A while back I described some of the new lighting features in version 10, including lighting calculations done in linear space.  The very short version of this is: X-Plane 10’s lighting will be more physically realistic, and this is important when you have a lot of lights shining all over the place.

The change doesn’t affect how you author content (you still texture your models and we shine the sun on them) but it has been a source of bugs, as we find all of the different parts of the sim that use lighting equations.  In the picture on the right, the landing light hasn’t been updated, and as a result, it lights up the city 2 miles away.  The picture on the left has the landing light turned off.

I kind of like the right hand version, but that’s why I’m not in charge of the overall “look” of the sim.

(Will the runway lights look that “splattery”?  Probably not, but I don’t know; Alex will be in charge of the final decision.  That picture is zoomed in, which makes the lights look a lot bigger, but also the tuning of the runway lights for size is only partially done right now.)

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

12 comments on “That’s One Powerful Landing Light”

  1. Shouldn’t dark nights be more lightened and not as black as the first picture (where everything is black, except the lights)?

  3. I second Nelson’s question; you might get pure black in some areas but certainly not under starry nights or in/over cities. But while we’re on landing lights, my project has two landing lights and two tip-tank taxi lights, and the only thing I can control is the angle of a single beam emanating from the center of the aircraft where there is no emitting source. Even worse, changing the beam angle of a light that’s off turns it on momentarily but I guess that was a shortcut done long ago.

    Just saying we need at the very least a shaped beam for landing lights and a different one for taxi lights. All that excellent and hard work on global lighting would go to waste if the light sources aren’t correct.

  4. One of my biggest complaints of flightsims vs real life is nightime lighting.

    In real life when I’m flying in my Piper Arrow III, the ground is very dark except for perhaps a few roads here and there, and parking lots that have bright lights. When on approach, I can rarely see taxiway lights except for a very faint outline.

    I remember one time coming into Vegas. The runway edge lights were turned up, and I couldn’t see taxiway lights. LITERALLY! I had no idea where to turn off at and ended up asking the tower for help finding a taxiway (via progressive) even with a ramp map.

    I’ve never flown near airports at 2,000ft and more than 2 miles that I think I could really see taxiway lights.

    If anything, can we have a way to tune them and turn them down?

  6. The post was supposed to be in the spirit of this:
    http://igetyourfail.blogspot.com/
    In other words, I posted the pictures because I thought the city lit up by the landing light was entertaining. Alex hasn’t tuned the airport lights since I took a whack at the shader, this picture is heavily zoomed, and no one has had a good look at night lighting and ambience levels. This is why we keep on not posting pics despite the gajillion requests a day.

    Now in terms of landing and spot lights and global lighting: I believe there will be a way for authors to leverage global lighting to get correct spot lights, taxi lights, and landing lights when the user is running with global lighting enabled; indeed the whole point of the feature is to let authors get these lighting effects right. I do not know what the interface will be yet, and there is no guarantee that it will be possible in Plane-Maker alone; you may have to make an OBJ.

    (Remember, there are already a number of rendering features that we require an OBJ for, and we will build starter OBJs for you to help you get there.)

  7. I Get Your Fail: Considered a failure if less than 85 metacritic. The picture is interesting, yes, even mildly humorous. Informative? We’ll take any scrap and eat it. Without jam. Or butter. On moldy bread. Mouldy for some of you…. Nice post, Curt. It was a sticky shutter.

  8. 1st Keyword : ‘development’… of course!
    2nd keyword: “Light attenuation”

    The intensity of a light traveling through the air decreases with distance.

    How long is that track? Can you see a little light -white, blue, yellow…- (edge, center) from opposite end of runaway … not just in a “horizontal plane” (without the irregularity of the terrain and termal effects that came from asphalt…) but when you are in APP, you are even further and there may be some cloudiness.

    Like Curt said… normally everything is dark and you only see the closest lights… just check out landing videos (not need to be a foggy night) in YT, Vimeo,…

    Anyways… it’s nice to see/read how XP10’s develop goes in its various areas.

  10. Actually it isn’t so ridiculous that landing lights light up the place. Once I was walking somewhere in the dark, about 8k feet under an approach route. Suddenly there was this dim search light, and it turns out an airplane turned on its landing lights. That was at, I don’t know, 50 degrees up? I was half a kilometer away from street lights, but it’s still a very strange experience.

    Can’t say anything about the experience of a pilot though, or whether their average eye condition plays a role. Just that as a casual, ground-based observer, night is far from pitch black (that’s moonless; full moon is even reminiscent of sunshine), and airport lighting looks really bright.

  11. Ben, speaking about lights, 3 ideas:
    1.-About the PAPI, right now lights changes in a binary manner from red/white, depending on the flight path, but in real life, you fine tune your descent much more easily, as the lights transition from one color to the other smoothly, I think the new lighting system may allow to simulate the viewable angle of the PAPI lights more realistically..
    2.-The same concept on the Navigation and Strobe lights, actually on X-Plane 9 you can see these lights -from the exterior- from any angle (that’s against the law!!)
    3.-Would it be possible to reflect the landing lights on both the clouds and rain (that would be awesome, it would give you a real sense of speed)

    Adolfo

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