how to freeze fs water in winter?

[Guest Kihew]

Hello forum members,I'm a newbie. I've searched the forums but to no avail. I have been using Ground2k4 (great utility) to draw polygons in FS2004. But I wanted to learn a method of hardening water surface in winter. I know how to repaint water by changing the texture. But how can we harden the surface so that we don't sink in it anymore, besides drawing a polygon over a lake? I've heard about VTP polygons layer 3 but when I try it it hardens not.Any help much apreciated!Thanks,Rui

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Rui.SCASM is your best bet, as the code needs to be conditional for the season. You need to make a surfacetype command and a textured poly over the water to look like ice... and I think that would work.Arno would know about this.Although VTP polys can use different textures for seasons, they cannot change surface type seasonally.Dick

[arno 1]

Humm, this is an interesting question. I have never tried to make the water hard depending on a season. The problem is that you can not let mesh polygons (VTP/LWM) display on condition (season for example).So I think you should try to add some sort of flattens command with SCASM then. But I don't know if section 16 (where the flattens are in) allows you to check for the season.

[Guest mlrdr2]

I have made an addon to freeze all lakes in Finland. I made the ice with VTP polygons and it does work in FS2004 nicely.In FS2002 however, it seems that the ice doesn't harden areas where there is no landclass over the waterclass.You can make the VTP ice disappear for the summer if you make the summer textures completely transparent with alpha. Alpha makes the polys soft too so effectively the ice is not there. The problem is, VTP poly drawing distance is quite short so all water gets blue again away from the plane. Visually this looks really bad from altitudes above 1000 feet. I'd guess other techinques suffer from this also.I fixed this with white replacement water textures and some .bat files to change back and forth between defaults and the white textures. As there already is manual work involved in enabling and disabling the ice, I decided not to bother with the summer textures and made all ice all white all the time. The user has to enable and disable the scenery and run the water texture .bats every time he wants to enable or disable the ice but if you do it only twice a year, it's not too much work. The ice is a huge improvement, both visually and for bush flying so most users seem to find the work involved acceptable, YMMV.Check FinnIce from http://www.fsnordic.net/ file library to try it out for yourself.

[arno 1]

Hi Janne,This is interesting. Do you mean that with these VTP polygons over your LWM water that they are hard in winter, but not in summer? This wouls surprise me as the VTP polygon is still there in summer as well.You also mention that the range of the VTP polygons is too short. This sounds strange to me, I have seen that there range is a lot bigger then with SCASM polygons. The seems to extend a good end until the horizon.

[Guest mlrdr2]

>Do you mean that with these VTP polygons>over your LWM water that they are hard in winter, but not in>summer? This wouls surprise me as the VTP polygon is still>there in summer as well.Yes, but is hard only when alpha is nearly opaque. Try creating a VTP polygon over water with a texture that has a gradient from black to white as alpha. Somewhere around 128 there is a sharp transition from nearly opaque to nearly transparent, the polygon turns from hard to soft at that point. But as I said, I abandoned the alpha summer texture idea and went with just one white opaque texture for all seasons.>You also mention that the range of the VTP polygons is too>short. This sounds strange to me, I have seen that there range>is a lot bigger then with SCASM polygons. The seems to extend>a good end until the horizon.That's strange. I find that the white ice VTP polygons stop at approximately 12 NM, see attached image. Could this be different for polygons over land and water?Notice also the funny blue lines running across the ice in the lower left corner. These seem to occur at a certain Mip level, probably around Area borders. Using white water textures solves this problem as well so I haven't done much research with these either.

[arno 1]

Hi Janne,Are you maybe using the CUSTOM ground textures (photo tiles), I that case I would understand the working of the alpha channel in hardening the ground.That range is strange. I will have a look at it at home, maybe I am confused and they are shorter then I think. If you don't have something like blue water below it, it is not that visible.

[Guest Kihew]

I thank all of you who replied to my question.After posting I went back to mind storming and, Janne, to also study how you had come up with the Finnice solution. I already knew about it, great file (!). I heard about it from a Swedish pilot that flies for TCA Alaska as I do. I had once frozen a lake by drawing a land polygon covering it. But I was babging my head about how to do it in one go with one VTP polygon layered nr2. I discovered I was doing everything correctly except I was assuming that I could assign only one texture for every season. Wrong. I noticed you used 6 individual textures, all alike, (except night text). I tried it and voil

[Guest Kihew]

Before posting my problem I made a search and I found the exact same problem answered. It is a matter of editing the ground2k4 ini file. Forums like these are a strong argument towards the idea that the world is not as bad as we think it is just by listening to world news....! People here are helping each other by freely sharing their hard obtained knowledge. Rui

[Guest mlrdr2]

Hello Rui,>After posting I went back to mind storming and, Janne, to also>study how you had come up with the Finnice solution. I already>knew about it, great file (!).Thank you :). It's really a shame that FS doesn't have ice as default, it makes a huge difference in northern areas.>I discovered I was doing everything correctly>except I was assuming that I could assign only one texture for>every season. Wrong. I noticed you used 6 individual textures,>all alike, (except night text). I tried it and voil