I’m a huge aircraft lighting nerd and have been doing light mods since the early days of 2020. I just noticed with SU5 in 2024 the Dev Mode-Tools-User Lights is completely gone!! Is there a way to access that again?
Gotcha, just found that…Is there a way to downgrade my SDK version to be able to see the menu because now I can’t even see aircraft that are encrypted like I used too….
Is there any possible way I can revert to an older SDK version to show the old user lights section? I literally ONLY need that
For reference this is what I was able to see prior. This is an encrypted aircraft and had no issues viewing encrypted aircraft user lights. You can now see above this is totally gone now with the latest SDK update. Says container encrypted and can’t do anything. This hurts as I’ve been doing light mods for aircraft since the very beginning. Please advise how I can work around this.
Hello
This is a side effect of regrouping all light debug information into a single window in the Debug → Aircraft menu.
I have logged an issue on our side so we can clarify what’s supposed to still be visible in case of an unencrypted package.
Regards,
Sylvain
Thank you so much! Not being able to see the User Lights screen on encrypted aircraft doesn’t make any sense to me, there is nothing private or discreet about it. I just really hope it can be fixed to be like it was prior to the update, where we can see lights on EVERY aircraft encrypted or not. Thanks in advance!
May I ask the reason why you need to access lights of encrypted aircraft? If I understand correctly you are making mods that change aircraft lights but the CFG that lists these lights also includes further information that cannot be seen anywhere for an encrypted package - making overriding lights only a tricky exercise (I see how it could be done in a “hacky” way but that’s not guaranteed to work in future updates).
Best regards,
Eric / Asobo
Ok so what I use the user lights section for when modding the lights is to see the changes to the .fx files in real time that way I can make the respected changes in the effects folder of the aircraft. For example, the light brightness, color temp, range, volumetric and inner spot and outer spot values. A lot of devs just use the default Asobo lighting for the beacons, strobes, navs, etc and more than half of the time they are incorrect and are not like that IRL. Being the lighting nerd I am I go into the aircraft effects folder and modify them to match them to their IRL counterparts. For example, a dev would use the default beacon light flash on a beacon light that should be LED with a longer flash rate. I’m on a few very well known aircraft developer beta teams strictly to do their lighting. With this merge of the lights there is basically nothing I can do for them anymore since their aircraft is encrypted.
Yeah the systems.cfg for the lights on encrypted aircraft has always been inaccessible and I never had access to that which is fine. The only time I ever really need to access the systems.cfg for the lights is when I’m modifying the rotation values to get a more realistic ground splash or bounce off the wing or changing the .fx file that is being used for a specific light. A lot of the times they don’t need to be touched anyway. The user lights is more important because that is where I can turn a normal flashing strobe into an LED style flash and for GA aircraft a triple flash etc. So the user lights section is needed for encrypted aircraft. There is another light mod person on flightsim.to that has over 65k downloads and I was in talks with him too and he is very upset about this merge as well.
On a side note, since 2024 modding has become extremely difficult and very time consuming, we used to have a re-load option in dev mode in 2020 to reload the aircraft instantly so every change I make in the user lights section I could just reload instantly to see the changes, with 2024 I have to close and re-start the sim each time and that is very time consuming.
Please please just let us see the lights for encrypted aircraft like we where able too a couple weeks ago. I beg 
Feel free to DM me so I can get into more detail if you’d like. thanks as always
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