Is it just me, or the timezones still having problems with the current flightsim.Please, i hope this is fixed for fsx

Yes this is another issue I did forget to post on the wishlist. There are definetly some areas that are not correct in the current sim. It is mostly so far that I have noticed in the Middle East and parts of South America. Asia is possible as well, but I don't fly to often in Asia so I really don't know. I fly mostly in the US, with exceptions in flying sometimes in the Middle East and sometimes do a South American flight. The biggest error comes when daylight savings time changes to standard time, irl last week of Oct, in the simulator usually the first week of Nov.

How about if we just publish the format in the SDK and you guys can fix what you don't like?

You know, if it came down to spending dev time on timezones vs. spending devtime on SMOOTHNESS, I would rather the FS team spend it on smoothness any day. :)So yes, it would be fine if the format were in the SDK.

The problem is not limited to Asia and South Africa. I have experienced problems when flying within BC, Canada, which is one time zone in real life, I saw traffic and texture problems coming up related to FS time zones and I had only default scenery installed.As soon as I installed the Time Zone 3.0 fix (available from avsim library) the problem was gone.I would be surprised if a fix by MS caused development to fall behind as the Time Zone 3.0 fix is merely a 34kb file. But what do I know.

"How about if we just publish the format in the SDK and you guys can fix what you don't like?"I think this is a great solution. I am sure someone will fix this for the community and it save development time for other more pressing issues.Mark.

Mike, I worked the format of the timezones out about a year or two ago and what can be fixed is pretty much fixed already. I told Dennis Thompson - the time zone guru - what he needed to know and he's actively fixing the time zones in FS9 (he's down to making very minor adjustments now and then). So an SDK is not really that important - everything you can tell us we know already and a pretty accurate timezone.bgl for FS9 is in existance.What I'd really like to see is the ability of setting day light saving times. Ideally, we could define our own dates, but at the very least please give us one day light saving option for the Southern hemisphere (or maybe two, say South America and Australia)!Cheers,Christian

The FS9 timezone setup may be figured out, but there is the possibility that the FSX flight zone bgl will be somewhat different...

>How about if we just publish the format in the SDK and you>guys can fix what you don't like?That'd be great! BTW, I'm wondering if the BGL structure will be fairly the same as for FS9. I've written a few BGL files in XML and compiled them using BGLComp. I'm a bit concerned though about compatability with the new FSX BGL structure. This is what I know: The land and water masks, vector terrain polygons, roads, utility lines, etc in FS9 are still assembled using the older ASM language used to compile the BGLs for FS2000 and FS2002. The airport (or facility BGLs) are compiled using an XML schema in FS9.My big question is: What types of BGL scenery will use the newer XML format as opposed to the old ASM format?Regards,Joshua Robertson (creator of FS Real Time)3D Softworks Design Studioshttp://www.3dsoftworks.net

Hi JoshuaThe xml format is really only a means to an end (as is BGLC). The terrain bgls are a different beast all together, hence there was no need to move them to xml (the old format is doing just fine). The move to xml for airports was quite logical, because in FS2002 that info was really existing in stereo (visual bgls and AFD info), so joining those and adopting xml to develop the new files seems like a logical move. But the bgl files still have a binary structure - in fact before bglcomp was released I have written a few BGLC macros that could generate the new FS9 bgls. (Plus the new bgls are actually more similar to the terrain bgls now than they were beforehand).I suspect that the terrain bgls will continue to work (maybe with some modifications). And I suspect that since there is an existing strong 3rd party support for those files the MS team won't bother creating an xml tool (if anyone wanted to that can be done today). Of course this is just a wild speculation.Cheers,Christian

And fix the issue of the sim adjusting the GMT time instead of local! When you cross a timezone, the LOCAL time changes, the GMT remains constant. In FS9 and FS2002 (at least.... dunno about fs2000 or before), more often than not the GMT changes instead (so if you cross a timezone at dusk, you're suddenly back in full daylight until you manually reset the GMT back to what it should be....

A timezone fix is long overdue in my opinion.