yeah. I'd put this on my prio #1! 

19 hours ago, Kilo60 said:

What a step down from realism!

Maybe you should have watched some of the videos of those who were invited to renton before jumping to conclusions.

Icing effects on the airframe have clearly been mentioned by the developers as part of the weather system.

Without seasons you just as well do away with the calendar have it fixed to summer, in the test flying that had a lot of flying in Seattle now I live in the UK but I think it get very cold in Seattle, and snow in winter is a done now we know why they never showed a clip of winter flying. what will the alps look like and the Himalayas, and Courchevel in winter sloped runway no snow used as ski resort.

Edited October 2, 20196 yr by rjfry

16 hours ago, Kilo60 said:

Is this even possible on GA aircraft?

 

Never experienced this myself...

Reminds me of my wife...If she wasn't there to see it, it didn't happen 🙄😉

Looking at the the low level significant weather chart for today 10/2/19. The freezing level is showing 16,000 ft MSL over central Florida! Even with surface temps still in the 90s F (Ugh...really?!?) Plenty of GA planes are capable of reaching 16,000 ft. Get in some clouds at the freezing level and guess what is possible. If you guessed icing you would be correct! 

I think someone else linked a reference for carb icing. So yeah, icing while somewhat less likely, is still potentially a problem no matter the season.

1 hour ago, rjfry said:

what will the alps look like and the Himalayas, and Courchevel in winter sloped runway no snow used as ski resort.

If they use satellite imagery, places that are normally snow covered most of the year will appear snow covered. Go look at the Himalayas on Google Earth or Bing that will give you an idea. I just looked at Courcheval and the surrounding French Alps are snow covered (Courcheval itself isn't)

Edited October 2, 20196 yr by ckyliu

I did not know they used google earth the dev said it was Bing summer tiles, is that why Courchevel looks the way was in the shot for all we know that could be winter.

33 minutes ago, rjfry said:

I did not know they used google earth the dev said it was Bing summer tiles, is that why Courchevel looks the way was in the shot for all we know that could be winter.

MSFS uses Bing maps data.  The "google earth" reference is a colloquial bias.

49 minutes ago, snglecoil said:

Reminds me of my wife...If she wasn't there to see it, it didn't happen 🙄😉

Looking at the the low level significant weather chart for today 10/2/19. The freezing level is showing 16,000 ft MSL over central Florida! Even with surface temps still in the 90s F (Ugh...really?!?) Plenty of GA planes are capable of reaching 16,000 ft. Get in some clouds at the freezing level and guess what is possible. If you guessed icing you would be correct! 

I think someone else linked a reference for carb icing. So yeah, icing while somewhat less likely, is still potentially a problem no matter the season.

Carb icing is absolutely a possibility even in summer. It depends on the specific make and model of engine and carburetor. The key factor is the amount of moisture in the air (humidity), and is most likely after a prolonged period spent at idle, because that is when the vacuum in the carb venturi is highest. It can happen even if the air temperature entering the carb is above 65 degrees F.

Induction icing is far less likely with fuel injected engines. (One poster mentioned a Bonanza - most of which are fuel injected). That would require flying in frozen precipitation.

1 hour ago, rjfry said:

Without seasons you just as well do away with the calendar have it fixed to summer, in the test flying that had a lot of flying in Seattle now I live in the UK but I think it get very cold in Seattle, and snow in winter is a done now we know why they never showed a clip of winter flying. what will the alps look like and the Himalayas, and Courchevel in winter sloped runway no snow used as ski resort.

Exactly!

 

Please fix the calendar to summer only!!!

9 hours ago, pracines said:

I have been a part of many alpha and beta tests, and I have experience with how fast the testing period is over and so many very important things were not tested enough.

The testing periods go so fast, especially as the release date looms. It then is like a Chinese fire drill.🤣

2 hours ago, ckyliu said:

If they use satellite imagery, places that are normally snow covered most of the year will appear snow covered. Go look at the Himalayas on Google Earth or Bing that will give you an idea. 

Not true, because satellite imaging is normally done at the time of year when skies are predictably clear, which is Summer in the Northern hemisphere.

