Military AI Works

Hey guys, does anyone know of a tutorial for setting light locations. If I had a little better understanding, I could probably save whoever is doing the FDE some time and trouble. Right now I'm like a blind hog just messing with settings until something looks right.

Also, is there any way to check them out without firing up FS?

Thanks,

You could use ACM that's what I do. You can move them around and fine tune them.
Just be aware that the order that it shows the parms is different to the way that they are written in the .cfg fie.

aerogator wrote:Hey guys, does anyone know of a tutorial for setting light locations. If I had a little better understanding, I could probably save whoever is doing the FDE some time and trouble. Right now I'm like a blind hog just messing with settings until something looks right.

Also, is there any way to check them out without firing up FS?

Thanks,

Jake,

The difficult part of the process in positioning the various types of lights for me is in determining which ones are located where on the actual aircraft. After that it is pretty straight forward if a little arduous to adjust their coordinates to place them where they should be and I don't know of any simple way of getting around that.

So if you are trying to save me some work on AI FDE's, you only need to supply me with a description of what lights are located where on the actual aircraft. Of course a picture or diagram is worth a thousand words, so providing these would really help also.

Mike

Thanks guys for your replies.

@Steve: I'll take another look at ACM. There's a lot of useful stuff there I've never used.

@Mike: I 'll try to find pics of light locations from now on when I'm gathering my pictures and diagrams prior to starting a model I just never thought that far ahead.

Hey Jake, is that yellow thingie at the bottom of your signature. another surprise?

I sure hope it is!!

Can this be done with an unregistered copy of ACM?

Can this be done with an unregistered copy of ACM?

I'm not sure; one of my questions. I had a little time to look around ACM yesterday but was unable to do anything definitive. I found out how to move the lights, etc around but is there a way you can view them in ACM? My main complaint is having to start up FS after every change or does ACM just save the changes immediately to the .cfg and show them when you refresh the aircraft in fs. Sorry, but I just haven't had the time to try it yet.

And Felix and Lewis: yeah it's around here somewhere. Keep your eyes peeled.

You can't view the lights themselves in ACM only fine tune the position, you will still need to load it up to ensure that they work as you want them to. I haven't tried to refresh the aeroplane but it might work.

Jake you can make in game changes to the aircraft.cfg including the lights section and .air file and all you need to do is to select a different variation of the model to get it to reboot and display the new settings.

If you don't have a different variation, just make a new [fltsim.x] entry for the extra variation or select a completely different aircraft.

But it's quicker to do it with 2 varitions of the same model.



Don't quote me on this, but I thought you could get the Y,X, and Z coordinates from FSDS by creating a dummy part where you want the lights and then selecting F2 for part properties to get the coordinates.

Mike/Jake

In order for new lights and locations and many other new parametric settings in the aircraft.cfg file to load while you have FS9 open all you have to do is reset the FS9 time. However, for new lights this is only good for the light effect files present in the FS9 Effects folder when you opened that FS9 session.

Mike

Cool! Good to know.