Simviation Forums

 Hi evetone. Is there a program or a way to light the decks of the aircraft carriers to allow for night landings? I would like to try landing at night when swappwed to shipyards maybe. Would it be like lighting a runway? I dont know how to do that either though lol. Well any help would be appreciated, thank you.

Hi Slim. I'm a little out of touch but I don't think this would be possible on the CFS2 default carriers. It might already be featured on 3rd party carriers like the CFS2 version of USS John C. Stennis.

The FS2000-style static scenery object carriers should already have lit runways.

The Stennis is lit for some great night landings. Pucker time!!!

I can't believe that in all this time, no one had put out a macro for the stock CFS2 carriers with lit decks. And I looked hard too. Would have been nice to have them.

I suppose, if and ONLY if the carrier was static (standing still in the water) you could add lights by painstakingly getting the coordinates of the carrier, and placing lights in the exact right place and aligned exactly with the deck and at the exact height!! Too many EXACTS.

Guess ya just got to bring a good flashlight slim!!  

Hi Fireman. The CFS2 carriers aren't conventional scenery macros but configured much like an aircraft. Aircraft have nav lights so I would think it's theoretically possible to create a CFS2 Ship with a lit runway. This might also be possible with the default ships by adding extra [LIGHTS] entries to Ship.cfg as with the FS2002 aircraft. I'm not sure this would work in CFS2. The problem would be in the switching which unless they're on permanently would need to be a timed event rather than key command.

I haven't investigated these possibilties myself as I don't often fly at night. I would be very surprised if someone hadn't already done so.

Well as usual, The forum has helped me out, or at least, given me some ideas, lol.  I'll look into adding them in the ships cfg. and also investing in a big flashlight. lol. 1 more question though, the carriers in "shipyards" or "carrier haven" are static, so would that mean altering the .cfg file would or would not affect those carriers? I also heard from somewhere about adding lights through the ships dp file, does this sound like something that can be done? Thanks again for your input.

Hi
Yep you can add effects to the dp
the only hard bit is the location and that would be a case of trial and error(one way to make this a little easier would be to use dped http://www.simviation.com/cfs2utilities1.htm
open the ships dp file and use the damge boxes diaplayed as a guide,the default model files dont show up as wireframe).All you need to do then is add somthing like the  following lines to the dp

[EXTRA.0]
location=0.0,0.0,6.0
effect=fx_wake_ss

If you pop over to this site there are a few good costom made effects http://web.tiscali.it/Nanni/CFS/
download the ship package and see how the author has modded the cfg and dp files
Hope this helps
MaV