Partager via

Talk About the Weather

  • Article

Yeah, lets! I wore my sunglasses this afternoon for the first time in a long time. That's a good thing since my car has a cracked, leaky windshield. When I got back from CES I had an inch of water under the dash. Blah.

A lot of other folks, like those on AvSim, are also talking about the weather--in Flight Sim, that is. Based on the comments and feedback I think this is another area where few people outside the team have an appreciation for the depth of the system. Did you know, for instance, that when you download real world weather the sim computes high- and low-pressure areas and cold/warm fronts? This data is used to drive the dynamic weather feature that changes weather over time based on relative values from nearby areas. If you're interested you can even view the intermediate computations in the weather map. This is what it looks like:

 

 

The illustration shows a grid of pressure values computed from the weather download. The darker the circle, the lower the pressure. You can see how the high and low systems are centered on clusters of like values. The line on the left represents a frontal boundary computed from temperature differentials.

To see this yourself, just add/change this line in the [Weather] section of FS9.CFG. (In case you don't know where to find FS9.CFG, read this.):

WeatherGraphDataInDialog=1

The denser the station grid, the better the results. Have fun!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2006
    Another undocumented feature. This is very cool and helpful. Thank you.
  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2006
    This is neat. But it brings up something else I'd like to see.

    In the SDK there is documentation on a lot of things (some is rather weak, though), but I have yet to see more than piecemeal documentation of all the fields you can manually add to fs9.cfg.

    It would be very helpful if there were a specific document of some kind that describes these parameters and their effects, especially the ones that aren't affected by display sliders, menu choices, etc.

    Thanks,

    Larry N.
  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2006
    One other thing occurs to me. I'd like to have a way to show the weather map other than when changing the weather settings, especially now that I know there is a way to see the general weather patterns.

    And perhaps the weather map could be a tad larger, or at least be able to be resized so we could see more detail.

    Thanks,

    Larry N.
  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2006
    As a fellow computer-scientiest, this is very impressive and the calculations to make all this dynamic must be headache-inducing.

    However, in terms of weather and the sim, the area that I feel needs to be concentrated on is the "feel" of the atmosphere. In FS9, the lack of a solid overcast was a total realism killer. Also, you never felt like you were truely in "the soup" as compared to real world IFR.

    The dynamic weather system is impressive, but I think that is already "as good as it gets". Now let's make the view out the windshield as equally impressive :)
  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2006
    To Patrick: Actually, if you have ALL the sliders maxed, FS2004 weather looks surprisingly good. I was using real wx in Alaska the other day, and I was startled to find that I had a real undercast -- non-transparent clouds. This wasn't possible on my old machine, as it would have locked up from overwork, but my new 4400+ w/7800GTX shows me things I didn't know were possible in FS9.

    Larry N.
  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2006
    Thanks for that little tip. I don't think the dynamic weather system made for FS2004 gets nearly enough credit, it really is quite impressive. I recently actually went back from Activesky to the default weather system. I load up the real world weather - no updates, then let the dynamics do things from there, I find it much more interesting and "alive" that way, and it prevents the sudden weather changes that the 15 min update can do.

    I also would love to see more complete documentation for the cfg file parameters.

    As mentioned on an Avsim thread the only big changes I would like to see to the weather system is better / smooth / less noticable visibility and wind transitions, and a less noticable change when you go from one weather station area to another.
  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2006
    PLEASE tell me that FSX will have moving frontal systems?

    Are you able to comment on how the aircraft behaves in flight, is it more like FU3 with the sort unstable air flow that exists in the real world and indeed.. in the fu3 world.

    Any comments on weather would be greatly appreciated.

    Steve
  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2006
    See http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=248&topic_id=10136&mode=full