Hi all,
For info, this is NOT about 3D lights on the plane, but about the "illuminated ground" part of the landing light. That ugly white triangle(s) on the ground, that is
Recently I have tried, without success, to find a replacement for the landing lights beams on the ground. The triangles appearing in front of my planes on the ground are really looking terrible. In fact, they even prevent me from seeing anything on the ground, because the triangle is almost opaque and way too clear. In the end, it's easier to taxi at night WITHOUT landing lightst than with them...
So I tried to find a replacement texture for these triangles. In FS9, I could find some, I can remember that I was using some nice stuff which came from a package I can't remember anymore. However, instead of white triangles, the landing lights looked like a nice round/oval beam on the ground.
In FSX or P3D, I couldn't find such a package, so I tried to make my own. But since I'm really not a texture artist, this is more difficult than I expected.
A bit of technical information:
- The texture which is drawn in that triangle is called spotlight.bmp.
- In FS9, that texture in simple BMP file.
- In FSX or P3D, it's DXT1.
- In FS9, it seems that the texture is displayed from bottom up. In P3D it's the contrary: the top part of the texture is the nearest from the plane.
I took some FS9 package I found in avsim and tried to modify the spotlight.bmp provided inside.
Basically, I flipped the texture upside down, converted it to DXT1 and moved the "start" of the beam picture a bit down so that it would not reach the borders of the triangle (so that the borders are not visible anymore, so that the thing doesn't look like a triangle anymore).
The texture was low resolution 256x256. I'm pretty sure it can be bigger but didn't have the energy to try anymore. It took me so much time to find a correct position for the start of the texture, I wasn't motivated to do anything else after that
Anyways, here's how far I got until now. The lights look much better and they are finally usefull for taxiing, since they don't mask the ground anymore. They are still lacking a bit of brightness, and they are still a bit too much distant from the plane, but they are enjoyable enough. I'm simply wondering if anybody has any freeware recommendation for this ?
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