In my (little) experience during night flights:
- green lights directly on taxiways are visible only if looked from a distance on tens of meters when you are directly on the line. They are highly directional and not visible from above or the left/right sides.
(the whole disc is about the size of an open hand)
Apparently, some models have a green light on one side and an orange/none light on the other side to prevent taxiing in the wrong direction.
- blue lights on the edge of taxiways are visible from distances of hundred of meters
(in size, they are a bit larger than a regular bulb)
- during a clear night, runway lights are visible from 5nm but you'll probably have problems to see them from 10nm. The pilot must see the lights
before the decision heigh. The exact distance depends on many things, but it is somewhere between 1 and 5 nm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumen ... h_lightingRemember you must see at least the lights of the touchdown zone, not the other end of the runway that is 1-2nm away.
I really think all these lights must have different sizes. I'd say current lights on runways as shown by ALS are probably OK, or at least not that far from reality. But lights on taxiways, specially the green ones, are far more brilliant than lights in real life.
Thorsten, if I understand the code in simgear/simgear/scene/tgdb/SGTileDetailsCallback.hxx (and I probably don't), all lights have the same size so there is no way any "renderer", default, ALS or Rembrandt, can render lights on taxiways differently from lights on runways. Is it correct? In this case, this issue wouldn't be something that ALS could fix without the support of the C++ code.
(I know this message has plenty of "probably"s and "I'd say"s because I'm expressing my subjective opinion, not my facts
)