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MikeP

Weather Texture Engines

Which Weather Engine?  

103 members have voted

  1. 1. Which Weather Engine?



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I've posted in the forum, but I don't really see how it's an issue I've only got. What issue could I have that's making REX report wrong winds? I've tried changing interpolation settings, wind smoothing on and off, it makes no difference to the winds being reported wrong over the Atlantic.

 

The problem I have with your model data is that if you even look over the US your data is incorrect. We use radiosonde data.

 

http://www.spc.noaa....gn=V&Levels=300

http://www.spc.noaa....gn=V&Levels=300

 

Your data shows more a zonal flow aloft where our data which would reflect what is in the image link I supplied. This is NOT a zonal flow aloft at 34k feet. So I think we are trying to parse the difference between apples and oranges here. You are comparing winds over the ocean where FSX is already struggling and real weather data is sparse compared to model data. We do not use model data. We use radiosonde data. So over the oceans there are going to be some gaps. That is natural. We do not use model data. Even if you look at Florida compared to the model data it is off. The upper air support for what was once Beryl is located over Florida (real live data). The model data you supplied is pushed out into the ocean. That is a BIG difference.


Reed Stough
Managing Partner
REX SIMULATIONS 

website:  www.rexsimulations.com
supportwww.rexaxis.com

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The problem I have with your model data is that if you even look over the US your data is incorrect. We use radiosonde data.

 

http://www.spc.noaa....gn=V&Levels=300

http://www.spc.noaa....gn=V&Levels=300

 

Your data shows more a zonal flow aloft where our data which would reflect what is in the image link I supplied. This is NOT a zonal flow aloft at 34k feet. So I think we are trying to parse the difference between apples and oranges here. You are comparing winds over the ocean where FSX is already struggling and real weather data is sparse compared to model data. We do not use model data. We use radiosonde data. So over the oceans there are going to be some gaps. That is natural. We do not use model data. Even if you look at Florida compared to the model data it is off. The upper air support for what was once Beryl is located over Florida (real live data). The model data you supplied is pushed out into the ocean. That is a BIG difference.

 

That's obviously going to be a problem for transatlantic flight (or flight over any ocean for that matter) because obviously the data for the aloft winds is going to be model/forecasted data, since there's obviously no other way for them to be calculated. The problem I have is that using the REX Essential weather engine means fuel planning is made redundant. I'm sure you can appreciate, any transatlantic flight is mostly spent over the water and given that, even in real life, the wind chart I was using is also used to calculate the trip fuel I literally have no way to do fuel calculations without just using what the REX flight plan tells me the aloft winds are. From experience with using ActiveSky, the winds you get in the initial navlog are very rarely ever the actual aloft winds 8 hours later when you're actually flying over those points. Is it not actually possible for you to incorporate the model data for the oceans - which is what I assume Active Sky does, which does give me generally the correct winds over the oceans. Fair enough if we were talking about a small peninsula's weather being off, but the oceans cover 70% of the planet...

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That's obviously going to be a problem for transatlantic flight (or flight over any ocean for that matter) because obviously the data for the aloft winds is going to be model/forecasted data, since there's obviously no other way for them to be calculated. The problem I have is that using the REX Essential weather engine means fuel planning is made redundant. I'm sure you can appreciate, any transatlantic flight is mostly spent over the water and given that, even in real life, the wind chart I was using is also used to calculate the trip fuel I literally have no way to do fuel calculations without just using what the REX flight plan tells me the aloft winds are. From experience with using ActiveSky, the winds you get in the initial navlog are very rarely ever the actual aloft winds 8 hours later when you're actually flying over those points. Is it not actually possible for you to incorporate the model data for the oceans - which is what I assume Active Sky does, which does give me generally the correct winds over the oceans. Fair enough if we were talking about a small peninsula's weather being off, but the oceans cover 70% of the planet...

 

I understand that the oceans cover 70% of the planet, and in that case 70% of winds aloft data is then modelled and can sometimes be severely wrong. My example was not just over Florida, but over the entire US. Again your model data shows a more zonal flow, but that is NOT the case in real life. There is quite an amplified flow over the northern half of the US.

 

I don't think we are going to be able to convince the other which is better, so I think it is better to just stop this conversation and move on. According to the original poll this had to do with Weather TEXTURE Engines. This has now become an issue of winds aloft.


Reed Stough
Managing Partner
REX SIMULATIONS 

website:  www.rexsimulations.com
supportwww.rexaxis.com

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I understand that the oceans cover 70% of the planet, and in that case 70% of winds aloft data is then modelled and can sometimes be severely wrong. My example was not just over Florida, but over the entire US. Again your model data shows a more zonal flow, but that is NOT the case in real life. There is quite an amplified flow over the northern half of the US.

