Re: [Flightgear-devel] electrical updates to kt70.xml break it

[Ron J. <wi...@je...>]

On Sat, 2008-03-01 at 20:37 -0700, dave perry wrote:
> I just noticed that the recent electrical updates to the kt170.xml 
> submitted by Ron Jenson make the kt70 bright white if the instrument 
> light are turned on in the pa24-250 and the pa28-161.  This is because 
> the material animation factor should be between 0 and 1 and this change 
> makes it equal to the output voltage from the buss (usually either 14 or 
> 28 volts in most light AC). 
> <factor-prop>systems/electrical/outputs/instrument-lights</factor-prop>
> This saturates the material red, green, blue values.
> 
> Several of the aircraft are expecting this to be controlled by
> <factor-prop>systems/electrical/outputs/instrument-lights</factor-prop>
> since they are assuming a rotating dimmer controls the intensity, not 
> the bus voltage turned on by the switch.
> 
> Many other objects in Instruments-3d have a material animation tied to
> <factor-prop>systems/electrical/outputs/instrument-lights</factor-prop>
> to simulate variable instrument light intensity.
> 
> Ron, is there a reason this needed to be changed for the kt70?

Hi Dave,

The change was to make the KT-70 only work when the electrical system
was turned on.  The old setting of /controls/lighting/panel-norm was
wrong, and needed to be changed to something based on the electical
system.

The electrical systems I use normalize the property
systems/electrical/outputs/instrument-lights.  

I didn't realize you were using the KT70 or I would have verifed it
worked on your planes, too.

I don't like the property /sim/model/material/instruments/factor.  I
feel its in the wrong place, and isn't well named, and using both
systems/electrical/outputs/instrument-lights and
sim/model/material/instruments/factor is redundant.

A grep thru CVS show there are only 5 aircraft
using /sim/model/material/instruments/factor now.

Most aircraft are using some variant of
systems/electrical/outputs/instrument-lights.  I'd like to use that as a
normalized value to allow instruments to just work regardless of the
system voltage modelled.

What should be the standard for instrument lighting properties?

Ron