No Environmental Lighting

Question

While I am still new to X-Plane and have mostly been doing flights during the day something I noticed was that when flying at night the lights don't... well cast light. Plane lights seem to work though not environment ones. The lights are on and you can see lights but like I said they don't cast light. No matter what settings things are set to, X-Plane 32bit or 64bit and I'm running this on Windows 10 64bit with a GTX 970 (with up to date drivers) and a 5820k and 32GB of ram so I have more than enough horsepower to run it.

Example

If you take a peek at that album I have a screenshot of the problem and my preferred render settings. Is this just the way X-Plane works?

Answer 1

In X-Plane the runway lights and taxiway lights don´t illuminate anything. I think it it s a limitation to keep performance up - if someone with a very weak computer dials down all settings, he would still want to see those lights, without taking the penalty of calculating dynamic lighting.

The aircrafts landing lights seem to work, although their beam is focused "downwards" to illuminate the touchdownzone during approach, so they are usually angled down at about 6 degrees (depending on typical aircraft attitude during approach).

Take a picture when you are on the ramp at EDDF, for example, and see if the ramp illumination lights light up the environment and your aircraft.

Cheers, Jan