 

I don't think we are going to be able to convince the other which is better, so I think it is better to just stop this conversation and move on.

 

I'm not trying to convince you using model data is better - I just think it'd be better for use over the atlantic. REX was reporting the wind to be exactly the same value (direction and speed) for over a 60,000 square mile area of the Atlantic to me earlier. Is it not possible at all to use both model and radiosonde data?

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Reed,

 

Since I have you here - can I ask if anything's going to be done about smoothing abrupt wind and pressure shifts? All the flights I've flown with Essential so far (several GA and several NGX) have shown these - it was my major issue with REX2 as well and I'd hoped it would be fixed.

 

As someone above said, REX's weather depiction looks *stunning* visually especially in the way the distance hazing and boundary layer stuff looks - best I've seen as far as what distant mountains and stuff like that really look like in a real airplane. The issues with the wind and pressure will keep me from using it as my weather engine though if nothing can be done. I haven't seen a single shift in AS2012 - it's transitions perfectly smoothly...


Ryan Maziarz
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For fastest support, please submit a ticket at http://support.precisionmanuals.com

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With regards the above post from Tabs, does REX do this with you when you turn the weather smoothing on? The peeps at REX say this reduces weather accuracy. Ive always wondered why weather engines cant slowly bring the new weather into the area. Say you have winds 120/45 at point x. The next weather station says winds are 190/52. Why cant weather engines take the last wind aloft data and slowly change the wind data to the current set within say 10 seconds?. Is this what 'smoothing' in essentials is meant to do? In which case, why does it decrease accuracy?

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During beta testing I did have some minor wind shifts but not at every weather injection and the shifts that did occur weren't enough to really hurt the plane. I did not have any pressure issues. I achieved these results using FSUIPC wind and pressure smoothing, I had wind smoothing disabled in Essentials.

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I made my first flight using both REX (for textures) and AS2012 (as weather engine) tonight, and I had maybe the best results ever. For the first time I've been able to cloud surf for a while at FL390, something I had never seen. :Party:

 

I'd say if you own both like I do, it would be a shame not to take the best of these two great add-ons.

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Reed,

 

Since I have you here - can I ask if anything's going to be done about smoothing abrupt wind and pressure shifts? All the flights I've flown with Essential so far (several GA and several NGX) have shown these - it was my major issue with REX2 as well and I'd hoped it would be fixed.

 

As someone above said, REX's weather depiction looks *stunning* visually especially in the way the distance hazing and boundary layer stuff looks - best I've seen as far as what distant mountains and stuff like that really look like in a real airplane. The issues with the wind and pressure will keep me from using it as my weather engine though if nothing can be done. I haven't seen a single shift in AS2012 - it's transitions perfectly smoothly...

 

Ryan -

 

First, thank you for your kind words.

 

Secondly, can you go into more detail with the abrupt changes you are experiencing? To be honest we did not get a lot of this during testing. I myself probably flew nearly 70+ flights with the 737 NGX and I can only think of may be a couple of occasions there were issues and that was before we implemented our own wind smoothing feature into REX E. We know the standard you have at PMDG so it was our main goal with testing to be sure the NGX would fly well with REX. Own team felt pretty confident the two worked well before we released.

 

Could it be may be some setting issues?


Reed Stough
Managing Partner
REX SIMULATIONS 

website:  www.rexsimulations.com
supportwww.rexaxis.com

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I myself have flown many hours now with the PMDG NGX and only occasionally see wind shifts like what you are talking about Tabs, and that is with all smoothing off including FSUIPC, which previously was absolutely required to fly the PMDG 747 in any kind of proper way.

 

There are times when the wind aloft data is very different between say FL350 and 390, the levels for which we have data, and I am flying along at FL 370 or 360. So what are the winds supposed to be? There must be some kind of interpolation going on by the FSX weather rendering engine, right?. Sometimes during this kind of condition I will see jumps beween one wind level and the other for just a few minutes. This is when I will see wind shifts like what you are describing. In this case I either reload the weather or tick on FSUIPC for a bit and this goes away mostly. Actually, most of the time I just ride it out. You can see this when you do a step climb and you approach closer to say FL390 than 350 and the winds will stabilize. Not once has the AP disconnected or the now famous S turn behavior started. In fact, there has hardly been any disruption at all, some speed up and down a little , but that is about it. I am not a programmer and I have no idea how all this works in game, but I hate wind shifts like we used to have and in the more than 100 hours of testing with no smoothing at all, I no longer have to hold my breath that I am going to fall out of the sky at any moment. This didn't used to be the case, especially before FSUIPC came along and changed everything.

