Gauge illumination problem

[f104g]

Hi ..

I hope someone can help with my problem before I go crazy....

I am following Nick Pike's tutorial on VC gauge backlighting, and I am almost there it getting it working.

I use FSDSv2.... and I'm trying to resolve a problem I am having with back-lighting the gauges.

I have the VC Gauge planar polygon set up with the $texture inverted . The $texture is sitting in the texture folder and the panel.cfg has all of the necessary VC references listed for the gauges themselves. The $texture is a 256x256 white texture.

The texture is assigned to the planar polygon as $texture,A and is inverted.

In this first (night) screenshot, you can see the gauges are visible and working fine the VC panel.

panel shot with Lights off



The instrment panel and the VC gauges are visible and working fine .. no problem there so far....

I have also created a lightmap texture with white areas on a black background to light up the gauges, inverted and saved in the texture folder and a dtx3 with alpha.

result is as follows:-

Lights On screenshot..



The gauges are back-lighted... but the panel turns completely black,

I've missed doing something, or done something wrong .... can anyone please help ...

cheers

[Katahu]

Did you remember to append the suffix *_l.bmp to the light map? Did you remember to convert the lightmap to 8-bits? Did you remember to place the $texture file in the Panel subfolder and NOT the Texture subfolder? Did you remember to link the lightmap to the visual model [you don't need to realign the map - it's done automatically]?

Sometimes, the little things can drive you nuts.

[f104g]

finally I have managed to resolve the problem  !. The panel and gauge back-lighting is working fine now.  

My error was that the panel background texture in the PANEL folder was saved as a 32bit texture rather than a 24bit one.

Many thanks for your assistance and feedback...

[nickpike]

Can I point out this was quite an old tutorial by me, and was tested on my aircraft with small spaces between the gauges. I have just released a new tutorial on VC gauge placement and background illumination that will not produce a black background, and keeps the VCockpit sections in the panel.cfg to 1 or 2 to optimise frame rates. It's new, and I would appreciate some feedback here or on my forum.
Nick Pike.