Weather METAR integration

[Axelb9]

Hi Steve,

I am not going to be bothering you with this topic anymore just this last post. I want you to understand what I meant with my questions because I am not sure as you state obvious things that I not questioned at all. Of course FSX is a sim and needs extended functions. On the other hand I would want a weather software to take care of them, flesh out the weather from the raw metar strings - it should not be the task for the user.

I read the SDK and it is complicated for everyday use. The way I would have imagined is that on the airport page where you set the departure and destination airports right under the airport ICAO you could input the raw METAR in a field. And that is it. The rest should be done by IF. IF should take care of how to translate it to FSX, how to add the extended functions so that it looks good, cloud layers, temperatures, winds aloft, etc. It should provide for the right cloud representation and so on. And then make sure that the weather morphs between the 2 metars in a believable fashion. That would be fantastic. In a leter incarnation it could download those two metars from NOAA.

This request is far different from me wanting to strip out the metars. And when you say that

So you will have to find out what they are and type them in if that's what you want to do.

I thoroughly disagree. This should not be the task of the enduser in a weather modul.

I am testing the other functions as well of course and will decide. Just as I said my main interest was having a gapfree consistent weather that at least at the departure and arrival airports consistent with real weather.

Thanks again for your time,

Alex

[Steve Waite]

Understood. Your ideas have been added to the requests db.

A simple metar would have to be interpreted and much would have to be assumed about visibility, winds aloft and so on, unless it was defined in the metar which defeats the concept. I have provided a file to place whatever metars you like but they are the full specification for complete control.

Instead in the weather page there are two drop down lists, one for dept weather type the other for dest. These place simple metars at each end of your route and the program fills in between. You cannot type them in but a good range of weather styles are present. You may like to have a go with that.

Steve

[Steve Waite]

Hi Alex,
Well I've been discussing the idea and thinking about it a lot. I hate to say it but it does not seem such a good idea. If you want a particular weather setup, it's no good just setting a few metars, every one in the reality bubble needs to be set so the result is an extrapolation of all the ws's combined. If there was a box to type a METAR string one would probably want a thunderstorm or overcast, so there are dropdown lists for dept and dest, effectively several main METARS you may like to choose. Then since they are simple, how should they be interpreted, high or low speed winds aloft? I think if you just press the new flight button followed by the fly button, do a flight, use the briefing, arrive within a minute of your ETA, with an accurate fuel load, this allows you to get into the performance of the plane, like you did with your car and commute.
Steve

[Steve Waite]

my main interest was having a gapfree consistent weather that at least at the departure and arrival airports consistent with real weather

I keep forgetting to mention that IF makes weather right across the seas, and other areas of scant ws's so you never get a gap.

If you mean by real weather, todays weather, what you see out of the window: The best way to get real weather is use ASE, REX, or FSX download weather, or in fact your favourite real weather system that downloads weather reports. Turn IF's weather off, but you can leave the thermal and ridge engine running. IF weather allows you to fly winter or summer at any time of day, and offline.

I may improve the METAR functionality with the .ini file in a future upgrade.