Runway Lights

Hi,

I am building an aircraft runway, 100m long, and down the middle embedded into the runway, I have a megaprim 100m x 0.2 x 0.2

What I would like is to have one of those chasing runway lights, where a bright white strobe light starts at one end and races to the other end, hotly followed by another (hope you know what I mean). I have seen similar in clubs, but I need a script, not a unit, as I need to put it into my megaprim.

Anyone know where I could get hold of such a script?

TIA

Rock

Here is the script library in world :
http://slurl.com/secondlife/solvo/191/192/25

not sure they have what you want but it's a start Good luck.

Try contacting Cubey Terra from Abbott's as well. he may be able to help as well as the owners of J&S Aviation. I don't know their names.

Also visit the particle lab. You might be able to get thie effect using a particle moving along a path. I am just not sure ont he distance limit on particles.

I would think about this in two scenarios

Option 1 - In the real world, runway centerline lighting is static, beginning with white lights at the approach end, then alternating red/white through mid field, and all red toward the end. I don't know the exact specs here so that's general. Since this centerline lighting arrangement is static, you could get by with just a texture designed for the dimensions of the megaprim that represents this idea. The majority of the surface of the texture would be black, and the dots representing the lights would be the white and red colors as needed. Set full bright, this should work in a night scene.

You generally see the chasing strobes you mention at the approach end of the runway, originating some distance shy of the threshold, chasing in the landing direction of the runway, ending at the threshold. This could be done with a scripted series of "light" objects, which turn themselves on and off in the desired sequence.

If the entire stretch of these lights can be within 30 meters, they can be linked into a linkset, and then you have llMessageLinked() at your disposal as the communications method for synchronizing the lights, which is more efficient than llSay, llRegionSay or llShout, which would need to be used in unlinked lights. This is the basis for the chase lighting you see in club systems in world.

It would also be the more realistic approach to designing your runway lighting system. Real runways don't have chase strobes running the entire centerline. The purpose of these lights is to call the pilot's attention to the approach end of the runway, and put the visual focus there, conveniently also indicating the centerline.

Option 2 - create a texture for the megaprim that has a black background, with evenly spaced white and red circles in the appropriate sequence, make that surface of the prim full bright, and just do a simple side to side texture animation in the approach direction of the runway.

Option 2 is the easiest to accomplish. Option 1 is the most realistic, but would require a good deal of effort. I doubt there are generic scripts available to accomplish this. Heck, you could even use the animated texture idea on option 1 instead of a scripted lighting system.

All I have ever seen done in world for this type of runway approach lighting is a particle emitter that shoots balls of light in a given direction. It doesn't look very realistic.

Another way to do it is through an animated texture on that megaprim and set it to full bright and glow.

This can be done with a frame animation texture.

Lemme see if I can whip one up.

Sent.

what is a frame animation texture?

*waves to Annabelle*

llSetTextureAnim displays portions of a single texture defined by x_frames and y_frames, or think rows and columns. If you define 2 rows by 2 columns, then your texture will be displayed as 4 different frames starting at the top, reading left to right, then across the second row, left to right, in a loop. In order to create an animation as required in this instance the texture used would need to be created so that it is made up 4 frames combined into one texture. What it produces is the equivalent of a gif animation.

I've recently found using a frame animation texture to be far more efficient in terms of lag than using a loop to switch glow/full-bright on & off. Probably old news to experienced scripters, but loops do seem to be especially laggy.