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How to force snow on an elevation during Winter in FSX

Messages
395
Hi,

I am tweaking the landscape of a middle eastern region and the mountains are covered with snow in real life during winter but not in FSX

Is there a way to force snow on a specific elevation or range of elevation in a way that it will be covering the whole mountain in Winter and some patches in spring?

Thanks
 
Messages
395
Thanks for the help but I am trying to avoid using extra images to cover the mountains area and render this effect.

I thought that with some landclass / regional tweaks that I heard about I could manage to cheat and have the mountains have a specific regional season different from the area region ?

Cheers
 
Messages
395
Thank you all for the tips and feedback

By following the explanations in the seasons link you gave me, I finaly succeeded to create what need this way:

Using SBuilderX , I created a landclass area by covering the mountains with a random class tile, then compiled the Landclass in SBX and that gave me a BGL that I did not use but also a .ini file as well as an 8 bit RAW image.

I opened the RAW in a graphic editor and filled the pixels with the color R1,G1,B1 (Hard Winter value) and then edited the Ini file to make it a Season type instead of Landclass and then mentioned the months I want snow to be displayed

Then I compiled manualy the .ini and got a lovely BGL that makes my mountains have snow during the months I need :)

Now I can enjoy creating many levels of snow coverage and assign each to a month and therefore will have the FSX months display the snow covering gradualy the mountains until full coverage during mid winter and then retract slowly until summer is around

Cheers!
 

rhumbaflappy

Administrator
Staff member
Resource contributor
Messages
5,932
Country
us-wisconsin
The season BGL is a really good idea. Glad it worked out. For some reason I never considered the mountain area as big enough to make the local seasons.

Dick
 
Messages
395
The season BGL is a really good idea. Glad it worked out. For some reason I never considered the mountain area as big enough to make the local seasons.

Dick

Well without SBX it could have been tough to do but with SBX the few landclass tiles that you can put with precision on the elevations areas you choose based on a live satelite background can be very precise and then you generate the RAW and INI files to change for seasons tweak.

I even found on the internet a satellite image that shows the snow coverage during winter, so i calibrated it and placed it as a background reference in SBX and I could put the tiles exactly where snow is. Also I did 2 variations of tiles (value 0 and 1) hard winter for the high tops and it fades into Winter tiles (snow that is not dense) on lower hills...

All in all I am very happy with the results and it is really fast to do

And with many snow BGLs for the different months of the year, I will even have one that shows patches of snow remaining on the high tops during late spring and early summer as in real life:)

Cheers
 
Last edited:
Messages
1,510
Country
unitedstates
That's basically the same thing I did except I used an SbuilderX waterclass which already had the needed values in place, i.e. Shallow Inland Water, Blue=1 (or hard winter).

You can consolidate all of your adjustments into a single .bgl with a multisource .inf though rather than having a seperate .bgl for each adjustment, here's an example of the one I did to take care of some adjustments for March, April, and September:

Code:
[Source]
Type = MultiSource
NumberOfSources = 6

[Source1]
   Type = TIFF
   SourceDir = "."
   SourceFile = "seasons_mar_1614.tif"
   Layer = Season
   Month = 3
   NullValue = 254
   ulyMap =  50.625
   ulxMap = -120
   nCols = 257
   nRows = 257
   xDim =  .0146484375
   yDim =  .010986328125

[Source2]
   Type = TIFF
   SourceDir = "."
   SourceFile = "seasons_mar_1714.tif"
   Layer = Season
   Month = 3
   NullValue = 254
   ulyMap =  50.625
   ulxMap = -116.25
   nCols = 257
   nRows = 257
   xDim =  .0146484375
   yDim =  .010986328125

[Source3]
   Type = TIFF
   SourceDir = "."
   SourceFile = "seasons_apr_1614.tif"
   Layer = Season
   Month = 4
   NullValue = 254
   ulyMap =  50.625
   ulxMap = -120
   nCols = 257
   nRows = 257
   xDim =  .0146484375
   yDim =  .010986328125

[Source4]
   Type = TIFF
   SourceDir = "."
   SourceFile = "seasons_apr_1714.tif"
   Layer = Season
   Month = 4
   NullValue = 254
   ulyMap =  50.625
   ulxMap = -116.25
   nCols = 257
   nRows = 257
   xDim =  .0146484375
   yDim =  .010986328125

[Source5]
   Type = TIFF
   SourceDir = "."
   SourceFile = "seasons_sept_1614.tif"
   Layer = Season
   Month = 9
   NullValue = 254
   ulyMap =  50.625
   ulxMap = -120
   nCols = 257
   nRows = 257
   xDim =  .0146484375
   yDim =  .010986328125

[Source6]
   Type = TIFF
   SourceDir = "."
   SourceFile = "seasons_sept_1714.tif"
   Layer = Season
   Month = 9
   NullValue = 254
   ulyMap =  50.625
   ulxMap = -116.25
   nCols = 257
   nRows = 257
   xDim =  .0146484375
   yDim =  .010986328125

[Destination]
   DestDir = "."
   DestBaseFileName = "seasons_adjustment"
   DestFileType = BGL
   UseSourceDimensions = 1

Note that I opened the RAW files in photoshop, converted them to indexed color, and saved them as .tifs which wasn't really necessary I see now, I could have simply renamed the RAW files to differentiate each adjustment and left them as they were.

Jim
 
Messages
1,268
Country
us-hawaii
I create geoTiff from the US NSIDC data, comes out daily with 4km resolution. It only shows snow/no snow, so the harder part was to recreate the default season coverage for the "no snow" area (for feb, it's mostly winter, but some spring and a little summer). I found I needed to go as far south as about 22N to include all snow in the northern hemisphere. So I create that as a layer and then I can add the daily snow cover under it and flatten to get a final image. The resolution for resample should be as in Jim's post. Here is the composite (before converting to grayscale 0-4) for Feb 15.

scott s.
.
 

Attachments

  • feb15season.jpg
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