Version: 1.5.23.0
Frequency: Consistently
Severity: High if you fix lightrows, Blocker if you don’t
Bug description: VectorPlacement objects seem to randomly despawn. Since the lightrows still don’t show custom models, and you can now add lensflares in blender, I thought can use VectorÜlacement instead of the lightrows since it is basically the same thing just without the added in-game MSFS light attached to it. Doing this I discovered that objects from VectorPlacements (or at least the lights attached to them, randomly despawn. Why randomly? Well because it is not based on LODs. I made a video showcasing this because it is extremely tricky to just explain. Please find the video attached.
Here is a quick walk-through. In the video, I placed 2 lines of lights. both custom models with blender lights and flares attached to them. The left row is hand-placed to show that they don’t despawn because of LOD issues, and the right line is a VectorPlacement with the same object. The last LOD has no mesh apart from a Cube with an invisible material. No, don’t worry, I am not abusing the Cube trick, it is just to make sure the lights don’t despawn. As you can see, the last LOD has no mesh, just lights, so the enlargement cube does not hurt performance.
So in the video you can see that when I move away from the VectorPlacement, the vector placement lights disappear, but the hand-placed ones are till there. So it is not a model LOD issue per se.
Where it gets interesting though is when you zoom in. If you move away from them they disappear. If you then stay in the same place and zoom in they re-appear. And then if you zoom back out to a point where they disappeared before, they are still there. You can repeat that over a very long distance. As you can see in the video I moved away quite far and it was always the same, whereas the hanplaced ones never disappeared. Do you have any idea of what’s going on here? Is this intentional or a bug?
As you can see, the handplaced lights still show jsut the lensflare when miles away from the airport, which is exactly what I am going for as this is intended to be runway and taxiway lighting
I would love to be able to do custom lighting in our 2024 projects, but I don’t know how since both lightrows AND VectorPlacements seem to be broken in some shape or form. Having played around with the 2024 SDK for 2 days now I have to say it is impressive what this new sim offers and I already found so many new cool features I want to add and implement, but I feel like the more features I find the more severe issues I find, too. Issues that prevent me from doing what I want to do even though, in theory, the sim would be capable of doing it. Like I said, I really don’t know how to do airport lighting now since all the different methods I tried seem to be broken in some way. Looking forward to hearing back about this issue.
Attachments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE08ndNsFY8