Add more Snow to the Hills and Mountains

[Guest FSimmersChile]

Does anyone know how to add more snow to the hills and mountains?I live in Chile and we have the "Andes Mountains" crossing the whole border of our country. In FS2004 there is a little quantity of snow but in the real life I saw the mountain covered by snow completely during the whole year.I mean in one specific season of the year probably some hills or mountains are covered by 1/4 of snow but I dont know if is possible to modify a file or something to see the same hill or mountain covered by 3/4 of snow.Is that possible?Cheers for all!!!

[scott967 62]

You might do some searching on the names Arnaud Clere and Holger Sandmann; they come to mind as designers who have done a lot of work with mountains and snow. Snow cover in mountains is controlled by three files:1. Landclass (worldlc.bgl or local replacement). This file determines the texture bitmap files to be drawn. In particular, there are two high mountain textures, one is "ice and rock" 122 the other is "rock" 142. These display snow all year long. Unfortunately, the smallest region covered by a texture is about 1.3km square, so it doesn't always work good on an isolated mountain peak.2. Mesh (dw120s45.bgl or local replacement). This file determines the steepness of slope. When the slope is very steep, in general you will see rock drawn instead of snow.3. Seasons (season.bgl or local replacement). When there are seasonal variations for a landclass texture bitmap, this file will determine which variation is drawn. The variation with snow is called "hard winter". Unfortunately this file also has fairly course resolution. This makes it hard to have snow show up only at certain elevation levels rather than over a large area. The season file changes monthly, around the 19th of the month in FS9.An alternative is to do local modifications using vector polygons to place snow textures. I'm not sure how feasible it is to use polygons to cover a large mountain range, but I suppose it is doable.scott s..

[Guest FSimmersChile]

Thank you Scott for your answer, as we can see this is more complex that I thought. At least now I know which are the files involved.Appreciated.