Working headlamps on road vehicles

jayholland

Content Creator
One of the things which tends to detract from realism in the simulator is that lamps, except those on locomotives, do not illuminate their surroundings. I have managed, after a lot of fiddling about, to install headlamps in a car. However, this meant making two tiny 'traincars', each of which had to be placed on a piece of invisible track and then embedded in the headlamps of the car. Each had to have all the attachment points required by a traincar. Apart from the palaver of setting it all up, in order to switch the lights on, one has to enter Driver mode and turn them on. My question is - if a lamp on a locomotive can illuminate its surroundings, why can this not be made to work for all lamps - lamps on cars, streetlamps etc? One can attach a corona to a scenery item, so why not add the piece of code that causes it to 'cast light' on its surroundings? I feel that such a modification would add enormously to realism. Failing a simple solution, is there any way one could make the 'traincar' lamp, together with a piece of invisible track, and attach it as a unit to another asset such as a car Any ideas on this, anyone?


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Have you already tested your map with 30-40 cars like this, that have their 'traincar' lamps swithched on simultaniously? A suppose no, because this brings down fps. Also you'll see bugs with illumination of the ground and bump-mapped surfaces (only one car will illuminate them)...
 
TRam - A very good point. The answer is no, I have so far only tried them on one vehicle. I can imagine that multiple vehicles would slow down the frame rate enormously, since one is running multiple 'locomotives'. These should not need to be locomotives. A simple corona with an illuminating triangle, built into the simulator, would be quite adequate.
 
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