Im having some trouble with the seasons in fsx.  The problem is I am seeing evergreen forests in new york state in November.  In November most of new york is turning brown for the winter.  Using tmf viewer I can check my various lc files installed (orbx ftx global, fs genesis, and utx usa) and they are all showing a deciduous forest for the areas in question.  Now this is correct, these areas should be deciduous forest and loose their leaves, the season overlayed at this time is also soft winter.  My question is what could be causing these evergreen textures to be placed in there areas?

ORBX FTX Global is not land class, it's just improved land textures. FS Genesis? Isn't that terrain mesh (Digital Elevation Model)? And UTX isn't land class either, as best I remember.

 

What you need is FTX Global LC for North America, which hasn't been released yet. The land class datasets in both P3d and FSX are so old (and fairly imprecise) that it's not surprising that you are seeing coniferous trees in areas that are supposedly deciduous forest in NA.

ORBX FTX Global is not land class, it's just improved land textures. FS Genesis? Isn't that terrain mesh (Digital Elevation Model)? And UTX isn't land class either, as best I remember.

 

What you need is FTX Global LC for North America, which hasn't been released yet. The land class datasets in both P3d and FSX are so old (and fairly imprecise) that it's not surprising that you are seeing coniferous trees in areas that are supposedly deciduous forest in NA.

I have landclass.  FS Genesis makes a very accurate landclass addon, seperate from their terrain mesh.  I have verified the accuracy of their product by comparing it to sat imagery and my own hometown, and it beats scenery tech lc and cloud 9 lc.  UTX also does include some basic lc modifications.  When viewing the lc file provided by fs genesis it displays the area as deciduous but in the sim I get green trees in november.  

Well here's what else that I know about this (mostly from doing GIS stuff as part of work), which isn't much. The most accurate and up to date land class datasets for the US can be found here:

 

http://www.mrlc.gov/

 

It gets updated every 5 years and the most recent version is from 2011. The legend can be found here:

 

http://www.mrlc.gov/nlcd11_leg.php

 

Since the MRLC data  is created from image analysis of various types of high resolution orthoimagery, it is highly dependent on the time of year when the imagery is done. To get the best results for developed land classes, the imagery is usually done in early Spring or late Fall, but some mid-summer  shots are done too. The orthoimagery is both visible and false color IR. The latter is useful for interpreting vegetation types and wetlands.

 

Where flight sim LC data comes from is generally a mystery, except to the app and add-on developers. Some developers claim to be using "expensive and highly accurate commercial products", but basically everything has been co-opted from governments, at least in the US. When I was working for the NY State government, we paid a contractor to fly our own high resolution orthoimagery and then Google would just download it from our GIS clearinghouse website for free and put their watermark on it.

 

So the question is, is the source data being used just inaccurate or is there something wrong with the LC in FSX/P3d? If the source data is MRLC 2011, there are some known disparities between coniferous and deciduous areas, but these are generally few and far between. Another possibility is that until you get to the winter season in the sim, some deciduous trees may look like conifers, although I'd be surprised if you were mixing the two up.

 

 

Thanks a lot, that was just the type of information I was looking for.  As a side note, I think i may have figured out why my textures are displaying the way they do in new york.  I started a flight over in europe where open lc europe with ftx global is installed and compared the scenery with and without open lc eu activated.  Without open lc the same problem existed, lots of full green trees in in the soft winter season.  But with open lc the trees displayed are correct.  I then viewed a collection of the winter texture .bmp files from ftx global and was surprised to see that many of them actually are green.  So..  What i think is that ftx uses this to get around the inaccurate seasons in fsx by using green textures in winter and placing them in spots like southern greece.  The problem is, without their own dedicated lc project this wont work correctly.  Basically it seems for the seasons to work right with ftx global we just need to wait for the open lc packages to be released.  Its going to be expensive, but it seems to be the most accurate seasonal variation so far.