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Guest scupper

Seeking Heavy Weather, Not Avail, What to do

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OK Great!In Online Mode most METARs are updated at the top of each hour. Then it takes a little time for the server to update.Archived weather is saved every 6 hours at 00z 06z 12z and 18z.It's really not our choice of weather, it's Mother Nature's! If I had my choice I would take 26-27C all year 'round!Hope this helps,JimActiveSky Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/as2004proudsupporter.jpg

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Guest allblack

Okay Okay, I worded that badly too! Maybe I should just do some work.....Your SCENARIO was good, how's that.26-27C? You can have it! We're currently 22-24C, with 17-18C overnight. I'm moving to Norway.Just thinking more about the last posts, how about this? Can AS put in place some form of database of stored weather whereby a user can select a time/date/place from your records that will give them the kind of weather they want?Let's say I wanted a weather pattern with lots of driving rain, heavy turbulence and extra sick bags. You could supply a list of dates that could be selected from your Archived Weather base that enable this to be selected?Not trying to be bolshy or demanding here, merely offering some thoughts.Time to go home soon. I wonder if I can use my PC tonight....Tim

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Guest scupper

Greetings Again Jim, Just to let you know that's I've not abandonedAS or this thread.I still believe (as others) that there is a real need to be ableto d/l from AS certain real weather scenarios and use them wherever weintend to fly.It's very time consuming finding different appropriate scenarios andwould surly be a big selling plus for AS.Please don't suggest creating them with MSFS, as AS just seems todisplay much better.Thanks for listening,Scupper

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There you go Jim, Scup's and I are at the same flight level here.Dare I say a poll on this forum? Garner some feedback from the users?If 500 people respond, and five want it, don't know about Scupper but I promise I'll go and hide in a hole somewhere and never mention it again!CheersTim

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Tim, Yes on the hole but make it a shallow one, at my age it'd bea difficult job getting out of a deep one!I don't want my comments to seem like I'm "trashing" AS, I'm not.My hat is off to the folks that wrote it. But I'd surly like this feature we've discussed available in thenext rendition, I'd even be willing to pay full price again.Later,Scupper

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Neither of us are doing that, we agree it's a good product.Full price?? Nope, not this fella but if it was a US$10 enhancement then I would.CheersTim

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>I am not sure if>AS Next will have any type of "theme based" weather feature.Please do not consider doing this as I think it will make AS a poorer product in the long run. Here's my reasoning.Just like a screwdriver is extremely good at inserting and removing screws, AS is without doubt the best "weather depiction" product for MSFS. By weather depiction I mean its ability to take current or archived real world weather and inject that into MSFS for pilot's to fly in. Your website marketing clearly indicates that's what the product does.Now compare this to "weather design", which is the ability to design and generate weather conditions (or themes) based on the imagination of the user, but in no way associated with real world conditions. This is what I think the original poster was looking for. MSFS has such a tool built-in, and there are other products out there which specialise in this as well. This for example can be a hammer (to continue on my screwdriver analogy).Now, you could make AS a multi-purpose tool to do "weather depiction" and "weather design", but just like my toolbox analogy, where you could have a tool which was part hammer and part screwdriver, in the end it will not be the best screwdriver there is, or the best hammer there is, and therefore is a poorer (though still usable) product.In summary, keep supplying us with the best "weather depiction" tool there is, and don't try to make it a cross between a hammer and a screwdriver :-)Of course, if you wanted to go and separately build the best hammer there is ...


