Classic British Flight Sim

Personally, I like to leave the the default effects alone "just in case" As they are used on many models, they may well look fine on most and changing them may have an adverse effect on those. A good add-on aircraft should never alter the default effects, but there are some that do. If the model in question does use custom effects, the you only need to replace the effect with a new one without faffing about with notepad / MCX.
One thing to note is that if an effect is called up in both the exterior and interior mdls, FSX will display both at the same time, effectively doubling the brightness. If that happens, I usually change the interior model to point to a dummy effect that does nothing. You can point it to a non-existing effect which also works, but then FSX will waste time looking for a file that doesn't exist, which isn't good practice.

DaveG,
thanks for that - it sounds like I need to do more checking with MCX. Could you please just confirm whether an effects file that does nothing is simply an empty file (file size = 0), or does it still need to contain some parameters and their values (if so, which) ? Perhaps you could post an example ?

Thanks again for your input here,
regs,
Ro

An empty file would probably be ok, but TBH, I'm not sure. I use one with some basic data in it just to be on the safe side. Can't remember off hand where it came from. I'll upload it later if you like.

Sri Ro.. had a late yesterday and an early today so I'm a few posts behind. Sri also for not explaining the nitty gritty of changing fx files (default) too

Here's DG's dummy fx file.. DUMMY

As Dave said.. changing default files for others by changing the name can be done but the effect (pardon the pun) can be far more wide ranging than one might expect so it's better to change the file rather than the name. I use pretty much the same versions of Dave's effects file for all the models that needed them changing though some are named differently to make them fit the character count of the originals. As Dave pointed out, not all models with duff lights use defaults

Right.. I'm gonna try my new mower out now
ATB
DaveB

No worries, Mr. B.

Thanks for posting that dummy file. It would have taken a lifetime to come up with something like that from scratch - at least for someone like me who has no previous experience in that field ...

Hope to start playing with MCX later today, and may have a look at an MDL in N++ if I have time.

And I'm happy to say that my life is now mower free ...

regs,
Ro