Developer Stairport Sceneries has updated their already successful Scenery Animation Manager to version 2 which includes season functionality for X-Plane.
Stairport Sceneries is known for its airport scenery developments published by Aerosoft which include, Tromso, Helgoland and St. Tropez. Stairport Sceneries is also known for its Scenery Animation Manager or SAM for short. SAM enables third party airport scenery developers to insert animated jetways, gate guidance which includes dispatchers as well as the ability to open and close hangar doors into their sceneries.
The latest version of SAM includes much more usability from the simmer as well as the developer. Version 2.0 includes an updated user interface to help make sense of controlling the airport environment. You can enter your flight information such as flight number and Target Off Block Time (TOBT) which will show up on the gate screen. You can also download and input your flight information direct from places like Simbrief, VATSIM, IVAO and PilotEdge. Through the new user interface, you can control which doors are accessed through the jetways, otherwise, the jetway will automatically choose the closest door providing the aircraft is set up correctly. For the airport scenery developers that use SAM, there have been many additions to make the process of adding animations into scenery projects a lot easier and less time-consuming.
Stairport Sceneries has also released a scenery texture library that allows you to inject seasons into X-Plane. There are 5 seasons settings included in the library, Spring, Summer, Autumn/Fall, Winter and Deep Winter for the extra chilly regions. Changing the seasons can be done via the new SAM interface providing you have the library installed. The downloaded seasonal textures should be placed inside the custom scenery folder just like any other library. Once installed, you can change the seasons on the fly with just a simple scenery reload. There is also added functionality to add snowy trees to add to the winter and deep winter seasons. You can see from the photos below the changes that these textures have on the look and feel of X-Plane. Stairport Sceneries has made sure that the seasonal changes integrate seamlessly with other texture replacement software such as SFD Global, Orbx TrueEarth and Ortho4xp.
To get hold of SAMv2 and seasons, you can find them over on X-Plane.org, Aerosoft or Threshold websites free of charge. You will need SAMv2 in order to use the seasons functionality and it is important you delete any previous versions of SAM you may have installed, including libraries and plugins in order for the newest version to work. To use SAMv2 as a developer, you will need to purchase a licence from the Stairport website for €178.50.
