Since the extent of my photoreal scenery design has been in an area that really has no major diversity between the seasons, I'm in quite a dilemna. In FS9, if one wants to add night textures to their photoreal textures, you must also add in textures for all the seasons as well. The area I chose to do is huge. It's getting up to nearly 10,000 summer (default) scenery tiles to cover the thousands of square miles. There are areas I'd really like to have nighttime textures for and others that it would matter little since there are no roads or houses. If I choose to do those nighttime textures, I have this huge editing nightmare and, I have to create 10,000 X 4 more scenery tiles that are essentially identical to my summer textures. Suddenly the distribution size of my scenery becomes unwieldly. Distribution by download becomes dicey to all but the people with the fastest internet connections and, if I host the file myself, my website bandwidth requirements go through the roof. Why the all or none requirement? For that matter why have to declare the nighttime textures at all? If the _lm.bmp file exists for a given tile, why not simply show it during the appropriate hours? In that same light, I've been toying with the idea of an application that automatically creates night textures for selected scenery tiles based on autogen that has been placed on them. This is probably a stretch but couldn't the graphics engine build those night tiles on the fly using the same logic (if they did not already exist)?Thanks for the consideration,Art Martin

I totally hear your sentiment on this one. I have created huge amounts of photoreal scenery before, and this is an issue that bugs me as well.For instance, my current Mount St. Helens Scenery Package release features an image that covers rougly 1,500 square miles, and contains 1,908 "tiles." The result is a package that consumes over 70MB disk space. Increase that by each seasonal variation that's required and instantly my package comes close to 2GB - nowhere near what's allowable on freeware scenery download sites.I hope this becomes addressed with the next Flight Simulator release.

Well, normally I don't like replying to myself but somehow I'm wondering why this request got overlooked by the MS development team and not responded to. I suppose either it means I'm way off base on the request and talking out my ***, the MS team is investigating it and doesn't know what it'll do yet, or simply that it got overlooked because of all the other posts on the day.In the event it was the latter, my responding should put this back up the list for reconsideration. Tdragger or Pixelpoke, if you already read this and blew it off, my apologies.Art Martin

<>or that I don't know enough about the issue to make a comment.

Hey, just as long as I know it's on the table. Thanks for the reply.art

>Well, normally I don't like replying to myself but somehow>I'm wondering why this request got overlooked by the MS>development team and not responded to. I suppose either it>means I'm way off base on the request and talking out my ***,>the MS team is investigating it and doesn't know what it'll do>yet, or simply that it got overlooked because of all the other>posts on the day.>>In the event it was the latter, my responding should put this>back up the list for reconsideration. Tdragger or Pixelpoke,>if you already read this and blew it off, my apologies.>>Art MartinHowdy Art!Not so much overlooked on my part, but the full answer to some of those questions above require a lot more time than I'm willing to invest in typing... :)For the best results, feature requests like these should really get sent to [email protected] --- it's the best way to guarantee a lot of eyes get on the issue at hand.On a more general note (having nothing to do with anything brought up in this thread, but sorta now on topic);I will say that we (mostly Mike and I) answer questions on our own time, and as such we *have* to be able to just not answer stuff. Both Mike and I try and hit a lot of different websites as well as Avsim, *and* we both blog...I know from my end, I tend to skip over threads that are much longer than 20-30 replies.

Appreciate the answer. I'll send the query off to the site you suggest. Art

"Since the extent of my photoreal scenery design has been in an area that really has no major diversity between the seasons, I'm in quite a dilemna. In FS9, if one wants to add night textures to their photoreal textures, you must also add in textures for all the seasons as well."No you dontI had the same problem down in Florida.Deleted all the other files except su and lmSeems to work fineTas

Well that's good to know. Certainly doesn't seem that way in the SDK. Thanks for the tip.Art

An update to this inquiry. It was rightly pointed out in this thread that, after compiling a .bgl file that includes seasonal and night textures, one doesn't necessarily have to have the seasonal files for Flight Sim to display the night textures. I've recently created the night textures for my scenery and things seemed to work fine without the spring, fall, and winter texture tiles. However, almost randomly, I'd load up a flight that was set for one of the non-summer seasons and find myself with a landscape of gray mottled texture. I'm now faced with making copies of my tens of thousands of summer textures for those different seasons to ensure my customers won't get the same results. The one area now has over a gigabyte of texture files in it and my distribution method of downloads over the internet is at risk. This is definitely an issue MS needs to address in the next version as more and more designers create huge photorealistic addons.Thanks,Art

Hmm, perhaps you could create a utility that creates the extra textures for the user upon installation, so you don't have to deliver them?And/Or..., how does FS deal with link files?, so instead of copying all those files, just creating links to them with the correct names. (I'm still thinking these could be created upon installation, too).Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com/FC_StartJava.html] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

This is a worry because I cannot get this effectDid get something similar once because I didnot use MipMaps.

That's a very good idea to have the installer create them but it still seems like a waste of resources I'd like to see addressed in FSX. When you think of it from a programming point of view, there really seems to be no logical explanation for the inability for FS to simply look for the texture name of the season it's in and, if it's not there, simply revert to the summer texture. The night textures could be handled similarly. If they don't exist, simply display the day textures with the brightness toned way down. I just think they never imagined the huge areas scenery designers would be tackling and just figured the scenes created would be small sections around airports. Art

I'm sorry, I hope you didn't take my comments as if the workaround was easy and therefore your thoughts unwarranted. Aboslutely your idea sounds reasonable to me. I was only trying to suggest a solution (which I imagine you had already thought of) so you could release your scenery.Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com/FC_StartJava.html] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

No worries. On the internet nothing's personal. Art