No NavLights and beacons on some planes and helicopters ....

[Fireball6]

Today i notice that a lot of my planes and helicopters have no navlights or beacons. I can switch them on but did not see any beacon flashing or navlights. Never had this before and i did absolut not know why this happend.

Anyone have an idea what causes this problem ? All effects are in the main effect-folder.

Any help or suggestion would be very welcome

Kind regards

Dirk

[falcon409]

Do the effects coincide with what's called for in the aircraft.cfg file? Is this a case where they worked and then suddenly stopped working? Odd to have something like that happen for sure.

[MrZippy]

Take a look through your FSX/Effects/Texture folder. You may want to be sure you see BEACON.bmp, NAV_Green.bmp, NAV_Red.bmp, NAV_White.bmp. You may also be surprised at some of the garbage pictures you might have unknowingly downloaded and installed over the years

[Fireball6]

Take a look through your FSX/Effects/Texture folder. You may want to be sure you see BEACON.bmp, NAV_Green.bmp, NAV_Red.bmp, NAV_White.bmp. You may also be surprised at some of the garbage pictures you might have unknowingly downloaded and installed over the years

Hello MrZippy,

thanks for your suggestion - no, i did not have the .bmp's in my FSX/Effects/Texture folder.

All the Best

Dirk

[Fireball6]

Do the effects coincide with what's called for in the aircraft.cfg file? Is this a case where they worked and then suddenly stopped working? Odd to have something like that happen for sure.

Hello falcon409,

yes they are all in the FSX/Effects folder. Some aircraft and helicopters have no entries in the aircraft.cfg (ND AS350). Thanks for your suggestion.

All the Best

Dirk

[WarHorse47]

Today i notice that a lot of my planes and helicopters have no navlights or beacons. I can switch them on but did not see any beacon flashing or navlights. Never had this before and i did absolut not know why this happend.

Anyone have an idea what causes this problem ? All effects are in the main effect-folder.

Any help or suggestion would be very welcome

Kind regards

Dirk

Hi Dirk.

Which aircraft are without navlights or beacons? Specifically are you referring to the stock MS aircraft or addon aircraft? What is your default aircraft when you load the sim? And did you make any changes to your default flight like setting up a "cold & dark" flight?

There are a couple things you can do to track down the problem. One is to remove your default flight and load one of the default MS aircraft. Another is to delete the fsx.cfg file and let the sim recreate it, then load a default MS aircraft and see if you have lights as expected.

Default and earlier addon aircraft typically have the navlights, etc., entered in the aircraft.cfg file. More recent addons have them coded into the aircraft model which means you will not see entries in the aircraft.cfg file. All of the lights are dependent on the aircraft electrical system which includes the battery and the generator. I've experienced electrical failures (lights, gps, gauges, etc.) when the generator was not active and the battery would run down, so I've had to create keyboard shortcuts to turn on both.

[Fireball6]

Thank you very much for all your suggestions and support - meanwhile i was able to solve the problem - thanks to MrZippy

I deinstalled a few old addons and two demo's - and it looks to me that one of them, unfortunately i did not exactly know which one of them, remove the .bmp's from my FSX/Effects/texture folder.

Now they are back in the folder and everything works like it should - by that way, i never thought about how many payware addons use them ....

So thank you again to all who offered me assistence - i am proud to be a member here, one of the greatest communities i ever know !

All the best

Dirk

[WarHorse47]

Ahhh.. good to hear.

I never would have thought of looking at the effects/texture folder as recommended by MrZippy. Now I wonder how many *.bmp files I've lost over the years and what I can do to prevent that.

[MrZippy]

Ahhh.. good to hear.

I never would have thought of looking at the effects/texture folder as recommended by MrZippy. Now I wonder how many *.bmp files I've lost over the years and what I can do to prevent that.

I was just lucky when it was mentioned that all of the effects files were there. Somehow I remembered that inside those files are callouts for .bmps.

I would recommend being very careful about using any downloads that use auto-installers. You never know what they are putting/overwriting in your Sim

[WarHorse47]

I was just lucky when it was mentioned that all of the effects files were there. Somehow I remembered that inside those files are callouts for .bmps.

I would recommend being very careful about using any downloads that use auto-installers. You never know what they are putting/overwriting in your Sim

I don't think we can solve the problem of poorly created auto-installers that overwrite such files without notification of any kind, then delete the entire file upon uninstalling. I don't know how many times I've updated an addon by first undeleting and reinstalling the updated product using their auto-installer.

It would be nice if someone developed a simple product that would scan the effects files and reported on any missing associated texture files so you can do a repair or at least have some knowledge of what was removed.

[Rudyjo]

Your lucky you were able to get things working.
About a month ago I also found out that many of the lights and all the engine startup smoke no longer worked.
I went to check my EFFECTS folder and got the message "Effects folder is empty". Somehow the whole thing got deleted.
I did a "REPAIR" by reinstalling FSX. That got things working that used default effects files.
Every plane I use is payware that often use their own effects for lights and smoke.
So I had to reinstall every plane I had to get the effects for those planes back.
What a mess, I must have spent over a week getting everything working.
The only upside to this is that I did get rid of a lot of stuff I have not used for years.