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Spotlight turning on/off at certain positions in view


Kelly Dang

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Hello, I'm having issues with my spotlights where it would turn on/off when I look around in the cockpit. This usually only happens during the descent phase up until I land, and then it goes back to normal. It's a serious issue because when this happens the landing lights do not illuminate the ground, which is critical during night time landings. I attached a video to show you what happens. Not sure if anyone else is experiencing this problem? 

I also want to point out that I have disabled all the fslabs folders and files in windows defender just as directed. I installed spotlights with admin rights and run p3d as admin. 

spotlight-1516000088.mp4

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
6 hours ago, Lefteris Kalamaras said:

Apparently, their fix didn't really fix it... we'll report it back to them. The small video we can showcase the issue with will help.

I’ll see if I can reproduce the flight and get back to you

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Gerald Krutsch

I've seen this issue for the first time yesterday. With the release of v4.2 I did a clean OS install and a clean V4.2 install. I have not seen this in 4.1 strangely.

Also to mention: I have not seen this issue prior of installing the FSL...

I'm unsure if it's related to FSL since I installed addon's one at a time and after each new install I did 1 day and 1 night short 1:30h flights to ensure the system is stable and the addon is working. In other words: since v4.2 i have added each day 1 AddOn and flew each time the NGX on the 2 flights. Therefore some AddOns have seen many hours of flight and other have seen only 2-3 hours of flight in 2 sessions.

The latest AddOn was the FSL which performed excelent on the day flight. Yesterday I wanted to test the night flight and boom...the issue was there.

It was very strange at my end: the whole environment was so dark that you cold not see anything in the VC. I had to push the backlight and the brightness of my monitor up and also adjust the settings in the sim to slightly see where the buttons are. I managed to takeoff and in my first turn the flood lights started to go on and off...it was at this point where I understood that something is wrong.

I tried to restart the sim but the same black effect was present in all my planes (even in the NGX). After a PC restart, all was back to normal and I could revert the monitor and video settings back to normal.

I will uninstall FSL and make more flights at night to test the system stability. If it passes, I will put the FSL back and test again.

This will take time on my end but I will definately report back with my findings.

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Gerald Krutsch

Dear @Lefteris Kalamaras,

I found the following by mistake!

As I mentioned in my above post, I experienced the "flickering" lights only once during a strange "darker" environment. I can reproduce the darker environment 100% of the time!

Following steps:

1. New PC start - launch P3D --> everything looks good!

2. Close P3D and start another game (in my case it was World of Tanks which runs in full screen). For clarification: I'm running P3D only windowed!

3. Closing WoT, the Desktop looks already a bit darker.

4. Starting P3D again you won't be able to see any buttons in the VC in ANY plane :blink:.

The display returns to it's normal "brighter" state only after a restart of the PC.

Configuring WoT to run windowed, the brightness remains unchanged...

 

This sequence might  just work with any game or App that runs full screen.

Now I did not had the chance to test if the "flickering" is related to this darker display but I'l keep an eye on it.

 

EDIT: It is related to Freq. Although windows displays the monitor runs at 60Hz, I had to put it e.g. on 59Hz then back on 60Hz. This brought the brightness back to normal even during running WoT.

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Lefteris Kalamaras

Gerald,

my only comment on that would be: HOLY COW!

Great investigative work! Could you please report this to LM in their forums? I'd love to see their response...

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Gerald Krutsch

Well I would but at this point I'm uncertain if this darker environment has to do with:

- my HW (Grafic Card / Monitor)

- OS

- nVidea drivers

- or even if in this darker environment has anything to do with the lights turning on/off...

I hadn't got the chance to do the flights and check wheather it relates to anything. I just wanted to post my observations since I saw a lot of people complaining of a dark environment.

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Gerald Krutsch

@Lefteris Kalamaras a small update,

first of all I can reproduce 100% of the time the loss of lighting with both A320 and the NGX.

Second of all: I get the same results with or without Spotlights installed.

