MacCekko

Lizz, first of all, sorry for the horrible delay in my answer, but I've read yhis thread only now. As for your answer, you may want to try the dataref "sim/graphics/animation/lights/normal" which is stated (inside Datarefs.txt inside X-Plane folder) that is "float" Dr with "[9]" indexes, non writable and affects lights so that they are ON at night, but i guess OFF at day. I have found that DataRef tied at LIGHT_SPILL_CUSTOM lights often inside lights.obj from Aerosoft sceneries. So, I guess it works after all...! I was looking deeper in the matter of LIGHT_SPILL_CUSTOM (as searched in Google with this whole word) and I found your post. I hope that you have solved your issue since almost a year ago, but if you did not, well... I hope I have been of some help. Ciao, Cekko™

Tom, I have proceeded in upgrading somehow the Florence Peretola scenery so that now it has an "interesting" use of spill lights, if I may say so, that incredibly do not seem to kill the framerate. Although I have read many time the "Lights.txt" document, I still have a couple of doubts, though: 1 - is there a way to have a billboard light that is ON during daytime? I have put some custom_halos on the ceilings of some opened hangars and I loved to have a spill light even during daytime (and I did), but, in fact, I get the spill but I don't get the billboard (oh, BTW, the spill light on the floor during daylight is AMAZING!!!). Provided that is almost irrelevant since nobody is gonna take a look at the ceilings from the inside, it would be perfect to control a billboard that is lit during the day. It should also need to be coloured, but this it's not essential. 2 - Much more important: is there a way to get a custom_halo that blinks/flashes during daytime? For some cars and trucks I have used the "LIGHT_NAMED PD_ltbar_1a" (and 1r, and 1w, etc, used over the top of X-Plane library Police cars), but they are simple billboards and NOT spill lights. So, is there a way to get custom_halos to flash somehow? I was thinking of using an airplane strobe (provided I cannot add colour to them), but I wouldn't wanna mess with airplane lights inside objects that in fact are NOT aircrafts, since those lights tend to behave in a so different manner and so thet are way better when left alone, in my personal opinion. Your help as always would be precious. Thank you so very much...!

And this IS the answer that I was hoping for, my dear Tom!!! You have an anser handy for every question, this is incredible!!! Excellent! I'll try to post s few shots with your new lights, so that you can see the difference and more to the point, others, if ever interested in this matter. Again, thank you so very much!!

Oh God, with your help I finally did it! Is it possible that you could be mistaken in writing the "kind" of light? I am asking (and please excuse me: I certainly don'twant to appear rude), because you used a light of type "named" instead a light of type "param" in your example (and I guess is a typo) as I instead did, but after some tries the result was: LIGHT_PARAM full_custom_halo 0.000000 26.866600 0.000000 255 170 130 0.015 220 0.0 -0.6 -0.6 0.000while before they were: LIGHT_PARAM sodium_flood_XYZBTSS 0.000000 26.866600 0.000000 0.0 -0.6 -0.6 2.5 300 0.6 0.0as they appeared here (from a thread at X-Plane.it): (I hope not to exceed the maximum image dimension and size and resolution and quality admitted buy this forum; if so, I apologize. Please feel free to reduce them or delete them as rules state) Now instead they look astonishingly good! The result is incredible!!! I'll look forward to do some tweaking into their parameters tomorrow (now I am so tired and a bit drunk... You know, going out with some firends and drinking red tuscan wine and vodka after the meal, well... ehm ehm, it doesn't help too much! ) but the result seems beautiful...! Tomorrow I'll fine tune it! And I'll report my improvements along with some screenshots, possibly. Now Florence Peretola LIRQ appears to be looking finer and finer, and that wouldnt' have been accomplished without your incredible help. Help for with I am grateful. Thank you, Tom, from the bottom of my heart. Be well. PS: Hmmm... are we absolutely SURE that those kind of lights are switching OFF during daytime...? I continued in my tests and it seems that they are ON even under plain sunlight... Am I wrong (I hope so)?

