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6.4. CONFIGURING THE LIGHTS 77
section “Fundamental Concepts” of Chapter 3. The pilot’s viewpoint, then, is set with respect to
the aircraft’s reference point.
6.4 Configuring the Lights
An aircraft’s lighting consists of external lights (including navigation lights, landing lights, and
rotating beacons) and internal lights (located in the cockpit, illuminating the instrument panel).
The Ext Lights tab, found in the Viewpoint dialog box, is used to turn on and off the different
types of external lights, and it also controls the location and intensity of those lights. Note that, in
order to clearly see the location of your external lights when you add them, you may want to select
the “Show with day/night textures” option from the Special menu, thus displaying the aircraft as
it will be seen in night lighting.
The Int Lights tab, on the other hand, is used to set the color and intensity of the panel and
cockpit lighting.
Configuring External Lights
In the Ext Lights tab of the Viewpoint dialog box, the checkboxes found directly above the numeric
input boxes control whether the aircraft has that light. An aircraft may have up to two landing lights
(corresponding to the two check boxes labeled “landlight”), two rotating beacons (corresponding
to the check boxes labeled “rotbeacon”), and so on. These check boxes are seen at the top of
Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1: Settings for the location of external lights, found in the Ext Lights tab of the Viewpoint
dialog box
Beneath each light’s check box are three boxes to set the light’s location, which comprise the
standard position controls in Plane Maker (as discussed in the section “Fundamental Concepts”
in Chapter 3). Normally, each light’s location is set relative to the aircraft’s reference point. The
two landing lights or the taxi light, however, may have their position set relative to a landing gear
(useful for lights which should be attached to the gear). Selecting a gear using the drop-down menu
controls seen at the bottom of Figure 6.1 will cause the gear’s position to be set relative to that
landing gear.
Near the bottom of the Ext Lights tab are a number of settings for the landing light, as seen
in Figure 6.2. The light’s intensity is set as a ratio of the default using the “landing light power.”
A power setting of 1.00 will give the default intensity, and a power setting of 2.00 will give a
double-intensity light, and so on.