My test site was in Gatwick on Stand 130. I figured out that the loss of lights is happening with the loss of dynamic lights but ONLY facing between 270 and 360 deg.

E.g.: On stand 130 the ACFT faces S. If you look outside the ACFTs turning the camera towards the N, you will loose the Navlights reflection on the ground. In air, turning the ACFT between 270 and 360 deg, will turn off all flood lights.

Strangely, I can reproduce this 100% of the time ONLY at Gatwick...

 

Can someone give it a try to confirm these findings?

Thank you!

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Lefteris Kalamaras

Is that an add-on Gatwick? Perhaps it's because of the 4.2 LOD fixes for Dynamic Lights that LM implemented? I have a feeling there's a bug that's crept in there...

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Gerald Krutsch

No! I have tested on the default Gatwick (EGKK) airport.

I also tried EDDM, EDDF and other airports and can not reproduce it.

So I see the issue at this time only in that region.

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Gerald Krutsch

@Kelly Dang sorry to say but I can't confirm your statement on my end.

I generaly fly fom S-Germany (EDNY, EDJA, EDDM,...) to airports within max  2h (mostly shorter) of flight time. This includes ARP in Austria (LOWI, LOWS, LOWW), Hungary (LHBP), Romania (LRTR, LROP), Italy,...as an example. I have never seen this issue before, neither in 4.1.

The reason I discovered this in EGKK was that I wanted to purchase this ARP as beeing in the distance of my usual flight time (e.g. EGKK-EDDM) and therefore wanted to get a taste of it using the free pack from UK2000. I then uninstalled the scenery thinking it was related to incompatibility which was prooven to be wrong since it happens also with the default scenery.

As a matter of fact I placed the issue also on avsim and the responses were simmilar: it happens on some ARP but the reason is unknown.

This topic here was relevant because some were thinking that the issue is Spotlights related. Well it's not!

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Lefteris Kalamaras

Gerald,

this confirms my suspicion that there might be an issue with P3Dv4 anyway and the way they handle light effects. Did you open a topic in their forum?

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  • 2 weeks later...
Gerald Krutsch

@Lefteris Kalamaras Dear Lefteris,

I chased it down: the problem occures due to Ultimate Traffic Live!

After uninstalling everything and cleaning my system, I started to add my stuff one by one. The last one was UTLive. Can reproduce the error 100% of the time turning UTLive ON/OFF from the Addons Menu within P3D!

Can anybody try it out?

 

Regards,

Gerald

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Gerald Krutsch

Hello @Kelly Dang,

this (or my issue) is still in debug phase meaning that I'm still investigating what could cause this issue. At this point there's a hint that it might be the SimConnect module causing the loss of lights. There's a chance of you having another AddOn that installs the faulty SimConnect version.

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Lefteris Kalamaras

Gerald,

cold it be that there are dynamic lights used inside UTL models? If so, the LOD logic used by LM might be causing this to happen as too many dynamic lights are used and the wrong ones get switched off (or all of them are). The LOD logic should cause the more distant ones to the user to switch off. If that is not the case, this is your issue.

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Roman Heriban
On 3/6/2018 at 9:20 AM, Lefteris Kalamaras said:

Gerald,

cold it be that there are dynamic lights used inside UTL models? If so, the LOD logic used by LM might be causing this to happen as too many dynamic lights are used and the wrong ones get switched off (or all of them are). The LOD logic should cause the more distant ones to the user to switch off. If that is not the case, this is your issue.

Dynamic lights of UTL can be disabled by deactivating two files in P3D/Effects directory - fx_landing.fx and fx_landing2.fx. Renaming them to fx_landing.fx.OFF and fx_landing2.fx.OFF will do. This will switch off taxi and landing lights of AI traffic.

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Roman Heriban

Lefteris,

I disable dynamic lights of AI traffic to substantially improve FPS and smoothness. As the amount of DL sources is reduces, it should solve the problem, if it is caused by an excessive amount of emitters. I would recommend Kelly trying it to find out.

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