Please remove nav lights

[Charon 95]

Their visibility in daytime is far too great. They're a highly visible wart on an otherwise beautiful game. They look bad when taking off and in the pattern with AI, and they are abused in multiplayer for daytime signaling and to mask the shape of the plane.

 

It would be great to rework them (and tracers) to look more natural, but I imagine rendering changes are harder to allocate time for than simply removing them. Don't let perfect rendering be the enemy of the good. Please remove them until they can be fixed.

 

For reference, Limitations of the See and Avoid Principle has a lot of information on page 18:

Quote

In theory, to be visible at three nautical miles on a very dark day, a strobe light must have an effective intensity of around 5000 candelas (see figure 15). In full daylight, the strobe must have an effective intensity greater than 100,000 candelas (Harris 1987). Most existing aircraft strobes have effective intensities of between 100 and 400 candelas.

 

Quote

A major U.S. Army study was conducted in 1970 in which observers on a hilltop were required to sight approaching helicopters equipped either with strobes of 1800, 2300 or 3300 effective candela or a standard red rotating beacon. It was found that none of the lights were effective against a background of daytime sky, however strobes were helpful when the aircraft was viewed against the ground

 

Quote

U.S. Air Force tests in 1976 found extremely poor performance of strobe lights on aircraft.In all cases, the aircraft was sighted before the strobe

Quote

‘Aircraft colours or lights play no significant role in first directing a pilot’s attention to the other aircraft during daytime’

 

[CountZero 2043]

recomended many times in last few years, it seams its imposible to make realistic or even remove ufo lights, it iz what it iz

[216th_Cat 1103]

They have been modified once already, but they are still too bright. Rather than removing them altogether I'd rather see them toned down and the AI's routines for using them improved. As for inappropriate use in multiplayer, well, that's not for the devs to bother with.

[[DBS]Browning 1174]

Tracers and lights. Both far too bright.

It leads to some unhistorical tactics in multiplayer.

[JG300_Winterz 110]

Why not reversing them so you see them well from a short distance and then they kinda disapears.

[Leifr 393]

3 hours ago, [DBS]Browning said:

Tracers and lights. Both far too bright.

It leads to some unhistorical tactics in multiplayer.

 

The tracers sterilise much of the effort for spotting in an online environment. When the new system came out last year and the following flip-flop on it, I didn't feel too bad for the outcome - tracers didn't change and so I knew the spotting game would be just the same. Chase the tracers, and you'll find the players. They're objectively the worst graphical effect left in BoX, I don't know why they haven't been revised.

Edited February 18 by Leifr