Optical Landing System

Trying to possibly make an optical landing system trailer for land based carrier landing practice. These IFLOLS/FLOLS trailers are common at Naval Air Stations. I see the Top Gun Maverick expansion has the Optical Landing System simobject but just as an experiment I placed it an an airport and saw no lights on it like you see on an aircraft carrier. The object itself doesn’t seem to have any lights attached to it on further investigation.

Any direction or ideas on how to go about this? I started experimenting today by making a box that was open in the front and had a colored texture in the back and then several planes inside the box that were placed horizontally. This allowed the texture to show through as you moved up and down because the planes were blocking the view. This might be a way forward as a “fake” optical landing system but I would prefer to be able to use lights like the Top Gun aircraft carrier has.

There is nothing in the SDK and the Fresnel lights do not work and the SDK has said that would be fixed in a future update although it has said that in the documentation forever. I’m looking for some direction or ideas?

Hello @thetford569

This system is very tied to the Maverick landing challenge.
The Optical_Landing_System SimObject just contains the geometry but all the logic is on the mission side.

Regards,
Sylvain

Well that’s a bummer… just another problem with tying all of this aircraft carrier stuff up into a mission system and not having it available in free flight.

Hopefully this can be implemented in FS2024 so that not only can we use stuff like this at military airfields but also fly off aircraft carriers around the world for the many users who don’t just fly airliners around all the time in the sim.

Thanks for the reply. I will look into some possibilities of faking one until hopefully one day a better one can be made.

The mission doesn’t contain any logic for the FLOLS. It only spawns the simobject with AI type OLS. I think the logic is hardcoded in the sim, through the ai type, and the Optical_landing_system simobject has some parameters for the lights.

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I tried creating an invisible simobject with attachpoints for the OLS and also the required attachpoints to define the runway dimensions but while I was able to compile and add the simobject it did not spawn an OLS at all. I am not sure if that’s because I am using Blender which the SDK says does not support attachpoints in the Blender Exporter from Asobo.

was that parent simobject a boat type? OLS works pretty fine on custom carriers, I even made a clone with better visibility range (i.e. different name) and it still works.
so my guess - it should be a mission, invisible boat as mothership and OLS attached to it