two questions to Holger about seasons

[fabs79]

Hello,

 

I was thinking about some aspects of seasonal variations and maybe Holger could shed some light on this. First, we all know that the default seasons file in FSX/P3D creates some very ugly looking patchy mix of snow and grass textures in the winter months, only the hard winter season looks halfway acceptable. Within the ORBX full fat regions, seasons look a lot better due to custom season file for each region. The difference becomes most obvious when flying in a full fat region bordering on default or OpenLC areas. My home town lies within the Rhine Valley, which happens to be one of those border areas. When I did a flight from EDSB to EDRY yesterday, I had an accurate depiction of what winter looks like in Germany to my right (with snow on the high hills of the Black Forest while the valley itself was still green) and the ugly default seasons on my left (across the French border, where the whole valley was -unrealistically - covered with snow. Now I was wondering if the default season file could be modified on a global level to alleviate this discrepancy a bit. Or maybe a modified seasons file could be created for each OpenLC region. I don´t know how much work goes into creating those custom seasons files, but I would really appreciate if ORBX could provide something like this for their OpenLC products.

Second, I wanted to know if seasonal variations could also be applied to Vector data. There are some places on earth where rivers and lakes are massively dependant on season, e.g. the Okavango Delta in Botsuana where a tiny river becomes a huge stream with thousands of side arms during the rainy season; or rivers changing their color from blue to brown during certain periods of the year because of mud and sediments washed into the rivers during heavy rain. Could something like this be modeled within the FSX/Prepar3d or is it technically impossible?

 

Thanks and Best Regards,

 

Fabian

 

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi Fabian,

 

creating a global seasons control file would be a pretty major task. More importantly, though, it would break compatibility with most airport or scenery add-ons using photoreal ground textures as they are typically based on the seasonal changes of the global default seasons control file. See the recent discussion regarding ESSA and its seasons here: https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/144558-seasons-at-essa/?tab=comments#comment-1276298 

 

The FSX/P3D SDK does not provide for the implementation of seasonal variations of water polygons or waterclass, unlike landclass polygons. However, quite a number of years ago we discovered a work-around that does allow for those changes and we've implemented it in the automatic "freezing" of lakes and rivers during winter months and also seasonal flooding in the FTX Australia Region. Unfortunately, changes to water display method and shaders in P3D have "killed" this undocumented approach and there's no alternative available at this time. That's why, for P3D users, we had to change the "frozen" and seasonal water options to external switches in the respective FTX Region's control panels.

 

Cheers, Holger