Iced Lake for ski landing

[Fox_Molder]

Is there any way to get all the small lake up north (Canada and uper us) to freeze so I can land on it with ski plane.

The utralite club near my place does it all winter. and it look to be more fun then snowmobile.

To the limit we could build some winter senery with ice fishing cabin and stuff. (only for winter)

[Jared]

I don't think it's possible with the stock FS9, though I could be wrong..;-)

[Yurei]

as for now, the only scenery i know of that lets you freeze the lakes, is holger sandmann's misty fjords addon. it only let's you freeze in the misty fjords area in alaska tho, so no canada freezing here. maybe sometime, someone developes a free addon that lets you do it to all lakes, but i doubt

[MattNW]

Freezing lakes is just an effect created by turning the water into land and switching the water textures with frozen looking ones. As Yurei said the number of sceneries where this has been done are limited. I think one other than Misty Fjords does exist. It's called FinIce and freezes all the lakes in Finland. It will add frozen textures to all lakes above a certain lattitude but they water won't be frozen. You will still sink when you land on it.

You can find Finnice at Flight Simulator Nordic:

http://www.fsnordic.net/

If you want this in a specific area you need to find the .bgl files for the lakes in that area and replace them with .bgl files that make the lakes into a hard surface. It can be done but it requires a lot of knowledge of scenery design and a huge amount of moving and modifying files.

[Yurei]

thank you for that info, matt  :)

i checked out the textures you suggested and they do a nice job in my opinion. you won't sink when trying to land on them. tried them out just now and they do let you land on the lakes. here are a few shots i took, in case someone is interested and wants to know what the textures look like:











it would be nice to see a freeware addon like this for other parts of the world too  ::)

[dave3cu]

I think what Matt was referring to is:

Yes, the lakes within the FinnIce scenery area are hard, and landable, but the replacement water textures also make lakes look frozen in other areas of the world, and these are only landable with floats or floating hulls.

I have experimented with this in the past (planes, not scenery) configuring planes with 'invisible' pontoons, so that wheeled and ski planes can 'land'. Fairly realistic 'till the plane comes to rest. They then start to 'bob' as they are actually on water.    :)

Cheers,
Dave

[Yurei]

Yes, the lakes within the FinnIce scenery area are hard, and landable, but the replacement water textures also make lakes look frozen in other areas of the world, and these are only landable with floats or floating hulls.

sorry, i just read over matt's post and yeah, i misunderstood that

I have experimented with this in the past (planes, not scenery) configuring planes with 'invisible' pontoons, so that wheeled and ski planes can 'land'. Fairly realistic 'till the plane comes to rest. They then start to 'bob' as they are actually on water.      

that's a cool idea, wished i had the knowledge required to play around with stuff like that.

[MattNW]

I only have limited experience in scenery design but with a simple program like FSSC you can make land act like water so I wonder if there's any way to do the reverse. Possibly a question posted in the scenery creators forum would yield an answer.

Yeah, it's only in the Finnice area that lakes are landable but the main reason I use it is for screen shots from Alaska. I can't land on the lakes without a float plane but the screen shots taken from an area like Coldfoot in January look 100% better when there isn't open blue water showing in the lakes.

[Ben_M_K]

My friend and I could not believe that they did'nt include this on the stock FS9. Up in Wisconsin, everyone lands on the lakes!

[Fox_Molder]

[quote]thank you for that info, matt

[Yurei]

thanks fox  ;D

yeah let's hope for the freezing option in fs10  :)

[dave3cu]

Matt wrote:......the main reason I use it is for screen shots from Alaska.

Also provides some interesting shots in the tropics.

Just out from TNCM, St. Maarten Is. All ya gotts do is add a little snow....  



Cheers,
Dave

[MattNW]

Can ya imagine what traffic was like down there? People up here in Indiana have trouble driving in the snow and we get it all the time in winter. People in St. Maarten must have been a panic.  ;D

[Yurei]

probably similar to the south-east of england right now. the people act like it's the end of the world when there's like 2 inches of snow on the ground, they even closed my college . at first i thought theyre kidding but they werent . i just dont get it, back home we got like meters of snow every year but they don't close sh*t .
oh yeah, nice shot  ;D

[jordonj]

Well...here's a place where FS can improve...but then...look at how far they've come (I'm old enough to remember what flight sims used to look like!)