PMDG 737 NGX RADAR METEOROLOGICO + SP1

[kevinh 409]

Whining about weather radar at the end of the line isn't going to help anyone, and all it's going to do is irritate the Dev team (esp because they're being accused of laziness and incompetence in more than a few posts here) and all of us here who are really tired of having to explain this over, and over, and over again. It's not going to happen properly unless the FSX weather engine is completely revamped. The "analogies" being used to say "not doing weather radar is like ___" are weak at best. There's no reason to waste time trying to get something to see something that isn't there. If you really want weather radar, go buy the RXP, and find someone who hacked it together with the NGX.(and if you want to accuse them of being lazy, and using excuses, you go integrate a realistic simulation of weather radar into your own add-on...oh, that's right...you can't)

BIB: That is never going to happen, so I don't see why that should mean no WXR ever on a PMDG sim. It wouldn't be practical or worthwhile to model the atmosphere in that detail for a flight sim. You can't generate weather in such detail from a METAR report. The best you can do is see where FSX has placed clouds and develop algorithms to determine which clouds have rain in and to what intensity. An FSX WXR is only ever going to be an educated guess, but so is a lot of the simulation. Re your last paragraph this is what most other developers that offer WXR have done by packaging a WXR addon with their sim. Why reinvent the wheel? IIRC Digital Aviation did their own WXR simulation for their Fokker 100 sim, it was certainly very different to Wilco, PSS and CaptainSim offerings. I can understand PMDG not wanting to devote development resources to this though, given the far greater complexity of their simulation. Kevin Hall

[MrKen 3]

BIB: That is never going to happen, so I don't see why that should mean no WXR ever on a PMDG sim. It wouldn't be practical or worthwhile to model the atmosphere in that detail for a flight sim. You can't generate weather in such detail from a METAR report. The best you can do is see where FSX has placed clouds and develop algorithms to determine which clouds have rain in and to what intensity. An FSX WXR is only ever going to be an educated guess, but so is a lot of the simulation. Re your last paragraph this is what most other developers that offer WXR have done by packaging a WXR addon with their sim. Why reinvent the wheel? IIRC Digital Aviation did their own WXR simulation for their Fokker 100 sim, it was certainly very different to Wilco, PSS and CaptainSim offerings. I can understand PMDG not wanting to devote development resources to this though, given the far greater complexity of their simulation. Kevin Hall

I predict the answer will lie within PMDG's Boeing 787 for Microsoft Flight! Sorry, I had to...

[kevinh 409]

Could be something as simple as the sims are required to have it & PMDG isn't. With the sims though, the way it was explained earlier, they basically have a preprogrammed weather scheme to match a predrawn wxr image. I've never been in a level-d sim, so I can't really comment personally on that.

The weather radar modelling on a Level D sim isn't quite as basic as that. WXR images certainly aren't predrawn (the shape of the storm cells may well be pre-defined and but they aren't static). Also the weather cells are 3D so the image has to change as the sim moves through the weather and as antenna tilt is varied. Obviously FSX doesn't have an instructor who can decide how and where to put storms so the question of which clouds have rain has to be decided by other means, such as logic, statistics, tuning and of course random guesswork. As correctly you say Level D sims must have WXR and PMDG has a choice. My feeling is they've made that choice for the wrong reasons, but the end result is the same. Kevin Hall

[MrKen 3]

The weather radar modelling on a Level D sim isn't quite as basic as that. WXR images certainly aren't predrawn (the shape of the storm cells may well be pre-defined and but they aren't static). Also the weather cells are 3D so the image has to change as the sim moves through the weather and as antenna tilt is varied. Obviously FSX doesn't have an instructor who can decide how and where to put storms so the question of which clouds have rain has to be decided by other means, such as logic, statistics, tuning and of course random guesswork. As correctly you say Level D sims must have WXR and PMDG has a choice. My feeling is they've made that choice for the wrong reasons, but the end result is the same. Kevin Hall

I could have worded that a little better. I didn't mean that the wxr depiction is static and never moves, but that the weather (storm cells) are predrawn, premapped, however you wish to say it. As for the wxr image, it would be larger than what's displayed, scrolling depending on the aircraft's position like a moving map.

[Paul Deemer 13]

I have a Cash Structured Settlement and I need NGX Weather Radar Now! (Chorus Singing - NO no NO no NOooooo!)

JG Wentworth

[ajpongress 467]

Oh god, not this again.C'mon guys. Can't we just let this die?

[hopskip 253]

They could get the weather radar to check the nearest 5, 10 whatever METARs, if there is no mention of precipitation, then don't draw any rain. If there is, then do some wierd calculation of cloud locations, sizes, colours, and types and analyze and predict which clouds are likley to have rain, and draw this on the weather radar display. Weather you actually get rain as your aircraft passes that location in FSX is less important. Of course they could just forget about it and release the 777 a few months earlier. My vote goes to 777. Trent H