Downloading Offline Weather

[Guest A319]

Hi, I was just thinking of something that might be interesting especially to low-bandwidth users. In the next version of Wx-RE, would it be possible for us to download weather for only certain regions? For example, I fly mainly in Europe, so when I'm downloading weather I don't need the winds and metars for north america, asia, africa, south america etc...So would it be possible in the next wx-re update to include an option that can let you download only european metars and winds, for instance? It would reduce the download size by far and it would be quicker.Just an ideaA319

[Damian Clark 1,261]

Hi,By design, AS2 has reduced the download amount from approx 2-5MB to under 700K (for the entire world weather snapshot including winds aloft). This should do the trick :)See http://www.hifisim.com/datanet/currentsnapshot.txt for a sample of this data...-Damian[table border=0" cellspacing="30" cellpadding="0][tr][td align = "left"]Damian ClarkHiFi Simulation SoftwareDeveloper of ActiveSkyThe next-generation weather environment simulation for FS2002!http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky[/td][td]http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg][/td][/tr][/table://http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/ima...[/tr][/table

[Hakkie 0]

Hi Damian, just a note about the new snapshot format. I assume your goal is to get the download size as small as possible. If so, you could decrease it with some more bytes by removing the ICAO code from the METAR string? It looks like this ICAO code is either always the same as the one preceeding it, or it says *NO DATA*. Example:®(I)BIRK(/I)(M)BIRK 090800Z 10012KT CAVOK 10/05 Q1010(/M)(T)*etc etc etcSkipping the second BIRK saves 4 characters. The complete snapshot contains over 3500 lines, so it saves 3500x4 characters. I know, I know, we're talking about nothing here. However, it could save again some bandwidth... When creating the snapshot you could make a routine that verifies if the first and second ICAO match. If not, make it *NO DATA*. I'm not a programmer. Just thought it might be worth mentioning.Kind regards,Hakkie

[Damian Clark 1,261]

Thank you for the help Hakkie..This is a debug version of the data - not what will be sent to AS2. It has to be "human readable" so it can easily be debugged when any inconsistency comes up at this point. Try downloading currentsnapshot.dat, which is in binary form, and much more condensed.-Damian[table border=0" cellspacing="30" cellpadding="0][tr][td align = "left"]Damian ClarkHiFi Simulation SoftwareDeveloper of ActiveSkyThe next-generation weather environment simulation for FS2002!http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky[/td][td]http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg][/td][/tr][/table://http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/ima...[/tr][/table

[Hakkie 0]

OK, all clear. The DAT indeed is significantly smaller :-) Looking forward to AS2!!