As the title says, how is the sim determining this?
What is puzzling, is that I thought that 2024 was going to be better at this than 2020, yet I’m seeing ridiculous quantities of water in the Santa Clara “River” in California.
Here is the Bing imagery of the area I’m speaking of. Do you see a river with huge amounts of water?
Seas, oceans & (I think) lakes are improved, in that - if I recall correctly from one of last years devstreams - waves are now affected by wind direction & have swells / height. I certainly noticed the swells were affected by windspeed when flying around the South Atlantic.
(e.g. see this bug report)
Here is a wild theory… with absolutely no proof other than this…
Background:
Did a group flight with friends from Chicago Meigs (yes, the one that isn’t there any more but is in the game again now since 40th Anniversary Edition and now also it’s in v2024).
Friend flew it earlier the previous day to check it out and make the plan for us.
No water on the runway.
We flew as a group the next day. Runway was partly flooded.
My Theory:
There are tides simulated now??
If so:
It’s probably “all” water so would affect rivers too.
Also it would sort of explain the seams we see in water tiles (still!). As it’s stepping up each tile as the tide “curve” is adjusted depending on your position around the globe and the time of day?
Well it’s probably not but it would explain a few things!!
I’d be really surprised if they’re actually attempting to model tides. Such a thing could get extremely complex and could easily inundate airports and cities leading to all kinds of bug reports.
If I had to guess, the sim loaded different elevation data between sessions somehow. Might be able to actually test this by changing the sim time/date though.
As far as I can tell, the simulator has no concept of “depth” to the water. It instead draws water by its areal coverage. It has vector data that outlines dry lakebeds and river floodplains that could have water in them at some time, and a lot of time just fills them all with water. Some larger bodies of water might be planes at a set elevation, like Lake Michigan. If the photogrammetry DEM drops below that plane, it might be flooded.
Actually just looked it up (if you can trust the Google AI summary lol)
No, even large lakes like the Great Lakes are considered non-tidalbecause while they technically experience very small tides due to the moon’s gravitational pull, these fluctuations are so minimal that they are masked by other factors like wind and weather changes, making them practically unnoticeable.
Key points about tides in large lakes:
Minimal tide size: The tides on large lakes are usually less than 5 centimeters in height.
Dominant factors: Wind and barometric pressure changes cause much larger fluctuations in water level compared to the tides.
Technically tidal: While considered non-tidal for practical purposes, the gravitational forces of the sun and moon do technically create small tides in large lakes.
So they are, a bit. Maybe enough to flood Meigs!! It’s pretty low there but that airport is hand crafted now. And the landside has a manmade seawall (I know it’s a lake but it’s so big it looks like the sea!) which is probably like 1 metre above the water surface. Not 5cm! How did it flood even?
This looks like the well known SU1 Beta bug where aerial textures are bleeding through airport aprons in photogrammetry areas. In this case, the Meigs area as it looks today is bleeding through the historical Meigs airport layout.
My problem with the lakes and rivers is that they’re only a foot deep at most. Even lakes that are hundreds of feet deep IRL are just puddle deep in the sim.
You can see their fancy pebbles and small stones texture everywhere. The texture does look nice, and I can understand it being there near the shore line but not the entire body of water.
Been flying around that area a few days ago towards six flags in the east and I noticed the same.
I also noticed that edges of water bodies are not as refined as they had been in 2020. I see lots of sandbank like surfaces along almost every waterbody.
Water levels of reservoirs also seem to be too high.
And most annoyingly the water is too calm and too reflective. Oceans and large lakes seem to be made out of mirrors with almost no wave action.
) - I don’t believe there has been any change in 2024 with regard to how water depth in rivers is determined.
