Help with nav lights on ship traffic

[irmurray]

Hi all,

I am trying to put shining nav lights onto moving ship traffic in FSX. The model is created in FSDS using XtoMDL, with the night texture fixed using Model Converter X.

I tried adding nav lights to the MDL in three ways -
- putting a [LIGHTS] group into the ship's SIM.CFG file
- adding a Light object with Model Converter X
- adding an Effect object with Model Converter X

None of these had any visible effect (!) at all.

I had a look at several of the default FS moving ships and don't see any "real" nav lights on any of them. They have some nav lights in places, but they're done with clever night textures, not "real" lights.

So, is it possible to add real lights to moving ship traffic at all?

And if it is, how do you do it?

Thanks for any tips.

Regards,


Iain M.

 

[ALain152]

Hi,
in the sim.cfg you have an [effect] section to call wake effect.
You might change the effect and tweak it in order to add nav lights.
Regards

 

[jpfil]

Hi all, salut Alain,
Here is my own receipe.
I create three sets of texture : white, green and red (64x64 pixels and 17 ko each). All have day and night textures. I create position and navigation lights with these textures. It's looks good at a certain distance, but not to far.

 

[ALain152]

Salut cousin,
Actually that's what i do too
But il was not answering the question!

 

[Farfy]

Hi Guys
I have never tried to make a moving ship (Yet). So I am not sure is this will work.
But adding effects to scenery objects is very simple to do with the “PartDataDefs.txt”
You can add lights and some smoke coming from the smoke stack on the ships would be neat also.
H_Farfy

 

[irmurray]

Hi all,

Thanks for the suggestions ... your wordings suggest that you've not actually done this with nav lights ... has anyone actually got them to work?

Should all of these arguments be superseded by use of Model Converter X? I have added attachpoints to the MDL using it, and attached the appropriate effect, but nothing shows in FSX.

I have also tried adding a nav light effect as an effect in the SIM.CFG - again, nothing.

I have also tried adding a [LIGHTS] section (as in an aircraft CFG file) into the SIM.CFG file - but again, nothing.

I have had a quick go with the PartDataDefs.txt route, but am not certain that I have all the bits correctly referencing each other. First off, is PartDataDefs the right filename - several spellings of the name are used in the older posts!! If anyone could talk me through the whole process here, that would be useful!

Failing that, I'll fall back to the texture method - any chance of sharing one of your example textures, as I'm not sure about fading/transparency on these (if required at all).

Many thanks,


Iain.

 

[jpfil]

I remember that I tried adding nav lights by the way of the sim.cfg file. That works but the lights where to less brighting at a distance. Considering the time passed to positionning the lights in the sim.cfg file, I switched to faster "hard" lights in the model, like explained above.

 

[BASys]

Hi Folks

Iain -
Are you using default effects,
or have you rolled your own.
Try substituting with defaults.

Have you tried substituting your vessel model
for any of the default vessels ?

i.e.
The simple models, (not the library objects).

Do they display effects correctly ?

e.g.
Acceleration's Veh_USCG_Cutter_Sm
which has various attached effects, (8 off),
each of which are present in every LOD.



I can't check how it performs in sim,
as my video card has a hardware fault.



PS
re: Previous vessel grounding & website issues
Never received your sample file or any followup to my emails.



HTH
ATB
Paul

 

[irmurray]

Hi Paul,

Are you everywhere on the web?

I haven't caught up on an e-mail backlog, and made a note to myself in a meeting today to get back to you!

Anyway, to return to previous problem ... water height turns out to have nothing to do with grounding of the ferries ... I found that the ferries do not go all the way to the end of the path, so I had to move the ends right up into the land to get the ships to go to the right position!

Back to the lights problem ... the effects are all defaults. I don't have Acceleration, and all the standard default ships only have wake effects - no light effects that I can see.

I have had a bit of success tonight playing with textured nightlit spheres, but now can't get them to disappear in the daytime.

All this is rather depressing, as it appears that Model Converter X should do the biz for the lights, but nothing appears.

Regards,


Iain M.

 

[irmurray]

Hi all,

To continue my previous message ...

I have now downloaded a 3rd party vessel from FSshipyards, and it has light effects defined in the SIM.CFG file (using default FSX effects). Using Model Converter, I can see the AttachPoints for these lights within the model.

HOWEVER, when I put this vessel into my traffic, I can see no lights at all.

Can anyone offer any assistance with this problem?

Regards,


Iain M.

 

[jpfil]

First try different height settings for one light, just to see if the effect works. In sim.cfg, the settings of the FSShipyard boat are from it's reference point, who are not necessarily the sames on your ship.

 

[BASys]

Hi Folks

Iain -
No worries.
Didn't know if my ISP was playing up again.

re: Grounding
All simulation for all simobjects occurs about the datum reference point,
usually colocated at the model centre.

e.g.
Assuming datum reference point as centre of object.

If you have a ramp/link-span
and two vessels of different lengths,
e.g. 50' and 500'
you'd need to use different routes, (terminal points),
as the bow offsets would be 25' and 225' respectively.



re: Lights
Attachpt lights and effects are working here.

Added both using Arno's MCX,
but beware there's an axis based error when adding.

Workaround -
- Just add the attachpts without positioning them.
- Export.
- Re-import and edit to correct locations.
- Export again.
- Re-import to check ok.

See your email inbox.



HTH
ATB
Paul

 

[irmurray]

Hi Paul,

Been continuing to experiment, and I have made an interesting discovery.

I have successfully added an attachpoint within FSDS, and it shows as such when the MDL is viewed in Model Converter. I have attached a red light effect to the attach point.

If I put the MDL into a static scenery, the ship shows correctly with the red light in place.

If I put the SAME MDL in as the AI ship, I get the ship but NO red light!

If I understand correctly, the aircraft carrier catapult functionality is only added with FSX Accelerator (which I don't have) - is this light function on AI ships the same?

Thanks again,


Iain.

 

[FelixFFDS]

If I understand correctly, the aircraft carrier catapult functionality is only added with FSX Accelerator (which I don't have)

Acceleration SDK and SDK SP2 are the same. You don't need to have Acceleration SDK to have the carrier functionality.

 

[robystar]

Hi,

Sorry for reviving an old thread but I had not seen a solution to the initial problem of adding lights and effects to simobjects with sim.cfg's. So I had to figure it out myself.
I found that custommade lights and effects do show up on a sim.cfg object when, in the mdl, you give the attachpoint name the same name as the effect used.
Might be that this is old news and that I invented the wheel again,but then again, you never know.