Orbx P3D 4.4 and NO SEASONS!

[pmb 5,137]

1 hour ago, Christopher Low said:

That would be me.....and the thousands of other flight simmers who prefer an accurate recreation of the real world with one season rather than boring generic stuff with multiple seasons.

Add me, too. I own the excellent Flugwerk Austria which is 1 season only, too. And no doubt Austria has real Winter contrary to most of GB.

The nasty thing is when you fly from Summer-looking Austria into Winter-looking Germany etc. No real issue for me as I prefer flying in my C172  in Summer anyway, but I understand for others in their tubeliners.

Kind regards, Michael

[Christopher Low 5,352]

When TrueEarth GB is released for P3D, it will be nice to get updated versions of the ORBx FTX UK airfields that have had the other seasons removed.

[G-RFRY 1,710]

I have my sim set to my pc time I fly today it`s winter, I don't see the point in users wanting realistic weather engine in the sim and fly in summer terrain, if you fly the alps you see snow will TE remove that in it comes.

You could do away with weather addons and just fly in sunny weather.  

Edited December 31, 2018 by rjfry

[RALF9636 1,951]

2 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

That would be me.....and the thousands of other flight simmers who prefer an accurate recreation of the real world with one season rather than boring generic stuff with multiple seasons.

I totally agree, Even more because the seasons in the sim are inaccurate for essential parts of the world.

The sim for example has Germany covered with snow since the beginning of December. In reality Central Europe hasn't seen any snow at all yet this winter. For me it totally ruins the immersion when the sim makes me fly over a winter wonderland through rain at 10 degrees Celsius.

The system of seasonal change based on scripted dates and different sets of ground textures leaves a lot to be desired. It is time for something new.

9 hours ago, Skywolf said:

Why do I get the feeling that something like this will be in the corner for upcoming P3D releases.  The teaser is already here - this is using XPlane but I will not be surprised that like this could happen very soon in Prepar3d world

 

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165519-true-earth-and-seasons/?do=findComment&comment=1454799

 

9 hours ago, pmb said:

This was my idea, too. With growing popularity of photo-sceneries the landclass way of providing 4 or 5 sets of textures may become just impracticable because of storage and bandwith limitations for the average user throughout the foreseeable future. While I am all but an X-Plane fan, Austin's paradigm of not doing texture seasons but providing shader/particle-based solutions may turn out the better solution in the end, despite having been condemned numerous times. I would not be surprised if IPACS - lacking any legacy ballast - came up with a similar solution for their photo-only AeroflyFS2.

Kind regards, Michael

Absolutely. We need something smarter and more dynamic. Based on actual weather and climate instead of scripted dates, I am sure something like that will come at some point in the not so distant future.

I'm fine with Orbx not wasting enormous resources on a deficient technology of the past.

[RALF9636 1,951]

3 minutes ago, rjfry said:

I have my sim set to my pc time I fly today it`s winter, I don't see the point in users wanting realistic weather engine in the sim and fly in summer terrain, if you fly the alps you see snow will TE remove that in it comes.

But the problem with the current season system of the sim is, that it is NOT connected to the weather engine. Right now I would fly at 10 degrees Celsius in rain, with the sim showing me a winter wonderland below me.

[Paul Golding 92]

Personally, I think the weather in the UK has far more impact of how the ground looks when flying than the season itself.  In terms of hard winter, most years, the vast majority of the UK has zero to minimal snow to the point where it's really not even relevant and actually looks pretty stupid.  As for the rest of the year (ignoring a few months where most trees have no leaves), the ground will look pretty similar. 

Even in the summer season, the colour of fields will differ greatly in real life, depending on rainfall, crops and harvesting/ploughing.  I think the autumn/fall colours in the UK look pretty unrealistic; whether with default, FTX Global or FTX UK textures....the country simply doesn't turn brown.  If anything, aside from ploughed fields, all other grassland is actually greener in the winter than the summer because it's wetter and therefore not looking burnt due to the sun and lack of rain!

So, I'd much prefer real ground all year round combined with better weather/cloud shadows/haze and will snap this up as soon as I can.

[pracines 823]

55 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

Absolutely. We need something smarter and more dynamic. Based on actual weather and climate instead of scripted dates, I am sure something like that will come at some point in the not so distant future.

I Agree, it would be best for the wx engine to determine what the ground looks like, this would be ideal. But until we get there, the representation of wx is still up to the textures.

57 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

I'm fine with Orbx not wasting enormous resources on a deficient technology of the past.

I would be fine with this too, but we ARE in the past still.

1 hour ago, RALF9636 said:

But the problem with the current season system of the sim is, that it is NOT connected to the weather engine. Right now I would fly at 10 degrees Celsius in rain, with the sim showing me a winter wonderland below me.

Correct, that is a problem, but making scenery that is compatible with P3D 4.4 (The OLD way), to have no seasons is NOT the solution. This is like lowering full flaps for cruise flight. We have no idea (maybe LM/Orbx does, though I doubt it) if this new TE scenery will be able to accept new wx tech effects of the future. We can speculate that this is a "planned" Segway into V5 that possibly has new wx tech, but it could have waited for V5. There is plenty of other projects that could have been done, Africa for example. 

____________________________________________________________

There will be some who don't mind that seasons are absent, and they will either tolerate (settle for) sudden lines of demarcation. But one has to ask, why has Orbx and many other scenery development companies gone through so much trouble and effort to smooth the texture transitions up until this product? 

I think the majority of P3D users prefer a seamless scene all year round. I guess we'll see how successful this new product is.

