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Lights

Flying Officer Jevans

Flying Officer Jevans

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319
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unitedkingdom
First, thank you for making another useful tool available!

I did notice, however, that it's a bit difficult to edit lights in the editor, as there's nothing for the lights to shine on. Perhaps you could add an option to just add a ground and a couple of boxes or something to the preview while turning ambient light off so we can see the effect of lights?
 
Hi,

That's an interesting idea, although I am not sure if just adding the ground is enough to actually see it illuminated.

Is there a specific (default) effect that I could use to test this functionality?
 
Well, I suppose any of the normal lights like fx_navgre.fx. At the moment, the little sprite shows up for the light, but it might be nice if we could see something around the light to see the illumination. Just a plane as the ground plus a couple of primitive objects nearby at different distances or something. I know the lighting options for fx aren't very comprehensive, but it's the only thing I can see that you can do in the internal FS FX editor as opposed to your.
 
Sorry, don't mean to hijack. Exciting app you've got here. Just a question as I dabbled with it, strobes or flashing lights don't seem to show. What am I doing wrong? I really want to make some new lights that seem to be sadly missing from FS9 and hope this will be the tool to do it. Thanks again for your efforts!
 
Hi,

I think that is probably a bug in the tool at the moment. I'll check it.
 
The strobe lights indeed don't seem to work, I'll try to fix it.
 
Hi,

I fixed a bug that caused some static particle not to show, now the default strobe effect does show.

But it is not blinking. I am not sure if that is done in the FX file itself or externally when placing the effect. If anybody has some information on what makes an effect blink I would appreciate it.
 
The "blinking" is controlled in the .fx file's [Emitter.x] entry for Rate:
Code: 
[Emitter.1]
...
Rate=1.00, 1.00   // will flash every second
The length of the flash is controlled by the .fx file's [Particle.x] entry for Lifetime:

Code: 
[Particle.0]
Lifetime=0.01, 0.01

0.0 is "always on"

0.10 will be "on" for one-tenth of a second
 
Thanks Bill, I think I need to read the SDK again. Because I think most lights are static and according to the SDK that means the particle has an endless lifetime and the emitter is stopped after the first particle. So that's why in FXEditor I now ignore the lifetime for those (and of course they don't blink in that case).
 
now if we can only figure out a way to have the light splash on the ground we'd be in business! LOL!
 
arno said:
Thanks Bill, I think I need to read the SDK again. Because I think most lights are static and according to the SDK that means the particle has an endless lifetime and the emitter is stopped after the first particle. So that's why in FXEditor I now ignore the lifetime for those (and of course they don't blink in that case).
Click to expand...

The SDK is -for all practical purposes- nearly worthless! What's particularly confusing is that nearly all "light" effects use Static=1, but clearly the Rate=xx.x,yy.y parameter reinitializes the emitter and fires a new particle every x or y seconds.

If the x and y times are different, then the sim randomly chooses some value between x and y each time it "fires." This is how we can create a random blinking effect for strobes for example, so they will be asynchronous if used more than once in the sim for AI aircraft.

By using two (or more) emitter.x definitions, with slightly different parameters, we can also create those neat "double-flash" strobes, beacons, etc.
 
Last edited:
Thanks, I am going to try to update FXEditor for this :).
 
Hi,

I have updated FXEditor now. If you download the development release in about 1 hour time it should display the blinking lights correctly.
 
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