TerraMaxx - Seasons for X-Plane 11!

After years of development and a close working relationship with Laminar Research, we bring you the first product to properly bring seasons to X-Plane!

Maxx-XP, in co-operation with Sundog Software, and X-Aviation are excited to bring you another game changing experience in immersion with TerraMaxx.

Developer: Maxx-XP
Download Size: 6GB
Installed Size: 12GB

How TerraMaxx works
TerraMaxx is a plugin that will monitor a variety of factors as you fly and create a plausible season around that information. You have the option to manually select a season set, but you can also have TerraMaxx run automatically and change seasons for you. Additionally, as you fly across different regions of the world, seasonal textures will change accordingly if appropriate for that time of year. For example, let's say you fly from sunny Florida to snowy Colorado. If the time of year is appropriate, TerraMaxx will create a plausible situation where as you depart Florida it's going to be in a dry, summer-like season, and as you land in Colorado you'll find snow on the ground, in the trees, and other surrounding areas.

Will TerraMaxx work with custom airports?
Airports will continue to work in X-Plane and with TerraMaxx as they always have, but TerraMaxx will not apply seasonal effects to existing custom scenery packages. This means the airport will load just fine on top of a TerraMaxx season, but objects from the scenery will not have, for example, snow on them unless the scenery developer integrates their package fully with TerraMaxx. However, within the documentation that ships with TerraMaxx, scenery designers will find information about integrating their airports and surrounding scenery with TerraMaxx in an even more immersive way if they so choose (not mandatory, airports and TerraMaxx will load side-by-side together just fine). With the steps followed in the documentation, scenery designers could then have buildings that have snow on them in the winter, or different colored grass during autumn, etc!

Will TerraMaxx work with orthophoto scenery?
At the time of release TerraMaxx does not support changing seasons for orthophoto sceneries (like ortho4xp). We will re-visit this soon to evaluate what we can do to integrate these types of sceneries, if at all. That said, in the winter with snow everywhere it may be just as easy to disable any of your orthophoto sceneries and let TerraMaxx run the beautiful winter scenes during this particular time of year.

Will TerraMaxx work with HD Mesh Scenery v4?
Yes, TerraMaxx will fully work with this fantastic scenery produced by Andras (alpilotx).

How smooth is the season transition, like from snowy winter textures to dry summer textures?
As you approach the boundaries where textures should plausibly change, proper textures will begin to re-load for that region. This does mean you can have a small pause as the textures come in (TerraMaxx will display in the lower left corner that it is loading in new seasonal textures), and once X-Plane is done loading the scenery all is as it should be. Keep in mind that regions of snow conditions are typically quite large (numerous states), so this does NOT mean as you cross DSF scenery tiles that things are constantly re-loading. We have also talked to Laminar about ways to smooth out the pause, and while we have some positive discussion there, we are again going to wait to see how much support from the community is given to this project before we potentially venture down that path more.

Additionally, the auto texture changing is OPTIONAL. You do not have to have this, and you can force a single season as you wish, no matter the location.

Highlighted Features
  • Automatic swapping of X-Plane’s default scenery with seasonal representations of summer, autumn, mild winter, and deep winter based on your simulated location, date, and temperature
  • Replacement tree textures with 4X the resolution of default and seasonal variations
  • Optional post-processing effects to give autumn and winter scenes season- appropriate hues
  • If you indicated that your GPU has more than 5GB of VRAM when installing, high-resolution normal maps for default scenery will be installed, to give the appearance of more depth to the terrain. You can easily switch between the normal map option by re-opening the installer.

Compatible With
  • X-Plane 11
  • Mac & Windows. No Linux.

Why should you get it?
TerraMaxx is pretty exciting, we think. Not only is it the start to total seasons automation with beautiful scenes and high quality trees, but right away we're allowing third party scenery developers to also take advantage of this technology. As time progresses we hope to also advance TerraMaxx into a product you'll want to keep installed on your computer for good!

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