Right now it is 5:43am in Switzerland, and any country observing CEST

 

Why is it only 4:43am when I load up FSX?

In the General section of the FSX setup, did you select 'use system time'? Time in FSX is a known bug/issue. There's a payware program called FS Real Time that might help you with your problem.

 

 

Best regards,

Jim

Right now it is 5:43am in Switzerland, and any country observing CEST

 

Why is it only 4:43am when I load up FSX?

We set the clocks back this morning at 3AM.

Now it will be a little screwy the next 2 weeks or so till the states switches.

Right now it is 5:43am in Switzerland, and any country observing CEST

 

Why is it only 4:43am when I load up FSX?

 

There's a 'bug' somewhere that can cause FSX to corrupt the scenery BGLs where the timezones are defined, I had it happen once and every 'alter timezones' thing I could find didn't fix it, I had to restore the default scenery from a backup.

 

(I noticed it about a year ago (probably first week of november or so, when I suddenly noticed that I was still having an offset as if I was in BST, even though the clocks had switched, oddly it didn't happen at *all* airports, just ones where the default scenery was in use, so I didn't realise at first until I tried to fly out of EGSS)

The way fsx works is it has a "setup" phase where it uses system time or saved flight time (or set in create a flight) and then computes GMT based on location/timezone. Once GMT is computed it enters "running" phase where local time is computed from GMT based on time zone.

 

FSX has world timezone based on longitude, but they designed it wrong in that the GMT timezone is too wide so all the other timezones are offset 7.5 degrees from where they should be. FSX has the capability to overide the default timezones with scenery timezone definition files. One is provided in the default setup, covering just the US and Western Europe. That default file uses the timezone and DST rules in effect when FSX was released.

 

There is a scenery addon available with improved timezones, based on FS98-style scenery. Unlike FSX there is no ability to specify DST so what that scenery does is provide a "file switcher" utility that will load DST files based on current date or a date you enter in the GUI for it. The ini for that utility is pretty straightforward so you can edit it for the current DST rules (assuming all areas within the file coverage area are using the same rule of course).

 

I've been doing some work trying to redo the timezone data using FSX sdk (bglcomp) but I've been kind of frustrated in that it doesn't seem to always work the way I think it should. For example I couldn't get the Channel Islands to work right. I got kind of frustrated so set the project aside, though I will eventually get back to it. I did upload the portion for North America which AFAICT is working correctly. The hard part is testing. I can't see any way to do but to actually fly around in the sim and try to cover all areas. Even running at 16x with an autologging program/autopilot it takes forever to run tests.

 

scott s.

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The hard part is testing. I can't see any way to do but to actually fly around in the sim and try to cover all areas.

 

Couldn't you test it with the airpost selection dialog and the time/date dialog? -> Change the GMT, and see above what local time FSX displays for the airport you selected previously.

Sounds interesting Scott. If you get around to working on it, I'd love to help

Couldn't you test it with the airpost selection dialog and the time/date dialog? -> Change the GMT, and see above what local time FSX displays for the airport you selected previously.

 

Yes, but the problem is

1. It's very tedious to punch in many airports and record results

2. I like to fly over the boundaries as well

 

Here's an example of a test run in western N Africa/Europe:

 

 

scott s.

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1. It's very tedious to punch in many airports and record results

 

Of course it is. But it is magnitudes of order less tedious than doing all these flights, even in 16x accelerated speed.

 

2. I like to fly over the boundaries as well

 

For some areas, there is a solution for this, from the airport and time-date dialogs -> find and select airports (if any) that are very close to a border where there is a timezone change.