Get rid of the snow on runways, taxiways, aprons and roads

While the auto method of applying snow is welcome and probably needed, it would be great if the sdk supported some form of snow mask or exclusion tool so airport devs can control where snow does and doesn’t appear in their releases.

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I don’t know why no one has mentioned this,

…you can adjust the cfg file to adjust how much of the snow/pavement should appear in the mask file. It’s not perfect but works quite well at this point

Payware maybe?

So is Zinertek
both about the same price

Good idea. Wish I weren’t out of votes.

You can remove votes from topics you’ve already voted for (e.g. when they are resolved and you don’t need your vote there anymore). :wink:

recent use of Real Weather in trans-Canada winter flight has highlighted virtual impossibilty of finding a way around an airport when evenly covered with snow across the whole airport including aprons, taxiways and runways. Winter snow clearing of active surfaces is essential.

Reported to Zendesk

Maybe not realistic, but in this case I make use of the blue taxi-navigation arrows.

Realism is what we we aim for at all times when using MSFS and MS declared aim is to create a simulator not just a game. RW pilots make use of ground ATC where available, but commonly Airport charts to find their way around. Neither is a lot of use if unable to see what is an active surface and what is not.

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Maybe we can get devs to create snow plough ground vehicles that go clear it in real time. The passengers can then experience a realistic couple of hours delay at the gate while the clearing is going on. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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you know the atc instructions to go wwere, you can zoom in max on the ingame map
and make out the taxiways. thats how i do it, i dont like the blue arrows.

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You’re joking but this is what we would need. I mean, if this is a simulator, Asobo should ‘just’ get their inspiration from real life to solve most of the snow issues.

  • Ground heat melts the snow
  • Plow trucks remove the snow
  • No snow if the temperature isn’t low enough

So based on this and the real weather and temperature we’re supposed to already have in game, Vancouver water would automatically be water instead of covered in snow like in real life at this time of the year, runways wouldn’t be covered in snow, etc.

On the paper it seems like an easy and obvious solution: Do everything like in real life and everything should be accurate. :slight_smile:

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There are many posts about this glitch here I suppose, but I sent a Zendesk report about it :
Shallow Snow depth in Manual weather mode or Real Weather completely cover roads and runways – Microsoft Flight Simulator Support (zendesk.com)

I have this addon and it’s great but Bijan is trying very hard to make a compromise between masking the snow on the roads and airports and still see the runway numbers etc.

Interesting, thanks for the info. I thought that it has something to do with polygon and vector shapes?

Absolutely nothing to do with that. The darker the texture - the less snow, the lighter - the more.

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Wow, I did not even think about it but now that I do, it follows the behavior I observed. I suppose Asobo were aware of this?!

That is by design and they admitted that but are not planning to change it in a close future which is a shame.

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Well, yes, I admit it’s strange that such a glitch is not addressed.

The world in the sim is very realistic in winter here in Canada when it comes to VFR navigation if we only could see the roads and highways to follow…

Same goes for the Ash Clouds under direct sunlight, it seems that it was not addressed and perhaps a similar issue that could be more complicated to fix than it seems.

Ash clouds are like that due to limited dynamic range of the monitor to properly map dark and bright areas of the clouds into that range I believe. That is a really tricky thing to do. As for the snow, they have everything to change the system, it’s just not on their priority list. Heck, they are not even fixing the right mouse button bug in su8.

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