1 minute ago, 188AHC said:

Why are we concerned about seasons.  Microsoft has provided weather and seasons for practically all the version of Flight Simulator in one fashion or the other.

I have no doubt seasons and weather will be a part of the new sim.

 

Right - I agree that it would be a giant step backward and I cannot imagine not having them in a new generation sim.

On 6/22/2019 at 11:32 AM, 188AHC said:

Why are we concerned about seasons.  Microsoft has provided weather and seasons for practically all the version of Flight Simulator in one fashion or the other.

I have no doubt seasons and weather will be a part of the new sim.

 

Because I did not see any evidence of various seasons in the trailer, and it appears to be a new engine. We would be assuming that seasons are a part of the new sim at this point.

And yes real wx has been confirmed....seasons have not been confirmed.

1 hour ago, pracines said:

Because I did not see any evidence of various seasons in the trailer, and it appears to be a new engine. We would be assuming that seasons are a part of the new sim at this point.

And yes real wx has been confirmed....seasons have not been confirmed.

Neither have a lot of other things but it hasn't prevented our members from expressing their suspicions has it? 

I think seasons is a given at this point, confirmed or not.

What they said was, "real weather" which might not mean what we think.  Right now I'm assuming we'll have real world weather but I'm not ready yet to take what they said as a confirmation.

Since I fly exclusively with real world weather (the only time I haven't was when I was doing flight tests that needed a standard day), having real world weather with the option to load historical weather is very important to me.  At this point I think it will be included.  If it's not I have no problems buying a third party program to provide it when such is available.

Jeppesen weather had lots of problems, but was still 100 times better than the weather themes in Microsoft Flight.

Hook

The only reason I think that MS might not include seasons is because of the fact that the sim will use satellite imagery.

I don't know how they could include snow for exemple on a satellite imagery. I'm really curious how MS will deal with this pb 🤔

By the way, is there any add-on on p3d who use satellite imagery and have seasons ? 🙂 

9 minutes ago, popite78 said:

The only reason I think that MS might not include seasons is because of the fact that the sim will use satellite imagery.

OK... at this point maybe seasons isn't a given. 🙂  

People have been speculating that we'll get seasonal textures through shaders.  Another "wait and see" situation.

Hook

6 hours ago, popite78 said:

The only reason I think that MS might not include seasons is because of the fact that the sim will use satellite imagery.

I don't know how they could include snow for exemple on a satellite imagery. I'm really curious how MS will deal with this pb 🤔

By the way, is there any add-on on p3d who use satellite imagery and have seasons ? 🙂 

Through shaders, Microsoft devs for sure know how to implement it (not saying they will for v1.0, but they sure know).

Look for the XEnviro add-on, for X-plane. They are using shaders for the snow, water etc. It renders those everywhere, sim objects (airplanes, cars etc), roads, autogen, runways and on the scenery (photoreal or textures).

11 hours ago, 188AHC said:

Neither have a lot of other things but it hasn't prevented our members from expressing their suspicions has it? 

I would not call it suspicion (more a feeling), I would call it prudence (more a fact) based on recent history (X-Plane and others - w/o addon, Orbx - to avoid gigantic file sizes).

Either way, "a lot of other things" would be much easier to add to a virtual globe or a cockpit, but seasons, in the detail my OP describes, would not be so simple to add. This is why we need to bring it up now, and not later.

I started this topic hoping for other ideas pertaining to seasons. For example, similar to how we presently can get many (not just 4 or 5) different colors for our skies based on latitude or wx, I wonder if the same could be done with colors (more like 20-50 colors) of grass/ground/leaves based on season, weather, and location. (Shaders, as has been suggested in this topic)

For the future, I even suggest we call for different species of grass, trees, ect. to shade differently as they do IRL....no limits.  

Now, if seasons and weather mean the exact same thing to an exec at MS, then its possible real seasons are already done, but "prudence" tells me to not assume that. 🙂

 

12 hours ago, popite78 said:

By the way, is there any add-on on p3d who use satellite imagery and have seasons ? 🙂 

I don't have P3D but assuming it's similar to FSX. With PR you have a different texture for each month of the year, however the storage space increases for each variation, so for a large PR area it's a lot of storage considering this is also multiplied by the number of LODs as well. Another issue is that with landclass you automatically get snow textures if it's snowing, but you can't do that with PR. This is where a shader-based solution would really help because you just need the base texture and let the shader code color in the seasonal variation or according to weather.

In terms of addon products, it's common for airport scenery to use seasonal PR, but for large PR areas it's much less common.

FSX/P3D also have seasonal autogen, so the trees and other autogen scenery can vary by season. I'd expect the new MFS to be the same.

WIth SODE you can also make custom non-autogen scenery models vary their textures by season.  P3D might now have that sort of functionality built-in.