Landing Light RFC

Revision History

12/16/08 - Initial Draft

This RFC addresses aircraft landing lights.

Background: it looks like X-Plane potentially has "budget" for up to four landing lights with certain hardware configurations. The hardware details are:
 * DX8 - type hardware: maximum of one landing light.
 * DX9 - GeForce FX series: runs shaders very poorly - probably should be bucketed as DX8.
 * DX9 - Radeon 9500-9800, X200-X600: can run up to four lights with some performance penalty (perhaps 10%?)
 * DX9 - all other: very little cost for up to 4 lights.
 * DX10 - basically no cost, up to 4 lights.

Now DX10 hardware can probably run significantly more than 4 landing lights. But DX10 hardware can do a lot of things. At some point introducing hardware capabilities to the plane SDK makes life difficult for authors (E.g. I have to tune my plane's lights for Dx8, Dx9, Dx10, etc...). Given that someday some new cool feature will come along that is Dx-10 specific, I don't think it makes sense to have a Dx10 light limit. Rather the limit should be one light for non-shaders and the GF-FX (and maybe 9600XT), and four lights for all others.

Questions (use discussion page please):


 * How should authors specify differing behavior for the one light vs. four light case?
 * How should the four lights be allocated?
 * Should planes light themselves?
 * Should we try to spend some light budget on the AI/multiplayer planes?