Feelthere Embraer E170/190 v3 SP2 P3D v5

[Zcloudman]

Hi All,

 

VC Cockpit lights do not work.  I have the FSLabs Spotlights Addon. Disabling or enabling this has no effect, so I don't think this is interfering. I also have GSX installed.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Steve

 

P3D v5  FeelThere E-jets 170/190 v3 Sp2.

RTX 2080 Super, i9 10900K, Windows10

[scoobflight]

V3 of the Ejets was made for P3DV4.

Using the simulation on P3DV5 is hit and miss along with some having success and others not (shows how each system: GPU, addons, settings, etc; makes a huge difference).

[Zcloudman]

On 2/5/2021 at 8:20 AM, scoobflight said:

V3 of the Ejets was made for P3DV4.

Using the simulation on P3DV5 is hit and miss along with some having success and others not (shows how each system: GPU, addons, settings, etc; makes a huge difference).

I just now noticed lights won't turn on during the day.; it has to be night.  All this time, I didn't know this.  Part of my problem is that I was trying to get the lights on at dusk and it still was not night "enough", I guess.   They all work - not the best, but better than nothing.

 

Thanks

[Neil Hewitt]

From pulling the aircraft apart, the cockpit lighting including backlighting is done using emissive textures. You'll note that in the dark when you turn the lights on, the textures reload - that's because it's pulling in the 'lit-up' textures from the disk. There's no actual dynamic light in the cockpit that I can find.

As to why they turn off when they do - I can't find a reason for it in any of the stuff I could inspect. It happens at a fixed time relative to local sunrise, from what I can see, but changing the sim's night / day settings to keep lights on longer into the morning doesn't stop it from happening. Of course, the textures would not look realistic in full daylight which is probably why the devs chose this method. But IMHO all lights should be available at all times regardless - they are in the real aircraft - as they would be needed in dark conditions / IMC etc. 

EA in V5 makes it worse because HDR can make the cockpit interior look shadowy and dark even at midday. 

Unfortunately, fixing this properly would probably mean re-doing the lights entirely and moving to dynamic lighting. Obviously we don't know what FT's priorities and workload are - and I wouldn't expect any business to tell us what they were doing in such detail - but it would be nice to know if this problem is being looked at in the internal V5 build they've mentioned they have.

P3D V5 is getting pretty short shrift in many case due to the 'MSFS effect', and I don't blame developers for going where the money is, but MSFS is largely useless for cockpit builders and advanced users who need multi-monitor support or may have advanced display configurations and advanced hardware interfacing needs, and it looks like it will be for quite some time. Meantime we're left out in the cold 😞 

[Neil Hewitt]

Quick update on the above - as I should have realised, all the emissive textures in the sim turn on and off at the same time (which is when a certain darkness / lightness threshold is reached). So basically the lights in the cockpit, being emissive textures, turn off when the sim thinks it's daytime. And turn on when it thinks it's night-time.

EDIT: remove the info about tweaks I had originally posted. It's now become clear these settings don't work in P3D 5.1 HF1. Not sure about v4.x.

The real solution to this issue is actual dynamic lights in the cockpit and custom effects for the backlights, as far as I can see, so it will only happen if FeelThere / Aeroplane Heaven re-implements the lighting. Though I know some people are using FS Labs Spotlights successfully - if anyone knows of a way to bind a key to turn Spotlights on and off, I'd be very greatful to hear about it, as this is the main thing stopping me from using it.