Removing extraneous seasonal textures

[toprob]

Thanks to Flyby for posting this over at the Avsim Godzone forum. I've copied it here for your info. From memory, the only scenery of mine which includes different seasonal textures is Tekapo. The others should all benefit from this if you are short on disc space.
(Well, if you do have the season 'fix' then you shouldn't see the winter/autumn textures at Tekapo anyway, so they could go as well.)
I haven't tried this, but it makes sense. (maybe backup your textures first.)



I'm sure you may already know this, but it's probably worth mentioning anyway.

If you are using Christian Stock's excellent NZ Landclass replacement for FS2004 (nzlc_2004) http://www.redbarent.com/free_stuff.htm , then you may be aware that it also tweaks/fixes the seasons in NZ. This means NZ stays green all year round and mountain/glacier snow cover is much more realistic.

Several Godzone or RealNZ photo sceneries contain night textures (*lm), which normally means you must also use all the separate season photo tiles as well - even if they are identical to summer. You can recover serveral hundred megabytes of drive space (not to mention reduced fragmentation) by deleting reduntant Fall and Winter textures (*fa, *wi). Just as long as you have Summer and Spring textures installed, then you don't need Fall and Winter. i.e. Summer = Fall, Spring = Winter.

First check that your seasons are actually identical before deleting any. The best test is a binary comparison with a hex editor. e.g. http://www.hexworkshop.com Failing that, load several seasons into a texture viewer like DXTBmp and see if all seasons are identical for a particular tile.

The quickest way to delete hundreds of similar files is to create a batch file. e.g. Browse the texture folder and create a new Text Document. Edit the file and enter:

del ???????????????fa.bmp
del ???????????????wi.bmp

Save the file, rename it to cleanup.bat, then enable file extentions: Tools (menu)/Folder Options/View/Hide Extentions (untick). Rename the cleanup.bat.txt file to cleanup.bat. Double-click it to run it.

NB: this only works with Christian's season fixes for NZ: s011213.bgl and s031231.bgl

Hope this proves useful to someone...