 

Regarding model versus radiosonde data, this now is what I have seen with REX. Previously when flying from say KSFO to Hong Kong, the upper level winds well southeast of Alaska were supposed to be from the south and around 20 kts rotating around to easterly winds further north near or over Alaska, which work out to be tailwinds shortly out of SFO up to the time you get Anchorage and beyond. What we got in game was 320/94 kts for much of the way, slowly rotating over time in a "zonal" fashion and it was difficult to end up with enough fuel to get to VHHH. Now, we actually get southerly winds of around 20 kts in game and the other day I actually had tailwinds of 15 kts south of Alaska. Why? well there often are low pressure systems coming in to the west coast around Oregon or so and this is the kind of wind pattern you get in real life as a result. I know this is correct because I often fly to China in real life on this route and keep a note of what the winds are from the GPS map, and bewildering at the time, there are frequently15 kt tailwinds in this Anchorage area. This is why these aircraft are up there, day after day on the routes that they are on. This was not simulated properly before in REX and it is now, or so appears to be.

 

Another example that I find very interesting is flying around the Equator. Before, the winds north of South America would be from the northwest right across the Equator and strong. The other day on a flight from Dulles to Rio, I had winds of 3-6 kts with a variable direction just a bit north of the Equator, that then picked up to around 20 kts a few hours later! I haven't seen 3kts of wind at FL350 in I don't know how long. A quick look at the weather charts show that this is what we should expect near the Equator generally. To me, as a longhaul flyer, this represents a huge leap forward in realism as far as winds aloft go, the problem over oceans as discussed earlier not withstanding. Regarding oceans, by the way, on my last flight, a flight from KSFO to EDDF last week, the winds over the Atlantic (~58-62N) were generally from the WSW, W, then WNW and varied between 30-60kts. They also were not the same the whole way.

 

Regarding fuel planning, I am not flying in the real world, but in the simulated world, and what I care about while simming is the winds that I think and expect I am going to see based on what my weather program is giving me, actually showing up in game, not what show up on the real flight. And this REX does pretty well with the margin of error I expect a program lke this to realistically be able to do. I have input the winds from REX into the FMCs of various aircraft, naturally PMDG mostly, and the expected fuel burn has been pretty close to what was forecast. Sure it is not pefect, but I have not run out of fuel or even come close. The winds that I thought I would see, I have mostly seen. I am even able to to do pretty reasonable VNAV descents now, when before that was impossible due to wild swings in wind on descent. I did a VNAV descent into EDDF from FL 390 on the ROLIS arrival the other day that was absolutely magnificent and the weather presentation was wonderful. All of this without the use of any smoothing at all. What else can I expect from programs like these? Perfect simulation of reality over the whole globe up to 40,000', 24 hours a day, all year around?

 

As a pretty serious sim hobbyist, I have to say that both REX and AS have come a long way dealing with this mind boggling FSX wind smoothing issue that have been around since the days when FSX first came out. The same thing goes for providing us with overall pretty realistic winds aloft and a beautiful environment. I happen to be an REX guy. I haven't used AS since I flew with FS9. A lot of you are AS people, and some of you are both, fair enough. I am for competition as much as the next guy, trust me, and for discussing their relative pros and cons, details and nuances, but at the end of the day I think we need to stand back and be very thankful that there are now two very good weather sim products available that seem to get better and better every year that have greatly enhanced our enjoyment of this hobby, along with the apprearance of very highly and realistically simulated aircraft. I would not be flying FSX if it were not for these talented developers and their great products and I am grateful they are doing what they do for us all.


i7 3770K HT, 8GB RAM, nVidia 980GTX, Win7, P3D 3.4, FSG mesh, UTX, GEX, ST, ASA16/ASCA, NickN optimized

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Reed,

 

Do you guys recommend using FSUIPC smoothing stuff? I do have that all turned off for the REX E flights I've flown because of AS2012 not requiring it.

 

The shifts are more noticable in GA than in the NGX to me - I flew the Carenado Bonanza F33 from KSGU-KBCE the other day and I was seeing a shift pretty much every other new weather injection/load, both wind and pressure (altimeter setting would suddenly change).


Ryan Maziarz
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For fastest support, please submit a ticket at http://support.precisionmanuals.com

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I flew the Carenado Bonanza F33 from KSGU-KBCE the other day and I was seeing a shift pretty much every other new weather injection/load, both wind and pressure (altimeter setting would suddenly change).

 

Exactly same issues with me too.

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What is the RATE AT WHICH WEATHER CHANGES OVER TIME set to within FSX?

 

Are you gents running REX by RIGHT CLICKING the exe and selecting RUN AS ADMIN... and I'm not referring to being the ADMIN on your Windows account.


Tim Fuchs
Managing Partner
REX SIMULATIONS 

website:  www.rexsimulations.com
support www.rexaxis.com

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