In the area I live (Olympic Peninsula, WA state) the nearby mountains like the Olympic range, Mt. Baker, and Mt. Rainier are shown with summer snow pack in Bing or Google Earth. Basically what it looks like outside my window right now, in early Fall before the heavy weather sets in. 

It's much thicker snow pack in late Fall and Winter, but you'll never see that in a satellite ortho image because there's a 90% chance the entire area is covered in clouds. The heavy clouds and their precipitation as rain or snow  are the reason for the snow pack!

Then it melts and drains off in Spring, and the mountains go back to looking like they do in the satellite photos for the rest of Summer.

For Winter to look realistic in mountainous areas, MS will have to find a way to extend the snow pack beyond what you see in satellite images.

11 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

2 hours ago, ckyliu said:

 

Not true, because satellite imaging is normally done at the time of year when skies are predictably clear, which is Summer in the Northern hemisphere.

Unless you're in southern Alberta where the skies are often 100% clear in the middle of January. Bing and Google maps often have snow covered imagery from the region.

13 hours ago, pracines said:

The reason I think this is because there is no good reason to not include seasons day 1. Even a delay of including seasons should not even be on the table.

How do you know that there's no good reason not to implement seasons in the graphics engine Asobo are using - are you familiar with it? If it was easy, I'm absolutely convinced they'd do it without a second thought. You seem to be implying that they're deliberately leaving seasons out even though they don't need to.

10 hours ago, pracines said:

And how about FSX DX10? All disasters because there was not enough time to find and/or fix the problems.

FSX was released in October 2006. The first version of DX10 was officially released in November 2006. We were lucky to even get DX10 as a preview mode in FSX - it was nothing to do with bad implementation.

It's a fact of life with all modern games that they tend to be initially released with missing features or unanticipated bugs. If every feature which they planned to include was there in the release version, we'd probably be waiting much longer for the sim to be released than we currently are. I'd rather have a usable sim (with some features still to be added) next year than a fully completed sim with all the bells and whistles from a long wishlist a year, or more, later.

Edited October 2, 20196 yr by vortex681

11 minutes ago, goates said:

Unless you're in southern Alberta where the skies are often 100% clear in the middle of January. Bing and Google maps often have snow covered imagery from the region.

Are you sure you're not seeing Summer snow pack? At high enough altitude, mountains retain some snow in Summer. It just gets thicker with more coverage in Winter. 

Even in areas where the skies clear out sometimes in Winter (usually right after a cold front moves through), the satellite imaging is usually done in Summer for consistency with adjacent areas and previous passes. You don't want to see a mis-matched mosaic of different vegetation colors from images taken in both Summer and Winter.

There is a lot of data available for snow coverage in the US and some decent data for the globe. Data isn't the problem. rendering is the problem. As stated in a few other places, the best solution is with shaders to approximate the seasonal variations, and teaching the Azure system to recognize the seasonal differences with the data they can access.

It 's not impossible or even tremendously hard. It's a matter of man-hours spent on any one part of the sim's development. I'm sure this is why Microsoft is reaching out now, as there is only so much time to go before the final release. They have a basic sim right now. What do the customers want that is not represented yet, as there is a time budget availability for 'extras' to be included? Assuming 1 year from release (200 work days), with 10 active coders to spare, 8 hours a day, is 16000 man-hours available to include the stuff we don't yet see in the sim. Hopefully these are their fastest coders. 

I truly get it. But I also get what we wanted from Dovetail: we wanted FSX on steroids. Everything FSX included, but improved. This is also what we want from Dos Equis. Scenery, clouds, weather, aircraft modeling and functioning... thank you!

We also want Ai, seasons, helicopters... everything from FSX at this point, even if they are no better than FSX. We don't want anything excluded. Use post-release updates to upgrade features that had less than optimal implementation if you run low on man-hours. That would be acceptable if Microsoft is committed to the long haul with this product.

We are not going to get a perfect sim. The code tweaking would be endless. The product would never get released. What we are going to get is "good enough" do to time restraints. We are helping MS decide what is good enough by squawking in these forums. So, I'm squawking for seasons. How hard could it be? 😄