Dome White Light & other lights - Default 737

Hi all,

I've been continuing to improve the default 737 where I can. It's been thoroughly enjoyable, if not downright confusing and frustrating at times!

I want to attempt to improve the lighting inside the Virtual Cockpit.

As I understand it, there are basically two types of lighting available to pilots in the 737 cabin. The Dome White light and the panel lighting.

The Dome White light is essentially your 'ceiling' light used to provide overall illumination in the cabin. During cruise in night flight, this may well be left off.

The Panel Lights are used to illuminate the panel gauges and are generally always on during night flight.

Is that about right? Is there any other source of lights within a cabin? Flood lights of any description etc? How do pilots tend to use the lighting available to them?

I don't know too much about the lighting in a 737 cabin and would like to learn, so I can try to model this to some degree.

Ta!

Trent

The gauges are not lit by a:

light.01= [coordinates] , [effect]

line.

It's the gauges themselves, that are created to change colour in response to a trigger. That can be a trigger command fired by a specific switch made for it. Or just by time of day in the sim. Or by the same command and switch that also turns the light effect on.

Whether or not the gauges can light up depends therefore on how the gauges are created and their (night) textures.

I made a lot of changes to the default 737 as well, but the lighting issues was the end of that.

I installed the 747VC in the 737 instead. In that the lighting is fully adjustable. And if you don't like seeing 4 engines on the 747 panel of which only two work, you can easily change that gauge for the 2 engine indication of the 737.

Have a look here also.

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?291525-How-do-I-get-all-buttons-to-work-in-the-boeing-747

Something you might consider is getting the A2A Shockwave 3D lights REDUX ($15.99 USD). Not only will it install some special effects lighting to your 737 (including cabin lighting), but ALL the FSX default aircraft. You can also add effects to added aircraft.

Here's a YouTube to tempt you...

CAUTION: BACKUP the [fltsim.x] section of any Aircraft.cfg's you added liveries to because the A2A installer will replace them ALL with a A2A (light section modified) but not your liveries.

Thanks everyone for the helpful suggestions and interesting reading.

Before I get into trying to figure out my own solution, I wanted to make sure I understand the lighting available in the cabin of a real life 737.

So, at night time, with a cold and dark cockpit, would pilots turn on the Dome White light to provide overall illumination?

Then, during cruise flight, this dome white light can be set to a dim level or turned off completely, is that right?

I assume it's not the panel lights they turn on for illumination. Panel lights would be for the purpose of illuminating the gauges only and not for the purpose of illuminating the cabin. Have I got that right?

Are there other sources of illumination in a real life 737 cockpit? I've seen a reference to floods in the VC, what are the purpose of flood lights in a 737 cockpit?

Thanks everyone!

Trent