investigating Lighting - WHOGX5

[NineLine]

From This thread:

https://forum.dcs.world/topic/350326-dcs-f-16c-early-access-whats-left-whats-next/?do=findComment&comment=5471117

Quote

 

- Lighting: Some things are completely missing, like the external IR emitters which our tape and block of DCS F-16C should have, being selectable through the COVERT modes to allow external lighting at night which isn't visible to the naked eye, and also to only illuminate the lights on top of your aircraft, to stop ground threats from spotting you. If you look at the the external lights through NVGs, you'll see that the green lights seem to be NVIS compatible, but the red lights will completely fry your retina. Cockpit flood lights have very low intensity even at the max setting, and also little to no light scattering, meaning they don't actually flood the cockpit. They're more like focused spotlights, leaving many parts of the cockpit completely in the dark, even at full intensity, including the new pilot body kneeboard which is completely unreadable at night even with every single internal light source set to maximum. On the topic of spotlights, the actual Cockpit Spotlights under the glareshield are completely inop. The Cockpit Spotlights are also the only light source in the entire aircraft which are usable purely with battery power, and are commonly used in real life to monitor engine instruments during startup at night. They are also used to illuminate the pilot body kneeboard when the pilot don't want to illuminate the entire cockpit with flood lights, in order to be more NVG friendly. In addition to these points, there are also issues with light intensities. Some lights like the left indexer or external formation lights, etc., usually go from slightly dim to quite bright between 0% and 5%, and then every setting above is just almost indistinguishable amounts of extreme brightness. With other lights, most notably the cockpit flood lights, you can barely see them at all between 0% and 50% intensity, and then they go up to kinda bright at 100%. This becomes even more troublesome because of the way light brightness works in the F-16C, because when the flood lights are set to high brightness, every other malfunction and indicator light in the cockpit will go to max brightness too. This means that we can't have a bit of flood lighting without getting completely blinded by every other light source. Some lights also don't seem to be NVIS compatible at all, especially the RWR panel which is extremely bright and will wash out your NVGs. The right indexer lights seem fully NVIS compatible and won't blind you even on max brightness, while the left indexer will wash out your entire NVGs at max brightness, and still be very bright at only a few percents intensity.

 

Locked as I investigate