active Runway Lights at KSTS for FSX

[mnowinski]

I just did my first landing at the ORBX KSTS - Sonoma Co. airport on Rwy 32.  Time of day was approx. 09:45 am and weather condition was scattered fog from 1000' to 3000'.  At about 1 nm from TD, I couldn't see the runway or any lights.  At about 1/4 nm the runway came into sight and I was able to make a landing.  What I noticed was that the runway lights were not activated and was curious to know why.  After finishing my flight, I reset the aircraft short of and above the runway and changed the time to 7:00 pm (Dusk) and the runway lights were turned on.

 

Is there any coding in the scenery for KSTS that limits the lights being activated only during the hours of darkness?  I have been under the impression that runway lights were on day and night.

 

Thanks,

Mike

[Bruce Hamilton]

Pretty sure that's a sim limitation, they aren't on during the day.

[Nick Cooper]

I have been told that this is because (some or all?) the airports don't use default FSX\P3D

runway lighting. At the moment, these are only responsive to the time of day.

Default daytime lighting does indeed come on when the visibility is 2 miles\3.2 km or less.

There is work in the background which will eventually enable the developers to include

lighting which does also respond to poor daytime visibility.

In the meantime, the runway lighting looks much better than the default.

[mnowinski]

Thanks Bruce and Nick,

 

I went back and confirmed that at two other non-ORBX airports that the only lights that came on were the VASI, PAPI etc and some end lights.  No edge lights or ILS lights (MALSR etc).  As mentioned, just curious as to whether there was some under-cover coding happening.

 

The ORBX lights do look better than the default as well.

[Adam Banks]

In P3Dv3, I get runway lights quite successfully in low-vis (1m or less) even at mid-day ... for default airports. Eg.NZAA. I have FSX NZNI, but no FTX Global.

 

By coincidence, I also have KSTS. Only the one runway (32) has approach lights, but I can't persuade them to come on in low-vis like I can for NZAA.

 

Adam.

[Adam Banks]

I must admit I'm confused about runway lighting in P3Dv3/ORBX.
 

Here's NZNI with the default NZAA - around mid-day, with visibility set to 1m:

 

Pretty decent lights, IMHO. But KSTS shows nothing during the day (night time is fine):
\\

 

Adam.

[Finni Hansen]

Hi Adam.

The NZ airports use default fsx lights. Those are hardcoded, and will turn on during low visibility.

The ones used in ksts and most other orbx sceneries are custom made. This means they often look better, and also performs very good. They can be controlled via Objectflow to turn on at certain hours of day (or night), but we currently cannot make them turn on during low vis.. A compromise has to be made here, as you see.

However, as I told nick, we are working on some new functions in objectflow, so hopefully we will be able to get this working in the near future. As well as pilot controlled lighting

Finn

[Adam Banks]

Finni - many thanks for the explanation ... I think I get it now ... I thought I was going mad! Pilot controlled lighting would be *awesome*!!!

 

Adam.