SAM Seasons change without reloading scenery?

[ri0tjuice 0]

I suppose this is a feature request. It's quite tedious to have to reload scenery to change the season, as this causes the flight to pause for some time, disconnect from vatsim, etc. Would it be possible for any scenery which is loaded in after the season change in the settings menu to appear as the newly selected season? Not an instant change but rather the next loaded scenery tiles are affected. This would be useful when flying from an area covered in snow to an area that isn't, etc.

 

Thanks

[FlyAgi 396]

This in theory is possible if you just skip the scenery reload. If you do so the season (it's just a datarefs telling sceneries which assets to load) will be switched but only the reload will be skipped so sceneries which are loaded later on will have a different season than those already loaded.

 

Also you can change seasons at the end of a flight before leaving X-Plane and skip reloading - then next time you start X-Plane you will see the season activated at the end of you previous flight. This way you have no additional loading time at all.

[ri0tjuice 0]

Perhaps I didn't wait long enough then, I changed from deep winter to autumn and hit cancel instead of reload scenery. I flew about 100nm and still saw winter. I'm not actually sure how far ahead x-plane loads scenery.

[FlyAgi 396]

X-Plane loads 4x3 scenery tiles but when flying 100nm you should see a difference. This might not work if the textures used by later loading tiles are the same textures as already loaded because the tiles use a library for the textures and the library is not reloaded when loading new tiles but only newly loading textures will change season in this situation.

[mbecker0813 0]

On 10/20/2020 at 4:48 AM, FlyAgi said:

X-Plane loads 4x3 scenery tiles but when flying 100nm you should see a difference. This might not work if the textures used by later loading tiles are the same textures as already loaded because the tiles use a library for the textures and the library is not reloaded when loading new tiles but only newly loading textures will change season in this situation.

 

I'm still not sure this is working as you say it should. I've changed to Deep Winter hundreds of miles ago but still am not seeing anything reflected on the scenery. I'm flying over Bratislava and Ukraine right now but changed it over Iran. I clicked "cancel" when it asked for a scenery reload just like previously discussed.

[FlyAgi 396]

Then maybe the new tiles use the same textures already loaded into memory and thus don't change seasons on the fly - in this case you really need to reload scenery to see the changes.