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Guest allblack

Agreed.What Scupper and I are asking for is a hammer and as well as the screwdriver. What an interesting analogy...No-one wants to dilute or change the screwdriver, but not all of us have the time to find the screwdriver, if a hammer is much quicker.And development of the hammer would benefit from the already-exisiting well-made screwdriver.Good lord. And pay accordingly if needs be.That way, those that prefer to screw are happy, and people that prefer to thump are also happy campers.CheersTim

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Hi All,Interesting reading! I thought about this all day and before I voice anything else, I need to hear from Tim and Scupper and answer this question:With the way you like to fly is the weather more important or the location of your flight more important?Based on that feedback I may have some ideas.Hope this helps,JimActiveSky Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/as2004proudsupporter.jpg

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Hi Jim,Have to think about that.Weather. Though that's not emphatic, it's a gut feel presently.Whilst I have some set routes I do often, I could find others if the compromise had to be made. It's easier finding different places to fly than trying to find weather somewhere in the world that floats your boat at that particular time.CheersTim

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Hi Guys,Right now we are looking at 2 different situations.One is this: A pre-selected route needing a method to enter some weather. This is the hard one because AS is not set up to do this, and the station based weather of FS04 makes for a long process to manually enter the weather. See, FS02 made this easier, set things to rain, it would rain all over. Want to see snow? OK it will snow wherever you are flying, even in the tropics. That is known as global weather and you can still do this in FS04 by setting all the stations to use the same weather. This really doesn't use the new FS04 weather engine though. Right now I really can't see a way around this using AS. Yes, one could manipulate the weather file, but it would be a long and tedious process. One would never have time to fly and we don't want that!The other is this: A way of searching, identifying, or cataloging certain weather conditions irrespective of their location. Well, the cataloging method is out due to the vastness of the world and the shear amount of data that is collected. The time it would take to filter through the data and catalog the information would be enormous. For identifying current conditions there have been some suggestions already made in the threads above. For flights in the USA, weather.com qnd their national radar can quickly locate stormy weather. As for the searching for certain conditions I can see an easy way to do that. I can explain this in a another post tomorrow, as it is getting late and I need to get to bed.Yes, we really do care what users think. Damian has a vision and direction in which he hopes the product moves. But the team and individual users are constantly giving him new ideas. Some are easy, some are hard, some are impossible, some need to wait for a future release due to the programming nature of FS and AS. All of them require programming, private testing, public testing, and then official release. Already he is developing the next version of AS and we are awaiting the next version of FS with whatever that will bring to the mix. All of this happens, not from some computer lab, but from a team that is scattered around the globe, who are awake and asleep at totally opposite times, who many, if not all have never even met or even had a telephone conversation, who don't even know what each other looks like! Can you imagine all of this good "stuff" coming out of that? Sometimes it even amazes me to load FS, AS, and FSW Sky World, and see what we have ALL done. Can you imagine if we all lived in the same general area and could hold monthly planning meetings? Maybe Microsoft would like to hire us to do the weather portion of FS!!Hope this helps,JimActiveSky Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/as2004proudsupporter.jpg

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Maybe as an adjunct some day, even though the weather archives are compressed, perhaps at the time of collection an index consisting of an area (not a small single point but a fairly wide area such as Midwest for the USA), two fields for a condition code, a season code, and a time of day code, could be constructed. If that index could be made searchable and return a suggested archive reference date/time, that would save a lot of searching. Consider a form of checkboxes or radio-buttons with a fuzzy search.In my example I'd check Midwest US, autumn, snow, low vis, noon, and let the server crunch. I'm not saying this would be a massive detailed index but one with a few entries per day to get a generalized weather condition for an area from the archives. With only four archive entries per day and the earth divided up into sensible large regions to get a sample for each, this database does not have to evolve into a huge amount if duplicate entries are not posted. Leave the year and day out of it. The entry crunching would only take place every six hours.

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Guest allblack

Phew. Have a good sleep Jim.It's currently 20C here, very humid, it's 1910 and bacon and eggs for dinner.Won't be much sleeping going on here in the next few hours. Waay too hot.CheersTim

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Guest scupper

Hi Jim & All,I guess I'm with Ronzie. I don't believe a massive db is necessary."The shear amount of data" that you mentioned is exactly what wehave to plow through to get a custom situation. I still think a few situations could be programmed into AS that we could choose from.Give us some "canned" winds aloft with directional control/rain/snow/icing/ turbulenceThink about it anyway and your further comments much appreciatedScupper

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