How to add landing lights?

[WebbPA]

I've noticed a lot of my addons don't have landing lights.  I've experimented with about everything I can think of but nothing works.

In particular there is an undocumented, apparently nonfunctional light #5 for landing lights, and an effect called landing.fx.  You would think that would work but it doesn't.

Is there a way to do it?

[fisharno]

Landing.FX, I think are the tire smoke/dust/rain water effects that are visible when landing. Landing lights are, (I think), in the aircraft.cfg file. But, the entries for the lights are coded to include light intensity, and where they are located on the aircraft. Tricky stuff.  ;)

[RollerBall]

Jim, this landing light problem was discussed right from the very beginning of FS2002 (Hagar will remember as well!)

Afraid that landing lights that you can see from the cockpit are only programmable in GMax (and I guess now FSDS2) aircraft.

They are in the model and you definitely cannot add em yourself. Many many many guys tried every which way to do it but no one succeeded.

[WebbPA]

I was afraid of that.  At least now I can stop trying to accomplish the impossible.

[sloop]

fisharno, what type of plane is that in that little pic? where caan I download it?

[fisharno]

It's the GMAX C-5 Galaxy.


Search the "Military" section here at SimV.

[emh8]

This is a problem that I have toiled with...........far too much.  

I have found that one alternative to adding landing lights is to add white navigational lights to the leading edges of the wings, or wherever I wanted the lights to appear.  The problem here, of course, is that the navigational lights do not have the intensity of landing lights.

In the aircraft.cfg file, white navigational lights are indicated by the entry,"fx_navwhih."

Erik

[RollerBall]

There are a few examples of aircraft where there is only 1 model available but this is fairly rare.

The other alternative therefore is not to get too attached to models that don't have the latest features and to regularly look for new ones on the fs servers that do.

I have to confess that I've oftem made do because I like a particualr aircraft only to find I've been missing out for ages on something even better because I hadn't bothered to look! Remember that model makers are looking for new opportunities all the time

[WebbPA]

In this case I was dealing with an FS98 or 2K B-1B that didn't have any lights on it.  I got the beacons and strobes installed but got hung up on the landing lights.

As far as I know the only other B-1B is the I3D, which seems plagued with problems.

That's just another thing I need to look for when I get a new aircraft.

[fisharno]

I read here that you can add lines to the .cfg file to make the existing landing lights brighter. I don't have an example in front of me, at the moment, (I'm at work), but say your .cfg file has something like:

(Just a crude example)

[Lights]
Landing_NoseWheel=19.996, 17.000, 37.0

You can add another exact line after the first one, so it looks like this:

[Lights]
Landing_NoseWheel=19.996, 17.000, 37.0
Landing_NoseWheel=19.996, 17.000, 37.0

This gives you a Nose Wheel landing light that is twice as bright as before.

I've done this to a couple of planes, and they look great from the tower view when you're landing. But, it still won't visibly illuminate the ground in front of you.