I've read that you can expect thermals in FSX where ever you can reasonably expect thermals in real life. My problem is I can reasonably expect thermals in my area, but there are never any there in FSX. I've tried using the canned weather themes, and real world weather. I've also tried to manuall tweak the weather so thermals show up. No dice. Does anyone have any tips on what weather theme I should use so I have thermals to soar on?

Try going to Settings Weather and Thermal visualization, and in the drop down select Schematic. Thermals should then show up as faint green spirals in the sky. Flying the glider into them should confirm the lift you get.Ensure you are also set to Summer, around mid day. If you don

Thermals are already on schematic, weather theme on the one that shows a picture of a glider (fair weather?), it's late summer, late afternoon in an area where I see gliders in real life (Cicero, IN). I have a P4 2.4GhZ, 1.5GB DDR RAM running @ dual-channel, Radeon X1300 overclocked to 701MhZ w/512MB video RAM. I don't have any issue with FPS, my system runs FSX great. Thermals show up in the glider missions, but not anywhere else.

You mention your local area, have you looked elsewhere for thermals? I don't know how well FSX models thermals but I tried soaring in the Columbia River area on a warm day with light breezes and found plenty of thermals to ride. Perhaps flatland thermals are not modeled as well. R-

maybe that is it. I tried around the Grand Canyon area and thermals are present, but I didn't know if they were placed there specifically by FSX's developers, or if they are occuring naturally (well, fake-software-weather naturally). I haven't been able to find any thermals in the midwest. So perhaps it is a flatland thing. What is the Lat-Lon of the Columbia River area where you're finding the thermals?

The occurrence of thermals are now controlled by the ThermalDescriptions.xml in the root FSX directory. As it is now, the several landclasses can have one sort of thermals or not. More often not, also in landclasses where one would expect thermals to form. I'm working on an improved version of this file (some more sorts of thermals and for some more landclasses) - if you can wait some days it'll be in the library (if you can't, it will be too). ;-)One thing I don't know is how the real occurrence of thermals during the day and seasons is coded (only in summer?, only between X and Y hours of the day?) - would be nice if someone from ACES could shed some light into this, as the SDK doesn't cover it... Cheers

that is interesting to know. I can certainly wait patiently for you to finish creating your file. Would you post here when you're finished so that I know its available?Thanks!Brandon.

That is good news. Thanks Markus. R-

"aircraft affected by turbulence" needs to be activated too in the settings...

It should be in the library now. Search for ThermalDescriptions_11.zip.And I want to know what real glider pilots think about it...Cheers