Carrier night lighting

[GOONIE]

Folks, Paddles and I have been working (ok mainly Paddles has been working) on updating the night time lighting effects and textures for Javier's USS NIMITZ carrier.

We both felt the deck lighting, edge lights (blue/green), and tower flood lights are too bright and distracting for night time carrier ops. See attached files if you would like to try them out. Feel free to share your comments or thoughts. As always, back up your files before copy or using the attached.

Also, I am looking for help to identify which file(s) create the red drop lights on the carrier. I am looking to increase their brightness, but so far no joy.

Happy night landings!  

[Mickey_Techy]

Am sure you would have already tried it, but just to make sure.

Have you tried playing with 'Approach light scalars'?

[GOONIE]

Good call. I think they are at =0.6 in the FSX.cfg, is that too low?

[Mickey_Techy]

They would work differently for single or multi-monitor setup.

But, try tweaking it a upwards to 0.8 and thence to 1.2 and see if it makes any difference. But, be advised, it's going to be an FSX wide change, and you will see approach lights on field runways also brighter than what you are currently used to

[pyroperson87]

Thanks fellas. This is a much needed change for FSX carrier ops, especially Javier's "Darken Ship." I'm horrible with textures, so my personal fix was to simply delete the lights except the yellow-orange flood light. I'm stoked to try this out when I get home from work tonight!

[Paddles]

It appears that no effect file (.fx) is responsible for the red drop lights.
Even with the Effects folder completely removed these lights are still there (as well as deck lights and FLOLS).

[GOONIE]

No joy on increasing the value of the approach light scalar in the FSX.cfg file. I used 1.2, and it looked exactly the same.

Any other ideas? The brightness I am going for can be seen in the attached pic.

[pyroperson87]

Since it isn't an effect I'm assuming that it's something hardcoded into the model, right? If that's the case, wouldn't you just need to find the associated texture file for that portion of the model and tinker with it to achieve what you're looking for? I'll see if I can find anything, but I'm lousy at playing hide-n-seek with FSX texture files.

[GOONIE]

Thanks Pyro, let me know if you have any luck.

[pyroperson87]

Is it possibly one of the textures on lines.dds?  That's the only texture I see that bears even the slightest resemblance to the drop lights.

[GOONIE]

Might be, thanks for pointing it out. Now I need to learn how to edit/update a .dds file 

[pyroperson87]

Paint.net is free and I believe it has built in .dds support.

[Orion]

If you have the FSX SDK, you can use ImageTool to convert the DDS to a format more graphics editors are compatible with.  Alternatively, there's DXTBMP.  Here's a decent tutorial on FSX repainting.

[GOONIE]

Thanks guys, will give it a try.