A best case for me is that there's a winter "look," similar to the current winter as opposed to hard winter... and then the snow coverage is rendered based on current or historical data available from a weather information source.  Windy.com, for example, provides snow coverage data among many other things. 

I have no idea whether that's technically feasible, so I'm really just blowing, um, snow... 😎

Another observation in passing - those of us who want seasons are really looking for a kind of "you-are-there" experiential immersion.  If your flightsim thing is, say, systems or procedures, then of course that'll matter less to you.

Much as I'd really like to see seasons in the first release, if that's not possible, my Plan B is to decamp to the Caribbean for the winter until the next-generation snow cover comes along. 

I can think of worse alternatives...

21 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

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?

This is a flight simulator, I do not need to know the engine, if a company is going to even attempt build a realistic worldwide flight simulator, seasons are a fundamental basic that has been established from FS1 all the way through FSX -so there is no good reason to not implement seasons. A lack of seasons will only serve to take us backwards like other DEAD products tried. 

25 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

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.

Excuses did not help then and don't help now. If DX10 was not going to be FULL of bugs that still aren't totally fixed (even by the wonderful DX10 fixer) 10 years later, then it would have been a neat feature to have, but as it is, makes for what ended up as a waste of time and effort, "preview" or not. I realize the intent was good. We would have MUCH rather 64-bit been implemented!👨‍⚖️👨‍🏫

But a shout out to Steve for his DX10 Fixer product and efforts.

 

31 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

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.

We differ here too. My fact of life is that MSFS will need to reasonably meet and exceed what we already have - across the board. Pretty scenery and new graphics are not going to make up for things missing which we already have.

This applied to FSW and it applies now. I was right about it then and I'm right about it now - that is the fact of flight sim life. No company and no person is going to take flight simmers backwards. Success will only come as we press on to "AS REAL AS IT GETS"....I hope you can understand this, because it is absolutely true; proven over the decades.😁

But lets please not get into another back n forth about this - I have said my peace. Take good care.👍 

I did use FSW but the sim was VFR focused with SEASONS  and DTG said a jet would be coming later, now we are getting FSW on steroids no seasons, remind me what happened to FSW.

This may have been answered already, but one thing that I was thinking of is even though we won't see visible snow, and possibly rain (?), reflected on the ground if seasons are not implemented, that doesn't necessarily mean that it won't affect the aircraft's ground handling, correct? So for example if it is in the winter and the ground is covered in ice/snow, even though we don't see that physically in the sim, does that mean that it still may be modelled such that the ground friction, etc changes?

3 hours ago, Paraffin said:

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.

I'm quite sure. More than once I've checked out the local imagery in the middle of the city and come across snow covered city streets next to green grass on the next tile over. While they have gotten better in recent years, it does still happen.

 

The weather around here is quite different than what you get on the coast. We get over 300 days with sun throughout the year, including the middle of winter. Same goes for the mountains just west of here too. it may be well below freezing, but the skies can still be perfectly clear.

15 minutes ago, goates said:

The weather around here is quite different than what you get on the coast. We get over 300 days with sun throughout the year, including the middle of winter. Same goes for the mountains just west of here too. it may be well below freezing, but the skies can still be perfectly clear.

Well, the window of opportunity for clear skies in Winter may be longer in that location. I still think most satellite imaging would be in Summer, and not a mix of Summer and Winter images to avoid clashing with different colors of vegetation on the ground, trees bare vs  with leaves, and so on. Satellite imaging companies strive for matched shots as much as possible.

On google earth Colorado is void of snow so much for the Rocky's.  

13 minutes ago, rjfry said:

On google earth Colorado is void of snow so much for the Rocky's.  

To be fair, the residents of Colorado have turned the Rockies into a bong and are using the snow to cool the smoke so this is an accurate depiction of the state as it exists today.  Quite ingenious, actually.  

Edited October 2, 20196 yr by TechguyMaxC

When ti comes to snow I actually don't see much of a problem. I am no software developer so it's more speculation than knowledge. But couldn't it be done in such a way like e.g. having a wet surface on runways? The snow would be "baked" onto the texture but have more procedural approach. After all you wouldn't just want to cover the terrain, but buildings and structures as well. The real deal here would be to combine the snow-cover with the weather. The weather engine would check the station if there has been snow reported, than check if temperatures remained below freezing since last snowfall and voila you have snow cover within the region of the weather station, perhaps even read how strong the last snowfall was to determine how much cover there should be. I guess the trickier part will be to get the correct terrain coloring (especially autumn) and also have the trees adapt to the season. But honestly? It really is just a lack of imagination i guess. I mean with all they have pulled off until now I am very confident they will find a solution for seasons. It's a matter of when and not if

3 hours ago, rjfry said:

I did use FSW but the sim was VFR focused with SEASONS  and DTG said a jet would be coming later, now we are getting FSW on steroids no seasons, remind me what happened to FSW.

Absolutely nothing about MSFS is just "FSW on steroids."

You are looking at the largest leap in visual fidelity and flight model fidelity in simulation history and all you can do is complain that you might not have low resolution white textures to fly over at launch.

Wouldn't it be cool if the snow was deform-able. Like OSJJ1985 said kind of, where it covers proceduraly based on the vericality of an object and depending on the depth it could deform toward the surface.   Like in red dead:

Edited October 2, 20196 yr by adamv1

2 hours ago, bonchie said:

Absolutely nothing about MSFS is just "FSW on steroids."

You are looking at the largest leap in visual fidelity and flight model fidelity in simulation history and all you can do is complain that you might not have low resolution white textures to fly over at launch.

Yes but it`s VFR focused they said that.

VFR CAPABLE...not focused. If that were the case, they wouldn't have added SIDs and STARs, or an Airbus, or all the major airports, or VORs, or GPS, or G1000/3000, or...

Edited October 2, 20196 yr by Noodle

It's not FSW on steroids. It's FSX without kryptonite

9 hours ago, Noodle said:

VFR CAPABLE...not focused. If that were the case, they wouldn't have added SIDs and STARs, or an Airbus, or all the major airports, or VORs, or GPS, or G1000/3000, or...

The Dev stated very frim it gives the user VFR anywhere they wish to fly that`s the big difference from previous FS, and that was the focus and to me it`s moved closer to XP than FSX legacy, the only aircraft available to the testers was GA they never got hands on a jet but a A320 will be in the sim they said so. again I can`t help thinking they are going to leave most of the big aircraft to third party`s like FSW was intending.

Edited October 3, 20196 yr by rjfry