Lights SS FS9 scenery objects by Sidney Schwartz
[email protected]

This is a collection of lighting objects for FS9. It includes ramp lights, street lights, and smaller lights for mounting on the outsides of buildings. These are standard FS9 scenery objects and can be placed using EZ-Scenery or other programs that are able to use FS9 scenery libraries.

Making FS9 objects that appear to cast light is difficult (at least for someone with limited technical knowledge like me). These are actually the landing lights FS9 uses for aircraft, but repositioned and angled. Since these lights were designed to look best when positioned horizontally, the effect is not always as good as I'd like, but it's the best I could do. I modified the bitmap slightly (see installation instructions) and used some other tweaks to give better results. These lights can impact your frame rates if you have and older system and use a lot of them in your scenery. These lights only illuminate FS9 surface textures...they will not illuminate aircraft or other scenery objects. Sorry, this is a built in FS9 limitation. 

My thanks to all the scenery designers who figured this trick out, and to Arno Gerretsen for his MDL Tweaker II and other tools. 

Installation
============

(These objects may share some textures with other object libraries of mine. If asked if you want to overwrite existing files, say yes.)

For all users:
1. Unzip files into temporary location.

2. The easiest way to install these objects is to copy lights ss 1.bgl into your FS9 Addon Scenery/Scenery folder, and all bmp files, except spotlight.bmp, into your FS9 Addon Scenery/Texture folder. Or, if you are familiar with how FS9 scenery folders work you can put them in any active scenery folder of your choice.

3. Find spotlight.bmp in your Flight Simulator 9/Texture folder, make a backup copy of it, and then replace it with the spotlight.bmp I've provided. This is the image that FS9 uses for landing and taxi lights. I've modified it slightly to improve the appearance of these lighting objects. As far as I can tell, this modification makes no difference in the appearance of the landing and taxi lights on the aircraft. Even so, you should keep your backup of spotlight.bmp in case you should decide that you prefer it.

For EZ-Scenery users:
Also copy lights SS 1.txt into the same folder as lights SS 1.bgl. This will provide descriptive names for the objects in the EZ-Scenery program.

Credits
=======
I use the following programs to make scenery and scenery objects:

Modeling: 
Gmax by Discreet
MDL Tweaker II by Arno Gerretsen
CAT by Arno Gerretsen

Library BGL creation:
EZ-Library Manager by Arno Gerretsen

Object placement and scenery BGL creation: 
EZ-Scenery by Abacus
Library Object Manager/Scenery Creator by Jon Masterson
Library Ojbect Viewer by Jon Masterson

Graphics: 
Lview Pro by CoolMoon Corp.
DXTBmp by Martin Wright

Terms of Use
============
These objects may used by anyone by any means in FREEWARE scenery only. You may distribute them as long as you distribute the entire package, unchanged, inlcuding this readme file.