No winter textures yet!

[Guest blaster331]

Greetings and Merry Christmas to all,Its Dec 26th and when flying out of Albany there is no snow showing at all.I am trying to remember that last year after the FS clock changed to winter(12-21) snow patches were present.If I advance the date to Jan I get snow.Any help; I'm clueless.Best regardsAndrew

[bucifan 0]

I found something myself yesterday. Chicago and up to MIlwaukee had no snow either. After doing some searching, I came across something that jogged my memory. There was an update done, (I forget the author), to the NAM_seasons.bgl, which changed some snow patterns. I believe it added snow to some areas, according to government survey info. For me though, flying around CHicago, I found I had no snow until January. Renaming this file to a .xxx and reverting back to MS's original file, I started seeing patches of snow after Nov. 21, and now have snow cover.Did you update this file? I just loaded up FS at KALB, and I have snowy winter textures!Rick

[scott967 62]

You are probably referring to a scenery I did. There are two problems in FS: The resolution of season definitions in FS9 is 10km square (2km in FSX), and, the season coverage is unchanged until the 17th of each month (+/- a day) (1st of the month for FSX). The combination of these makes it difficult to get accurate depiction of seasonal textures, especially in the winter/hard winter (snow) transition. I picked a single day of each month (around the 25th) and applied the actual snow coverage, so it doesn't change for the entire 30 day period. As it turns out, that year was one of relatively little snow in North America.In FSX if there is snow in the weather, the sim displays the hard winter textures which is a nice improvement. IIRC FS9 doesn't do that. OTOH, it is possible for scenery objects in FS9 to query the date and select an appropriate texture. So far I don't think anyone has found a way in FSX to do that (aside from autogen).I suppose it is feasible to have a set of 365 or more season.bgl files, and have some front-end copy the appropriate one into the scenery library prior to starting FS9.there still remains the problem of showing frozen water bodies. I have seen some config programs that can replace water textures with ice textures prior to startup, but the coverage is world-wide, not affected by the season file at all. IMHO, MS could have a hard winter water texture variant that would respond to season.bgl, but that I guess will have to wait to FSXI or ?scott s..

[altstiff 71]

Be aware it add's hard winter to some other areas as well (like Portland OR). It's a nice free addition but it does have it's bugs.

[Guest blaster331]

Thanks for the replys but can someone tell me what program we are referring to.I did follow the above suggestion of renaming the bgl file and that worked.I think it might have been an addtion of Glacier Bay that added that bgl.BestAndrew

[bucifan 0]

This is the program; nam_seasons.zipAll it is, is just the bgl file that you put into one of your scenery folders. If you renamed it, and you now have snow, you do not need to do anything else. As far as I know, it was not part of any other program. If you have snow now in Albany, you are using the default Microsoft parameters.Rick

[Guest blaster331]

Thanks Rick, I just took a look at Scott's program and Thats not what I had installed.I keep a very detailed log of what I put in to FS9.That bgl came from an addon scenery I haven't identified yet but all is well in KALBBestAndrew

[scott967 62]

>Be aware it add's hard winter to some other areas as well>(like Portland OR). It's a nice free addition but it does have>it's bugs.>>Unfortunately the source data has 4 km resolution and must be down-sampled to 10km for use in the sim. This can cause problems in areas with mountains where the snow line extends down to only a certain elevation. If the mountain top is always snow-covered, this can be handled with landclass rather than seasons, but when snow cover expands in winter, that is a hard nut to crack. I haven't played with it in FSX, but the better resolution of 2km should help quite a bit.There is somewhat the same problem with fall, where higher elevations should show fall foliage earlier.scott s..

[pschlute 37]

Global warming ?Peter