Lights with corona (not THAT corona...)

[mrbump]

Hi all

I'm trying to bring runway lights and taxiway lights to small airfields. There are a few shortcomings out of the box:

• The lights objects in the scenery category are just that: 3d objects. They are not functional.
• In order to precisely place single taxiway lights I could just use short "light rows". There is only one standard model of light stands that is a bit too prominent for small fields.
• For runway lights the only way seems to be to configure them in the runway properties. The result is quite large airport centric: No day night cycle (and way too dominant in daylight), placing too far from the runway, etc.

So I've started experimenting with custom light objects. The problem there is, that they become very faint very quickly when you get further away.
My runway lights consist of a "light" - to correctly illuminate the vicinity (for raised lights) and a sphere out of an emissive material.

I tried to apply some trickery:

• The base protrudes 10m into the ground to prevent the tiny lights from getting swallowed by the renderer way too early.
• The further away LODs have a larger emissive sphere (the dark gray material in the picture below).

This improves the visibility from a distance somewhat but by far not enough. Those half meter baubles look like mere candles just from the other end of the runway. Something seems to be very different compared to the stock blue taxiway lights and the street lamps far in the background.

Closeup it becomes clear that those lights have some kind of corona - possibly a billboarding technique. These coronas seem to get scaled down much less with distance than normal geometry (my spheres...) does.
Does anyone now if and how we can replicate this? Or is it not (yet) possible at all - hence the non-functional lights supplied by asobo?

Thinking a bit further - those light-properties for blink-frequency etc. would be a bit pointless if they could only be applied to the lights but you can't actually see the lights. And as usual the SDK "documentation" has a big TODO in the section that could possibly be relevant.

Any other thoughts? Thank you.

 

[Christian Bahr]

This glow of light (corona) around the light source. Does it come from a dynamic light (Asobo Light/FlightSimLight), or does the light come from the emissive texture?

 

[mrbump]

Neither. I think it is exactly what you refer to as "point light" in your thread. It seems to be a 2d texture that is applied in a separate rendering pass (like a "special effect"). Those textures also don't scale with distance in the same way that normal geometry does.
See the screenshot below. The corona is rendered on top of things that are in front. Would be nice if we had a way to do this. At the moment the only such light that we can place ourselves are the taxiway lights (as very short light rows).