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FSX Obstacle lightning, any ideas?

N

Navid Hashemi

Messages
51
Country
sweden
Hi! I've been using FSX for only a couple of months and right now i'm working on building my home town airport for FSX.

I have some experiance with FS9 and i've built about six sceneries for it. I've been using very simple and old tools like EOD (Easy object designer), FSSC etc. These programs are made for fs2002 and under, and are very limited but i've done my best to design the airport as accurate as i can. I found it is possible to create sceneries for FSX with these programs as well!

Screen:

esvmscreen.jpg


And now to my issue! This scenery includes some obstacles, right now i'm working on a tv-transmitter (about 100m high) and a couple of wind turbines. My issue is a solution for lightning, red and bright obstacle lightning. In real life, the wind turbines has a slow blinking light and the tv transmitter has a steady glow.

screen1.jpg screen2.jpg

As i mentioned i'm using very limited program to make my scenery, there is infact lamp objects in EOD but the visibility of these lights are way to weak.

Is there any way to place a single light object at a desired altitude? Is it possible to create a .fx-file and place it with ez-scenery?

Any other ideas? Help me out please! :)


Regards
Navid Hashemi
 
This could be done with either an effect, or a BGL light.

You can create/modify an effect easily with FXEditor (which you can find in the downloads section with the rest of Arno's tools), or you can use Notepad++ to write the code, though I recommend FXE as it has a preview window. Creating the effect itself is pretty straightforward, as it uses basic xml. If you don't have any programming experience, it's not an issue, as you can make a decent effect just messing with the code of an existing one (just make sure you don't overwrite it by mistake!). Something you should note is that in P3D, you need to have the effect be over a scale of 3.0 in order to get good visibility out of it. I don't know if this applies to FSX, as I haven't developed for that, but it is something to be aware of.

Alternatively, you can do this with a light you create in GMAX or similar. Basically, you take a plane (also about 3m in size, for visibility), copy and rotate it a few times so that it has four intersecting surfaces, then apply a self-illuminating light texture to it. In the end, you will have a glowing ball of light that can be seen from all angles. The advantage of this method is that it's easier to use a custom texture, and you can edit the mipmaps of that texture so that as you get closer to the light, the glow decreases in size. That way, if you view it from a few meters away, it doesn't stay as a massive glowing orb, but rather it appears naturally as a small point. The disadvantage, however, is that if you have to place this object a bunch of times, it could impact framerates, whereas an effect instanced the same number of times would probably have less of an impact. If you are only placing it a few dozen times, then I'd recommend the BGL light method, as it's more customizable.
One thing to note is that if you use BGL lights, you are better off placing them in your 3D program, then combining them all in to one object.
 
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