Talk:Landing Light RFC

=How should authors specify differing behavior for the one light vs. four light case?=

Two things are absolutely necessary: So in summary: yes. We should probably not try to derive an acceptable one-light pattern from the four-light pattern.--Bsupnik 12:39, 16 December 2008 (EST)
 * 1) When we only have one light, we continue to get good results.  This implies keeping the existing "one-light" params around.
 * 2) If an author has not "upgraded" the plane, we need to produce substantially the same landing light in the four-light case as in the one-light case.  One way to do this is to punt and produce exactly the one-light case (E.g. opt-in).

=How should the four lights be allocated?=

Three landing lights and one taxi lights. This allows for the basic typical positions (two under the wing, one under the nose) and a separate taxi light (potentially aimed in a different direction).

OR

Completely user controlled - named lights can be placed anywhere by the author.--Bsupnik 12:37, 16 December 2008 (EST)

=Should planes light themselves?=

When the new scheme is in effect: yes. This effect is not expensive...however, it is expensive to have planes light each other and not themselves. Having an opt-in scheme is a good way to do this.

But..perhaps no: planes have landing light halos baked into their _LIT textures; it might be impossible to remove these halos...in particular, the sim provides no facility to switch the _LIT texture based on the presence of shaders.

Could planes light other planes only? Perhaps - it might be expensive to special-case this. The resulting _LIT textures (part baked, part other planes landing lights) might not be correct.

Perhaps it makes sense to pass on this for now? --Bsupnik 12:34, 16 December 2008 (EST)

=Should we try to spend some light budget on the AI/multiplayer planes?=

Two options:
 * 1) A dynamic priority scheme - the most important four lights are utilized.  In favor: this is the most efficient usage of the lights.  Against: landing lights might disappear as planes come into and out of viewing range.
 * 2) A static priority scheme - if we have any lights left over (e.g. user's plane is NOT four-light capable) share them to other AI planes, but don't try to "save" lights for off-screen planes.  Pros: no artifacts.  We might get up to four SIMPLE landing lights for four AI aicraft.  Cons: a lot of the time we will waste resources.

At this point I think I'm in favor of choice 2 - landing lights mysteriously disappearing will be reported as a bug. --Bsupnik 12:36, 16 December 2008 (EST)