Hmmm, I've found a light "full_custom_halo" inside the document "lights.txt" in X-Plane 10.20 folder. It is listed under "Sergios' and Kriss's lights for buildings" more or less. The document reports: # Name R G B A Size Dx Dy Dz Width#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------#LIGHT_PARAM_DEF full_custom_halo R G B A S X Y Z F Is this the one you were referring to? If you could take the time to explain a bit better to my weak mind the meanings of all the parameters, I'd appreciate it very much (although I guess I could try to figure it out by myself...) I am sorry to bother, but it would be better that I understand the whole matter before I started creating lights with trial and error, that means dozens of scenery reloadings every time when not getting some good crashes. Thank you very much. Cheers.

Hmmm, I am still trying to find some time to look deeper into your kind answer, and I will do it most certainly in the week end most likely (although I am hoping that it would be earlier), but my firts question regarding this "named light" is: will it cast a spill on my aprons? if so, it would be GREAT (since it would solve my billboard matter), otherwise I'll try to better understand the matter of vector coordinates. If I could be able to fully understand that matter, I might become more easily in control of the "slopeness" of the light cone, so that I really could try to put the cone top right inside the bulb. This way I wouldn't be able to recognize the billboard, but if I could see it, most likely I simply would mix the two billboards appearing and the result would be obtained this way as well, although, i guess, with less energy expense... Anyway, if in the mean time you will write more info about the new named light "FULL_CUSTOM HALO" I will look forward to use it. Thank you so much, your help is simply invaluable!!

Ooohh, I am so honoured to receive a direct answer from an X-Plane developer, like Tom Kyle, noless...!! Ok, then, billboards are not hide-able, I was fearing such an answer. Now I will get deeper inside your kind explanation and try your suggestions. Will report back here in a while if I will find something unclear in your answer, or later on if I will be able to proceed in testing new light poles that in fact cast spill light. Thank you so very much Tom!!

Hello Tom, hello everybody. I am wondering if is there a way in Tom's PARAMeterized light "LIGHT_PARAM sodium_flood_XYZBTSS" to hide the light billboard that appears at the top of the light ideal "cone". I am asking this since I have created an airport scenery (Florence Peretola LIRQ, Tuscany, Italy, available for free at X-Plane.org since 2010) that in XP10 with HDR during night time is illuminated by more or less standard aprons lamps that cast their light on every apron (in Peretola there are two) with their 6 arms and 6 bulbs each. Now, my problem is that I could not put a spill light in EVERY light bulb, otherwise I would kill the framerate (I mean, KILL it more than I just did!), but I need some 6 to 8 lit areas on every apron. So I thought i could use a single light cone with no visible structure and place every one of them in particular places around every apron in WED. And so I did! But I've noticed that little billboard lights appear right in the sky in the middle of nowhere. I could try to create these "cones" in a way that every cone top could more or less coincide with the apron lamps themselves (so if I had a billboard, they at least could be hidden by the apron lamps billboards that in fact are already in place), but I am having some troubles in determining the perfect allignment of the cone for the first three coordinates X, Y and Z, that some say are simple coordinates, but reading different people's different answers, they appeat as well to be calculations of some other kind. I guess that I am having troubles with coordinates in the first place since I am not using my regular 3D software that is AC3D, because an updated plugin to export OBJv10 is still missing AFAIK, but I am tweaking the PARAMeterized lights directly inside the compiled OBJv8 using a text editor. S, to me, only two possibilities here seem to appear: 1 - as said, create a "cone" of sodium flood light so that its top coincide with already existent apron lamps bulbs (billboards), but I have to understand better the coordinates matter. 2 - create two different apron lamps, one with two PARAM floodlight, and one with one PARAM floodlight, and TRY to place them adjusting their heading so that the final result (in terms of position of lit areas onto the aprons) are similar to what I have now. I hope I have been clear enough and I apologize, since english ìs not my mothertongue. If needed I could post some images, that may be much more self explanatory. Thank you very much for any help that you may give me. I appreciate it deeply. Cheers, Cekko™

Great!! Thank you Goran!!

