ANSWERED Wartime Europe - How to turn off the lights

[bruce e]

At first glance this sounds really daft as the new lights are brilliant, but that is the problem.

 

I am putting together a scenario set in wartime 1943 in Europe & because of blackout restrictions I need to place the landscape in darkness. Is this possible & if so how?

[dickb]

Not daft at all - I'd like to know too ! And for the same reason. But I bet it ain't possible

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi there,

 

currently, with the FTX regions all you need to do is to use the FTX Day/Night switch to get rid of all 3D night lights. With FTX Global that's not possible as they are part of the "vegetation" autogen and thus you'd need to turn off all autogen to deactivate them. In either case though you'd still see the night variants of the landclass ground textures with their light "splashes" and it would require good knowledge of the FSX landclass texture naming convention and the use of some black replacement textures to switch all those, and there are hundreds of them in each region and FTX Global. And then there would still be the night textures of any photoreal sections, which are embedded in their respective .bgl files and can only be changed by the original author...

 

Cheers, Holger

[bruce e]

Thanks Holger, not the answer I was hoping for but is the one I expected.

 

I'll have to put an extra dark lens in my glasses 

[Hangar200]

Well you could conduct strikes on the the applicable power plants . . . maybe take out a strategic substation or two . . . oops my former career* coming through 

 

(*US Naval officer; well versed in carrier operations)

 

[dickb]

At least we know why it ain't possible !

 

I was just thinking - this is one situation where we would welcome those black texture squares that most of us have encountered at some time or other in FSX !

[bruce e]

Or maybe the option in FTX Central to revert to "Default"

[Hangar200]

OK, a little more serious thought into this this time (i.e. I've stopped programing TOMOHAWK missiles)  

 

Let's take a simplistic approach now that we understand the limitations .

 

What did the Europe look like at night in 1943?  - tough question - really too big an area to enforce a total black out.  Then there was Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Ireland - all neutral and therefore not impacted by the black out.  By contrast, I bet the UK in the late summer of 1940 was a much more effective, homogenous  black out - AND we have in FTX the 4 components of the UK at war - England, Wales, Scotland, N Ireland - but not Ireland (neutral) - possibly we can start with that.

 

Holger raises the key points - the very difficult things you would need to do if you wanted to "turn off the lights" - possible but difficult.  OK, take his first suggestion - using FTX Day/Night to turn off the lights.  Since we are not talking about FTX Global, this should work.

 

The next bit is the more difficult part - maybe.   Holger states "In either case though you'd still see the night variants of the landclass ground textures with their light "splashes" and it . . . And then there would still be the night textures of any photoreal sections, which are embedded in their respective .bgl files and can only be changed by the original author..."

 

  OK  way too much work redo tile by tile only to get stuck at photo real scenery.  

 

  But what about the day textures?  I'm probably wrong but . . .

 

  In FSX scenery design, if you don't add a night texture to an object, the day texture is plainly seen.  However, since the rest of the FSX environment is darkened, so is the day texture.  It is not very dark as one might imagine (for that effect you need to add a black night texture) but neither is it the same brightness as in the day - kind of looks like faint moon shining on it.  The light splashes are specific to the night textures (as they are in scenery objects) so don't appear in day textures.

 

  What would happen if one just substituted the day land class textures for the night textures?  . i.e. just rename all the day BGLs to their night counterparts (after backing up all the night BGLs of course).  Might be "moon lit" scenery but at least there shouldn't be light splashes.  And of course it doesn't sound like it would real work on a Europe 1943 scenario unless you turned off autogen to get rid of the 3-d lights.

 

  Just some thoughts.

 

Cheers!