I don't want to come across as though I'm discouraging extreme detailed scenery, no never. I just thought that Orbx knew that a majority of flight simmers prefer and even require seasons.

[RALF9636 1,951]

34 minutes ago, pracines said:

I think the majority of P3D users prefer a seamless scene all year round. I guess we'll see how successful this new product is.

I don't want to come across as though I'm discouraging extreme detailed scenery, no never. I just thought that Orbx knew that a majority of flight simmers prefer and even require seasons.

How do you know what the "majority" wants?

I'm pretty sure, ORBX makes well informed decisions for their work to be profitable for them. 

Imagine in one or two years from now we have some kind of a shader based sesaonal effects system depending on actual weather that works with every ground texture. So every investment in sesaonal photoreal ground textures now would have been in vain.

 

Edited December 31, 2018 by RALF9636

[pracines 823]

29 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

How do you know what the "majority" wants?

The majority could fly in XP 11 most of the time, but they fly in P3Dv4 most of the time. 

XP 9 and 10 could have been at least as popular as FS9 and FSX.

Seasons is one of them BIG visual differences between sims. World depiction and believability, like it or not, are very important, even to you.

There is no doubt, if Orbx global had no seasons it would have failed in FSX. Because it has seasons its #1.

 

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

Pretty sure that, even the famous survey we had going recently, still indicates what the majority of simmers who visit those few sites do. But no, it's not the majority of simmers.

 

To be honest, having gone from FSX to XP long ago, and me living in Italy, snow (but also seasonal variations) have never been so game breaking as some other users here appear to have it. At least on XP it looks like it will be partially fixed with xEnviro 1.10 which is able to show snow accumulation even above photoreal sceneries.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

The master of all things orthoimagery is Google. They have gradually upgraded their "bird's eye" view resolution over time. Then they added street view imagery to create a 3D perspective view. Where the available imagery is high quality, the 3D view is fairly convincing. It's not as geometrically correct as using autogen, but it's still quite impressive.

But what about seasons? Even Google Maps/Earth is still locked into an endless summer. When I see Google adding seasons, even for small geographic areas, I will know that the technology has arrived. If anyone thinks that either LR or ORBX are at the cutting edge of doing the same, well I just have to laugh.

[Clutch Cargo 384]

I find this thread very-very interesting with all the different viewpoints as one who is in the middle of beta testing a photoreal product.  So as not to hijack this thread let me throw this out there... what if Orbx offered a full blown 5-season product of the same product but you had to pay twice as much and you could only obtain it via a flashdrive?  That's right, snail mail.  Viable option or just more complaints?

Clutch

[Guest]

P3D can do procedural seasons so can FSX, has been that way for almost 2 decades.  You can even do procedural terrain textures based on weather if you like (nothing prevent that from happening in the SDK).  It's unfortunate that ORBX will not leverage this 2 decade old technology with their TE projects, but one vendor's weakness is another vendor's opportunity.

Seasons are much more than some snow on the ground (I hope that's NOT the grand plan for Seasons in XP11), trees leaves change color, trees lose leaves, grass changes color from short green to brown to golden brown to long dense green (all this is supported in the P3D/FSX SDK) ... I wouldn't have purchased ORBX NorCal if it didn't come with seasons.

Most likely the "no seasons" approach from ORBX is more about cutting development time by 50-60% while charging the similar price point, avoiding the purchase of seasonal imagery (it does exist and it's not cheap), and freeing up resources to do Multi-Platform projects.  Sad, Orbx Vector has seasonal support too, frozen lakes and water bodies which as one knows can drastically change how a location looks.

Revenue/Sales will ultimately decide the future of seasons or if we'll forever be stuck in summer at a specific "snapshot" in time ... some image data is very old, going back to 2005 so even PR isn't what I would define as "accurate", it's just a snapshot in time ... your house may or may not be there pending when the image was taken and when one's house was built.

I still not sure how one is going to reconcile long flights from KSFO in December (our Winter) to Melbourne in December (there summer) which is supported by the P3D/FSX SDK ... sooo, that would look very odd indeed.  I hope ORBX have a re-think for their P3D/FSX projects.

Cheers, Rob.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Clutch Cargo said:

what if Orbx offered a full blown 5-season product of the same product but you had to pay twice as much and you could only obtain it via a flashdrive?  That's right, snail mail.  Viable option or just more complaints?

I think those of us who want seasons have already indicated it's a viable option.  MSE provide this option also (not seasons but flash drive delivery option).  I think even PILOTs provided this option too with their global product.  However, with that said, I would venture that many of us (not all) also have high speed internet, at 1Gbps it doesn't take me long to download 100-200GB provided the sending server isn't throttling and is reliable (which the almost always do).

It would be cheaper to deploy using USB 2.0/3.0 external 500GB-1TB mechanical drive (they range anywhere from $10 to $50) rather than a "flash drive".  

EDIT: or allow the end user/consumer to ship the vendor a external storage device and the vendor would load it onto that and ship back (allow for re-use of the same device).

Cheers, Rob.

Edited December 31, 2018 by Guest

[kevinfirth 1,393]

26 minutes ago, Clutch Cargo said:

I find this thread very-very interesting with all the different viewpoints as one who is in the middle of beta testing a photoreal product.  So as not to hijack this thread let me throw this out there... what if Orbx offered a full blown 5-season product of the same product but you had to pay twice as much and you could only obtain it via a flashdrive?  That's right, snail mail.  Viable option or just more complaints?

Clutch

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