hi I have just reinstalled fsx im using some orbx scenery as well whenever I start fsx I always get snow on the ground even if I download real weather I still get snow on the ground even if its raining any help please

          

 

                thanks jim

The default scenery and some payware scenery does this based on the time if year, and it has nothing to so with the current weather.

 

To solve it, you can change the date so that fall textures load instead.

Are you using any of the ORBX sceneries that have a winter feature in the control panel for that scenery?

no I don't have a winter feature installed. do you know any programs that will install textures according to what the weather report is I don't fancy flying in rainy weather with snow on the ground I always thought fsx would load only snow on the ground if it was snowing

 

                 thanks, jim

No, snow on the ground is connected to the date in some way. That means that FSX will always display snow on the ground when it's winter, if the textures that are called up have such a feature.

As real as it gets, lol.

Glad you asked this, I am annoyed by it too! It stinks flying around Vancouver/Victoria Canada with snow on the ground all winter when it rarely snows here. Such a bummer. :(

That's one of FSX's main shortcomings, seasons are defined my the month of year, so it might be fall in your area on October 31st and then all of the sudden on November 1st it will be mild winter and the textures will change. It's controlled by seasons.bgl in the Scenery\BASE\Scenery folder, but it is possible to make a seasons adjustment .bgl that can reside in a scenery layer above that which can alter the seasons in a localized area without affecting the entire world. It's very similar to a landclass or waterclass adjustment, in fact you can actually make a waterclass in SBuilderX and turn it into a seasons adjustment just by making a small change to the .ini file that resample.exe compiles the .bgl from. There are a few threads over at fsdeveloper if anyone's interested, just search the forums for "season" and you should find something.

 

Jim

I've become extremely tired of Winter this year,  both in FSX and real world,  so have just been changing the dates to Spring and/or Summer.  

 

Problem solved,  except when I go out the door, LOL.

I am going to keep it simple and set summer and then save it as the default flight, thanks for the advice .

 

Jim

That's one of FSX's main shortcomings, seasons are defined my the month of year, so it might be fall in your area on October 31st and then all of the sudden on November 1st it will be mild winter and the textures will change. It's controlled by seasons.bgl in the Scenery\BASE\Scenery folder, but it is possible to make a seasons adjustment .bgl that can reside in a scenery layer above that which can alter the seasons in a localized area without affecting the entire world. It's very similar to a landclass or waterclass adjustment, in fact you can actually make a waterclass in SBuilderX and turn it into a seasons adjustment just by making a small change to the .ini file that resample.exe compiles the .bgl from. There are a few threads over at fsdeveloper if anyone's interested, just search the forums for "season" and you should find something.

 

Jim

 

Has anyone taken this from theory to release? I'd really like to have an updated bgl that creates a more realistic snow layer in the fs world.

I've become extremely tired of Winter this year,  both in FSX and real world,  so have just been changing the dates to Spring and/or Summer.  

 

Problem solved,  except when I go out the door, LOL.

 

There's a door?

Has anyone taken this from theory to release? I'd really like to have an updated bgl that creates a more realistic snow layer in the fs world.

 

The thing is you have to assign one of 5 different values (Su, Wi, Hw, Sp, Fa) to every 1.2 Km square that makes up the coverage area, and you have to go through that process for each of the 12 months if you want complete year round coverage. You can't just say "OK, Washington State needs to show springtime textures in April", paint the area with a wide brush, and call it done. If you did that the tops of mountains would display springtime textures also, when most of the higher mountains are still buried under 12 feet of snow in April. You'd have to assign hard winter to the top of the mountain, mild winter halfway up the mountain, and finally spring around the base for example, and then do that for every mountain x12 months. As you can see year round global coverage is not something you'd do manually, you'd need to gather some real world climate data or something and automate turning that into a seasons.bgl for FS. The problem is the end result will only be as accurate as the data it was derived from, which I'm sure is the reason seasons are sometimes a little whacked in default FSX.

 

Another problem you'd run into if you did manage to come up with an accurate global seasons adjustment is that you'd break all the addon airport developer's existing photoreal backgrounds because they are all manually matched to default seasons (or Orbx seasons in the case of Orbx airports). A seasons .bgl doesn't have any effect on photoreal so you'd see winter photoreal backgrounds clashing with fall landclass textures and vice versa as the seasons changed.

 

Jim

I have in the past worked this out by first copying out the default seasons.bgl (didn't know how to read the file, but took a screenshot of each month in tmfviewer).  So I could use the default as a base layer.  I convert all the hard winter on this to winter, so by default no snow at all.

 

Then I just download the most recent (or date of interest) snow and ice coverage data for the northern hemisphere from nsaidc (unfortunately, know of no comparable data source for the southern hemisphere).   I overlay this on the default and then capture it as a single image which is resampled into an addon bgl.  The result is "hard winter" is set in accordance with real world, except that the resolution of nsaidc is 4km, not 1km so not quite a good.

 

scott s.

.

I have in the past worked this out by first copying out the default seasons.bgl (didn't know how to read the file, but took a screenshot of each month in tmfviewer).  So I could use the default as a base layer.  I convert all the hard winter on this to winter, so by default no snow at all.

 

Then I just download the most recent (or date of interest) snow and ice coverage data for the northern hemisphere from nsaidc (unfortunately, know of no comparable data source for the southern hemisphere).   I overlay this on the default and then capture it as a single image which is resampled into an addon bgl.  The result is "hard winter" is set in accordance with real world, except that the resolution of nsaidc is 4km, not 1km so not quite a good.

 

scott s.

.

 

Thank you Jim above for the detailed information. And Scott would you be able to make this available for us to test?