Can airfield lights be switched off?

[ScatterbrainKid]

FSX airfield lights take the fun out of navigating by map, compass and eyeball on photoreal scenery because they make it too easy to find airfields.
For example the red light on Haverfordwest airfield, Wales is blazing away (arrowed), so can't they be switched off?
(PS-plane is freeware Bucker Jungmann)

[rickattfield]

No. That'd be my guess! not without being removed from the scenery bgl for the airport in question, but then I'm not a scenery developer but from my understanding of how FSX works, I don't think it's possible. To be fair, if you were to catch sight of the papi's of an airfield in flight in the real world, they are pretty darn bright! I would estimate you're about 10-15 miles away in that picture? Not too unrealistic! Nice scenery and aircraft btw

[budreiser]

I'm not a genius, but they most likely can be adjusted to being less (or more) visible by tweaking the specific file for those lights. Someone else will have to point you to that file.

[jomni]

Maybe change the size of the texture. I know that REX fiddles with the size and shape of the lights (typically to make them even brighter).
So there's no reason it cannot be done manually. But I don't know how to as I'm no modder.

[llivaudais]

You could FIRST try reducing values with the FSX.cfg instead of experimenting with the effect files directly:

add lines if not currently included in fsx.cfg

[Display]
.
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_APPROACH_SCALAR=1.0
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_STROBE_SCALAR=1.0
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_SURFACE_SCALAR=1.0
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_VASI_SCALAR=1.0
.
.

Loyd

[ScatterbrainKid]

Thanks guys, i'll psyche myself up to have a crack at tweaking files and stuff.
Incidentally for the record the scenery in the top pic is 'Horizon Sims VFR photo-scen GenerationX version 3' (Gen X for short)which despite it's long name is far from perfect. It begins to blur badly below 2000 feet and some colours are not so hot, so in that respect it's no better than the old Justflight scenery.
Also the FSX ingame map doesn't display properly with GenX, airfields are on it but no ground terrain.
But the GenX mesh is good, and you get the odd 3D building and structure scattered around even if they're sometimes inaccurately placed, eg Stonehenge and the Millennium Dome are way off.

NOTE- the landscape in GenX is NOT populated with 3D trees, I use the separate 'Treescapes' prog for that which adds them to GenX, as in the top pic