Changing Date, Time, and Season
Altering daylight and ground conditions can challenge your flying skills
Related Links
Scenery Highlights
Weather Settings
Changing General Settings

The Mooney Bravo at dawn

Changing the date, time, and season can alter the daylight conditions and ground textures for your flight. Selecting winter, for instance, can cloak the mountains or prairies in deep snows. (As it snows, the snow on the ground actually accumulates.) Then choose to take off at dawn, or on a moonlit summer night.

Changing date, time, and season is a great way to set up challenging flying conditions. Following landmarks on the ground becomes a special feat on a snowy day. By choosing a calendar date of the year, you also take daylight hours into account. Choose to fly during twilight or with a window of only a few hours of daylight during winter's darkness. With a little imagination you can even make this feature a time machine–revisit any time, date, and season of the current year, or at any point in history.


Time and Season dialog box

To change date, time, and season

  • On the Free Flight screen, under Current Time and Season, click Change.

-or-

  1. While flying, press ALT to display the menu.
  2. On the World menu, click Time and Season.

To change the time of day

  1. In the Select Time and Season dialog box, click Dawn, Day, Dusk, or Night. With each Time of Day option the landscape graphic changes to match the choice you have made. It will also set the clocks to a time that depicts the general daylight condition of the Dawn, Day, Dusk, or Night option you selected.
  2. The exact time of day is displayed as two clocks. Local Time is the time where you are. GMT refers to Greenwich Mean Time (usually known as Coordinated Universal Time). Both are displayed in 24-hour format, where A.M. hours are 0 through 11 and P.M. hours are 12 through 24.
  3. To change the exact time of day on the clocks, click the hours, minutes, or seconds. Then click the spin box to advance or set back the time. Both Local Time and GMT clocks will remain synchronized. When you change one time clock, they both change to keep the correct difference between your local time and GMT.
  4. Click OK to return to the Free Flight screen.


Wyoming in Summer
Wyoming in Winter

To select a season
  • In the Select Time and Season dialog box, click Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall.

    • Note that with each season option, the landscape graphic along the left side of the screen changes to match the highlighted selection. This will change the landscape texture when you fly.

To select a specific date

  • In the Select Time and Season dialog box, click a date on the calendar.

Resetting Default Values

You can easily set the time and day settings to your computer system settings at any time.

To reset the time and day settings to the computer time

  • Click Reset.
- top -