Light over Ground Poly

Jirayu Tanabodee, Thailand

1/11/2012

Nowadays we often make ground poly over the default texture generated by AFCAD
to make it more realistic and more beautiful. But the draw back from this is the light will
be vainished. Since what produce by AFCAD has lower priority to what produce by Gmax.
There are choices to do the light in Microsoft Flight Simulator:

1. Default light from AFCAD: You can make AFCAD light visible by make some
transparency to the texture that cover it. Such as making the edge of the runway
with some degree of transparency and the light will be visible. A little bit dimmer
than default but easy to make. No frame rate problem.

2. Effect Placement: You need to make a box and use the script from
FSdeveloper.com . This take some time to make and knowledge to modify effect.

3. Scasm Light: It is made by the old code back to FS2000. It is easy to make and
bright. But someone report frame rate problem with FSX.

4. Blg light command: Using LIGHT_NAV in gmax material and export with FS2004
game pack. Then tweak the asm code. This is convenient and easy to make but
the light have no scale. When you are far away, all the light will be clumped
together like a big ball of light and too bright.

5. Polygon and Texture: In FSX, you can use polygon and texture. By using light
bloom property, you can get a light glow too. But turning bloom on has severe
impact on fps.
 You can have a lot of choices in making light. In this tutorial, I'll do only SCASM
light using Airport for Windows. You can get from flightsim.com by searching for file
name “a26b122.zip”

Setup AFW
Now you got the program. The first thing is to set it up for our airport. The
version earlier you might set up the path to Scasm.exe. But the new version everything is
in the pack.
We will begin making our airport light now. Click on 1 Setting-> General and setup
the parameter according to what you can get from AFCAD or ADE (2). You have to input

the information of your airport but the reference point is the center of the runway that you
are making. Not the reference point of the entire airport. Make sure that you put the
height of the airport right. It has to match with the AFCAD file. Save your file right now
and name it as you wish but it should be short like ICAO code, no space allow.
Next, you have to go back to the background and find the center point of the
background
 Right click on the center and see the menu, choose to make runway(2).

Then you will see the pop up window. You need to input all the information that
you have in AFCAD or ADE. Fill out everything you know from AFCAD file (3). The most
important thing is the runway surface (star). You need to put invisible into this drop down
list.

Now you have your runway, then it is time to make light. Click on the tab below
“Lights and Thresholds”. Then fill out all the information about the light. You can take a
look at AFCAD and ADE. One thing that you need to do it right is choosing the VASI (
arrow) instead of PAPI below even you want to make Papi light. Put a check box there
and input all the data. The drop down list of Papi is as this figure below.

It’s time to make scasm code. Close the window and you will see your runway. Go
to menu File-> Generate SCASM code from Airport. Once you click on it, the yellow
window will show up and you will get the code where you save your file in.
You have to open that file by using note pad.
You need to raise the light a bit above the
height of the airport. In my example I add 0.5
meter to the height.
Then you can copy SCASM.exe to the
folder that you have the code then drag it over
SCASM.exe. It will generate bgl file. You have
to rename it into something that make you
recall this file. I rename it into
AirportXXXRwyYYLight to make you know what
it is later on.
Take new bgl file to the folder Scenery
and see how it change.
If you want to make a new runway, you
need to do it all over again in another file but
only different reference point of the runway
center. And do the same way that you have
done.
Before SCASM light, the light from AFCAD covered with ground poly runway. The
approach light you see is over photoscenery in FSX. The other runway further is
the default AFCAD light.

After input the light from SCASM code, the light is visible over ground poly.