Hi,

Could someone please explain to me why certain sceneries come with a control panel where you need to manually change seasons and then there are those which do it automatically based on sim time. Some even dynamically alternate between snow cover based on precipitation and weather conditions. If this can be done by the sim then why leave it up to user? I find it rather tedious that I have to constantly go through many different control panels and switch seasons there manually. Few are especially confusing where there is a season switch and then seasonal ground textures switch (Hello, JennaSoft).

Thanks. 

I agree that it’s a mess. It’s impossible to get them all the way you need them to look. Winter is the worst.

It depends on the implementation the developer has chosen. The sim can only change a particular type of scenery automatically, namely the photorealistic ground scenery. Objects can not be changed automatically by the sim, at least not until recently. So why do people not use the method that the sim can change by itself? Because there is a limit to the resolution, which is 2cm. However, you’ll end up with huge filesizes for the groundtextures and they would still not be as crisp as object-based textures could be (e.g. on airport terminal buildings). So instead people choose to make what is called a ground poly, which is essentially an object that is textures to be the aprons, taxiway lines etc, which can be high res and crisp. This leads to lower file sizes but keeps the texture quality high. However, this methodology cannot automatically switch and that’s why some sceneries come with a dedicated tool to switch the season manually.

That is, until SODE offered a way to do these things automatically. Now developers can enlist SODE to change things on the fly by either changing the textures of an object on the fly, or injecting or replacing an entire object. This is, for example, how whole snow banks can be dynamically displayed in the winter time, whereas texture switching is usually the preferred method for changing the seasonal textures of grass surround8ng taxiways, for instance.

whether a developer enlists SODE is however entirely up to them. I personally agree that as many developers as possible should use it, but you can’t really force them... I have noticed an uptick recently of developers using it for these purposes though. Personally, on my own scenery, I’ll be using a combination of the “legacy” season switch for the photoscenery and probably some additional texture switching with SODE for the groundpoly.

there is of course an issue with SODE and that is that it requires SimCommect. I’ve had it happen that on approach to an airport SODE crashed and lost the connection to the sim. This can’t be restarted just like that - the sim needs to be restarted for the SimCommect connection to be restored. So there I was, on landing, without the airport lights working... so SODE, while overall being quite stable, have a drawback or two.

Hope that’s answers your question!

Thank you for a detailed answer, Benjamin. That clarifies it up nicely, as I was mostly wondering about older sceneries which were "auto switching" versus newer sceneries which have manual switches.

Personally, I have never had SODE crash on me. Would be great if devs would give an option to switch manually or via SODE, so that those who have no stability issues could take advantage of full automation.