s question; you might get pure black in some areas but certainly not under starry nights or in/over cities. But while we’re on landing lights, my project has two landing lights and two tip-tank taxi lights, and the only thing I can control is the angle of a single beam emanating from the center of the aircraft where there is no emitting source. Even worse, changing the beam angle of a light that’s off turns it on momentarily but I guess that was a shortcut done long ago.

Just saying we need at the very least a shaped beam for landing lights and a different one for taxi lights. All that excellent and hard work on global lighting would go to waste if the light sources aren’t correct.