John Goodwin explains how to improve runway and aircraft lighting in FSX.

When using large or very large displays; runway, taxi, aircraft strobes and aircraft navigation lights all tend to look far too large and unfocused. All of these can be fixed very easily with a couple of lines of code in your FSX.CFG file and the download and use of a very good free package by Nick Needham.

First the edit for the FSX.CFG file. You will have to add these four lines to your [Display] section.

RUNWAY_LIGHTS_SURFACE_SCALAR=0.75
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_VASI_SCALAR=0.5
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_APPROACH_SCALAR=0.65
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_STROBE_SCALAR=0.7

The best way to set up your lights is to use the settings above and do a flight around the airport and see what you think. Unfortunately every time you want to change the settings, you need to re-start FSX for the changes to come into effect. Do not make big setting changes, +/-0.50 is about the maximum you want to do at a time.

The values shown above are for my system, but they will probably be a good starting place for most systems.

Without the tweak, the lights look like this.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them to see the real difference in sharpness and focus. Reducing the scalar value of the various scalar sharpens up the lights from the fuzzy lights you tend to see with big displays, but the biggest improvement comes from a free download made by NICK NEEDHAM called “Nick’s Light Fix Version 2”. Search for the file “nlf_v2.zip” which can be found on www.flightsim.com.

This is Nick’s description of what the package will do:-

Adds an all new xenon landing light effect and addresses the following issues from version one.
Reduces the size of aircraft lights to the proper scale when the aircraft manufacturer uses the airport lights (halo.bmp) texture for aircraft.
The aircraft beacons and strobe lights have been redesigned so every aircraft being rendered in the simulator does not flash the lights at the same time. This greatly enhances the illusion of each plane running individual lights and makes the simulation more realistic.
Provides two optional flashing tower lights (large and small for different viewing distance).
Reduces and better defines airport lights – some airports were displaying the lights out of scale (too large) and this is fixed in this release. This package will automatically replace all the Flight Simulator aircraft and airport lights with more realistic ones along with better distance visuals of slower flashing radio tower/smoke stack and ground beacons.

Although originally produced for FS9, the lights will work in FSX without a problem. During the install of the light sets just set the path to your FSX root folder.

I hope this works as well for you as it has for me.

John Goodwin