No Snow in Telluride during winter??? What has Microsoft done?

[Shayne 3]

I have been playing with FSX now for about a week and I think t has lots of potential but some things like the deserts of CO, CA are awefull. I tried something this morning and was very suprised and was wondering if you guys can duplicate this. I loaded up the Baron, changed the season to winter and went to Telluride Colorada and no snow. For those of you that don't know Telluride is located at 9000 feet and has snow on the ground and in the mountains for about 7-9 months out of the year and many of the surrounding peaks are glacial and never completely clear. The big questions is how would you fix this?? The mountians look great and flying in winter is one of the great things we can do in the sim but flying throught parts of the Rockies with no snow is unacceptable. I also tried Aspen and only the highest peaks have snow, can anyone confirm that this is the way Microsoft programmed this or am I doing something wrong??Thanks Shayne:-(

[Holger 0]

Hi Shayne,I had a look at Telluride and it's indeed the way you describe it. The problem is that it is part of the US Desert Southwest region ©, which uses different textures (e.g., reddish rock and soil) for some areas than the textures of the rest of North America.For some reason, the "hard winter" textures have a lot of green and grey in them, which looks particularly odd since the autogen trees are snowy white.You could try the following as a quick fix. Move these files from SceneryWorldtexture into a backup folder (inside the texture folder or some other place you'll remember):022c2hw*.bmp (8 files)024c2hw*.bmp (7 files)027c2hw*.bmp (7 files)then copy the following files and change the letter "b" in the file name to the letter "c"022b2hw0.bmp to 022b2hw7.bmp024b2hw1.bmp to 024b2hw7.bmp027b2hw1.bmp to 027b2hw7.bmpThis will give you the Region B hard winter textures of the equivalent conifer and mixed forest types, which look much whiter.There may be other classes that require similar changes but this should be a start for the Telluride area.Let us know how it looks.Cheers, HolgerP.S.: the alternative is to create a local regions file that overrides the default regional distribution and turns the Telluride area into Region B but that would remove any of the custom Region C textures and is also a bit more complex to achieve.

[Guest Jozef_K]

"No Snow in Telluride during winter?"Hi Shayne,When Microsoft doesn't want snow in Telluride during winter, then there shall not be snow. Nature has to deal with that. Nature will be patched next update. Hehe... Jozef K. http://homepages.onsnet.nu/~jkusters/signature.jpg

[michal 44]

>"No Snow in Telluride during winter?">>Hi Shayne,>When Microsoft doesn't want snow in Telluride during winter,>then there shall not be snow. Nature has to deal with that.>Nature will be patched next update. Hehe... He, he, love this comment. Making fun of Microsoft but in an elegant, classy way. I love Telluride and can confirm - it is a beauty in real world with lots of snow in winter. By the way, their airport is so high that they sell a really funny t-shirt with a label "Some people fly at 9078 ft., we land." ;)Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/for...argo_hauler.gif

[Guest tcable]

Send an email to tell_fs@microsoft.comThey are planning on FSX having more than a single update over it's life.Tim

[scott967 62]

The good news is that the seasons.bgl file in FSX is at LOD5 (1.2km resolution) where FS9 and earlier was LOD2 (10km). Not sure how MS determined the snow (hard winter) coverage. Maybe by elevation? The best data I could find online is from US NOAA for northern hemisphere at 4km resolution.scott s..

[Holger 0]

Hi Scott,actually, if you look at the default seasons.bgl file for the Telluride area it does show hard winter for the mid-winter months. In this case it's the textures that are not sufficiently "snowy".Matter of fact, if you look at the textures in DXTBmp individually, they do look like forest with lots of snow. It's just that their grey-green tinge doesn't work well when the textures are placed on the terrain.Cheers, HolgerP.S.: GLFC has regional MODIS data at 1km and 500m that could be used to extract snow coverage for each month: http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml

[Guest]

> They are planning on FSX having more than a single update over it's life.where does it say that? I think pc12 said there would be only 1 (dx10) update, nothing more. The terms allow MS to charge money for the patch.