Hi all. Newbie flyer here. I love this sim and I hope to learn some tools to contribute some models and possible a new airplane or two. :)I was wondering two things:1) When it is raining, should I be seeing any rain effects? The real weather fetch seems to be working correctly (comparing local temps with the weather in the game) but when it was raining here I didn't see much other than some dark overcast.2) Which leads me to this question, does the real weather fetch continue to update as I fly from one city to another? Or if it is raining in L.A. when I take off will it rain across the country to NYC?ThanksTony

FlightGear has a list of all METAR stations that weather.noaa.gov offers data for ($FG_ROOT/Airports/metar.dat.gz). It checks once every minute if the nearest station has changed and if so, fetches weather for this new station. If the station has not changed for 15 minutes, new weather is fetched from the same old station anyway. The rain information is contained in the METAR report and FlightGear is aware of it -- you can check this with the "metar" utility that comes with FlightGear -- but FlightGear doesn't render rain yet. The reduction of visibility isn't *deduced* from the fact that it's raining, but is a natural consequence and explicitly contained in the report as a number.Erik started with experiments on rain modeling. You find the rain 3D model/texture in $FG_ROOT/Models/Weather/. Only the PC7 has support for this model built-in, but it's commented out there ($FG_ROOT/Aircraft/pc7/Models/pc7.xml). And the rain doesn't depend on METAR reported rain, but, once uncommented, is *always* on. If you apply this change to your rain.xml file, the pc7 will have rain whenever METAR reported rain, that is: whenever it's really raining wherever you fly. You can fly into rain and out of it. This, however, will only work with version 0.9.8a (note the 'a'!) or the development version from CVS.RCS file: /var/cvs/FlightGear-0.9/data/Models/Weather/rain.xml,vretrieving revision 1.3diff -u -p -r1.3 rain.xml--- rain.xml 3 Jan 2005 18:30:39 -0000 1.3+++ rain.xml 3 Mar 2005 10:50:13 -0000@@ -24,6 +24,10 @@ /sim/current-view/internaltrue+ + /environment/metar/rain-norm+ 0+ /position/altitude-ft/environment/clouds/layer[0]/elevation-ftNote that the crappy forum software removed all leading spaces. :-)

In AVSIM's defence the forum software does not remove leading spaces. They are still there. But standard browser behavior is to render no more than 1 consecutive space character. So, just out of curiosity:With a pre tag:

 one space    four spaces        eight spaces

with nbsp codes: one space four spaces eight spacesmaybe one of these will work.--jeff

Thanks for the help! My next posting will probably be about navigation :(I made the changes you stated and the flight gear window said "Object rain not found". Then it downloaded the weather and the rest ran fine. I'm taking off from the Van Nuys Airport which is just a few blocks from me and it is indeed drizzling so I guess it was trying to put the rain in and couldn't find a file it needed. (How cool is that!) Any ideas? I was flying the PC7, BTW.Thanks!Tony

>In AVSIM's defence the forum software does not remove leading>spaces. They are still there. But standard browser behavior is>to render no more than 1 consecutive space character. Which entirely proves my point. If it weren't crap, it would replace all leading spaces by   because the spaces were input by the user for a reason. Simply handing the code over to HTML, while knowing that it would ignore the spaces, is what I call crappy. But at least it has smiley support ... :-]

>[...] the flight gear window said "Object rain not found". [...]> Any ideas?Yes. Maybe the rain object wasn't found? :-> Looks like it's not in version ... whatever version you are using. (You failed to give any information about your version so far.)

Sorry, I'm running the latest version 9.8a for windows xp.T

But the rain.xml file is where I said? Sorry, for MICROS~1 my support ends here. For Linux/Unix I could have helped with finding the cause. Good luck.

No Problem. Thanks!!!