First thing first, please excuse my poor choice of terms, but try to understand that I am struggling to express myself in a language that is not my mother tongue, and trying to find the correct words in describing the problem is really awfully hard for me, expecially while attempting to describe the fact using technical terms. Having said that, I cannot tell you much more than what I have already said (considering also what I've read that happened to other users in previous posts). Here's what happened, more or less: I had to disengage A/P as I was flying the aircraft only with HDG mode, activated shortly after take off, since the aircraft did not keep its heading: it began rolling slowly from side to side, as if it was trying to correct its route constantly but never reaching a mid point. Also, when I engaged the ALT A/P function, it began the same behaviour but this time not only on the horizontal axis, but also on the vertical one. So I had an aircraft going up and down and left and right constantly, although with slow movements; I even tried to correct this manually with my stick, but with no luck at all obviously since the stick has not much priority over the A/P functions. So I disengaged the A/P and after a bit I managed to fly in a stright line more or less, although it has been terribly difficult to keep it trimmed not to dive or to go up too much. I felt as if my stick wasn't centered at all, and terribly delayed in its response; I don't know if you can understand what I am saying, anyway this is the sensation I had... It was a very short route (a few dozens of miles) and I tried to keep some 4.000 ft. Eventually I began my descent, visibility was horrible since it was reduced so much by real weather at a poor couple of miles if not even less, but I knew a bit the terrain and I had my VOR, ADF and ILS instruments set correctly so I could manage a decent descent towards the correct point in space. At short final I began a too steep dive and since I couldn't keep the heading even with A/P completely turned off, I tried to reach the runway but with no luck. In the end, I managed to enter the field but without being able to stay on the runway that I crossed diagonally from side to side, reaching its left side with a too steep AOA, crashing on the ground. That's all. I cannot describe what happened with better words, I guess. In brief the aircraft doesn't keep heading, and it doesn't keep altitude: with A/P engaged (HDG and ALT) it rolls form side to side, and pitches up and down continuously. Flown in manual mode, it gives the impression that I had a misalligned stick, but it wasn't of course. I had the impression I was not in air, but in honey, meaning... so dense! The aircraft seemed to be responding to stick movements in a very delayed way. Whenever I tried to manually correct, it began a similar behaviour but after a lot of trimming I managed to fly in the way I've described to you, here and in my previous posts. Ah, nearly forgot: I keep my flight models number at 2 at least in the sim so I don't think that it could be a possible cause... Now I litterally do not know what to add anymore... Bye.

Yep, I know, my bad, but I prefer 10.10 since I get a lot less Memory errors and crashes on my Mac, therefore I keep this one. I have 10.11 installed, but I don't use it: I guess I'm keeping it to test 10.20 at 64-bit when more and more plugins will be converted; I upgraded once to that version but I trashed it in 15 seconds flat, as nothing was working! Anyway, a few friends at x-plane.it who have bought the Duchess have flown it under X-Plane 10.11 and some even with X-Plane 10.20 but it seems that it always presents itself with the same problems. So I see no need to upgrade to XP10.11 just for a plane that it would continue to misbehave anyway. I hope you can see and understand my point. Instead under XP9.7 it flew perfectly, I remember that. How strange... Anyway, thank you Cameron for your very fast answer. I really hope problems will be solved soon. Cheers,

Sorry to point out that it doesn't fly good at all. Or better, under XP9 it flies quite well, but under XP10.10r3 it flies... horribly. With or without A/P it simply doesn't keep heading and roll steady. Even in manual, that is, it's almost uncontrollable. Sorry, but although I have version 1.2 since the start I cannot use it. Just yesterday evening I attempted a land and I crashed at the side of the runway with the aircraft destroyed because of Structure Over-G... I certainly am not the perfect pilot, but I am flying in X-Plane since version 7.6, so I guess I can say that this aircraft is behaving strangely to say the least. It's a pity, since I love it and I find this creature particularly beautiful, expecially as for the textures! Hope you can help us. I am not even complaining that I have paid for it (I bought it along with LES DC-3 in november 2012), I am only sad to announce that I cannot use it anymore. If something could be done in this sense by the developers, I'd love it. Thank you very much. ______________iMac 27" (Mid 2011), Intel Core i7 Quad 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2 Gb VRAM, 16 Gb SDRAM OS X 10.6.8 64-bit • Saitek Cyborg FLY 5 & Pro Flight Rudder Pedals & Throttle Quadrant • TrackIR v5-LinuxTrack • X-Plane 9.70 & 10.10r3