So seasons are being worked on. Given that msfs uses satellite imagery which by default will be the season that the image captures, how do you think this will be implemented? Will there be filters applied to the textures? Will it be reflected through autogen? Given that seasons vary differently from country to country it almost seems like an impossible task. Even here in the uk it’s generally green in Scotland in the summer but down in southern England can be very dry and arid.
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I wouldn’t say it’s impossible.
Third parties are already doing this (and quite well).
REX AccuSeasons takes into account region and applies seasons appropriately. You can fly between the regions and see the changes.
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I wouldn’t hold your breath on seasons. Haven’t heard about them in a very long time. Seems like quite a low priority which i think is pretty fair in some respects. I do think they’ll come & I’d love to see it, i just doubt it’ll be anytime soon.
I remember they did speak about how seasons effect much more then just how the trees look (which is obvious) & that they would need to alter many other aspects that the third party season addons can’t but that’s the extent of my memory on it.
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The only way that I can see to really do seasons well is to go back to land classification but use the aerial/satellite imagery and AI to classify every square inch of land and then produce a system that can intelligently and realistically draw pseudo terrain for all the different classifications.
Seeing what the current fake textures look like, I’d rather stick with aerials and sateliite imagery. But fake imagery would solve many problems including baked in shadows, clouds, cars, etc.
Well, seasons are shown visually on ground but that visuals depends on the weather conditions and climate. Would be really cool if they can make the weather feel different depending on season/climate as well. As it is now, the weather feels same all over the world.
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Would also in theory fix places where you can see a line where there’s a transition between different imaging sources. Even at launch MSFS was much better about this than the ortho4xp results in X-Plane using Bing imagery, but there’s still lots of room for improvement. Also would be a great goal if MS/Asobo ever wants to utilize this crazy virtual world they’ve built for things beyond flight sims.
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As you fly, what’s the main difference you notice as seasons change in the landscape?
- Trees and fauna/crops - plenty of trees and fauna, and MS/Blackshark AI knows where crops are and can create those textures
- Snow and ice - of course in recent years, this is declining pretty fast… Not going to be too many ice airparks like Alton Bay for much longer sadly.
Not too much else varies with the seasons. IOW, it’s doable, and they know what to do.
As I understand the system, part of the scenery you see while flying is already on your machine. Its the underlying base scenery. On top of that is a radius of streamed details where the radius is controlled by your LOD settings. This complicates seasons because the base imagery on your machine won’t necessarily match the current streamed data. Would they try to constantly update the base install? Should they try to create a system where everything a player can see is streamed – sort of like a movie – but all of it is created online?
Although its true that seasons are largely down to ‘things that grow and how they may appear at a specific location at a specific date’, the system currently doesnt display things like grass or bushes until you get closer to the ground. I would assume crops might also fall into this category so they would have to completely rework that or else you might have a white cotton field at 1000 feet that suddenly becomes either dirt or grass as the cotton fades as you gain altitude. I would love for us to have crops but I don’t think its that simple. If everything was created online and then streamed I think it could work but how would you get around the fact that one person owns a given scenery or airport while another doesn’t?
I thought, after older FS versions, that not having seasons like in FSX or FS9 would be more of a problem that it has been. Also getting multiple versions of areal images seems impossible. I’m quite happy with the current features:
- dark time reflects seasons, of course
- water gets frozen, quite ok!
- I can have snow, live weather or manually set
- Small enhancement by AccoWeather (paid add-on, also free ones exist), by selecting different tree colors
So, would be nice to have the seasonal trees w/o 3rd party mods, but actually not that important IMHO, when one has to prioritize.
Well, for me, seasons is a lower priority than global haze and improved/fixed HDR atmosphere colors. In fact, global haze and clouds could help alleviate problems displaying distant scenery as there’s no need to fix what you can’t even see.
But seasons are something they’ve mentioned and it doesn’t seem theres any harm discussing it.
BTW - I don’t know if anyone has considered it but if they have aerial and/or satellite imagery for the whole Earth… I don’t know what resolution or color bit depth those images are but super high def land classification based on those images would actually take up considerably less space than the images themselves… at least I would think that to be the case.
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I think in the most recent Q+A Jorg alluded to a few surprises coming to the sim later this year. My money is firmly on seasons being one of them.
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Last time we heard seasons coming to sim, it was moved from last year to this year.
Can’t wait!
-eelis-
I’d agree with this. Whilst MSFS is of course leaps & bounds ahead of XP11 & FSX, i do still believe they get some colouring & weather effects done a bit better. Global haze & light fog is generally handled better in XP & whilst clouds are pretty decent in MSFS, the actual sky colouring between sunrise & sunset is weirdly more realistic on FSX.
(I do also think the road traffic system & rain effects are better on XP11 but that’s unrelated & more debatable).
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Current generic fake textures look far worse than anything in FSX, Prepar3D and modern X-plane.
It’s obvious they were an afterthought.
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