Hi,

I love the option of having all my weather reports inside FSX by OPUS, but I'm missing this feature outside FSX within the OPUS Server program itself. I would absolutely love to have this feature as well, because these weather reports would really come in handy for flight planning. For example, when predetermining my fuel for the NGX inside FSBuild, it asks for average cruize wind. And to plan my takeoff runway in TOPCAT, I need the local METAR as well. OK, there are other ways to get this, but these ways are much more devious than doing it from a simple feature in OPUS itself. ActiveSky does give this information outside FSX, so why doesn't OPUS? I'd love to have this feature.

 

 

We have investigated generating weather without running FSX and this cannot be done due to other factors out of our control. Best run FSX as normal and just minimise it then enter your flight plan, process it, specify your cruise and update the weather etc..

 

You can then take as much time as you want examining the various text reports, Opus weather reports, and weather maps. The OpusFlightReport.txt file will give you all en route weather including upper winds and all average upper winds and temperatures. If you enable the TAFs option then the report will also include all relevant TAFs.

 

When done you can restore FSX to the screen and continue as normal.

 

It really is no great hardship and running standalone adds nothing to the program's usefulness.

 

Flight plans can of course be imported either by browsing for the file or loading it into FSX. The non-FSX was investigated recently and we reported our findings in SimForums. The OpusFSX LWE is a Live Weather Program but is designed to use the SimConnect interface hence is best run in conjunction with the sim.

 

But this is no problem at all since all you have to do is minimise FSX to the taskbar and it is the same as running the FSXSERVER alone. It also means users do not have to enter flight plans to generate and check the weather before flight, again using all the generated weather reports and weather maps.

 

You will find ALL the information you require in the very extensive Opus weather reports and text reports, including the handy SIDs and STARs report indicating the direction and bearing of each SID and STAR. Hence you can select a SID or STAR without downloading the charts.

 

The flight plan report is very extensive giving an accurate record of all en route weather including TAFs, upper winds, upper temps, and all averages.

 

The GRIB data report will give you all the upper winds and temps from 4000 feet to FL540.

 

The weather maps are detailed and also show your point of departure, destination and all flight planned waypoints.

 

Finally, you can restore FSX to the screen and check the on screen Opus Local, Lower, Upper, and Destination Weather reports. You will also have the en route weather reports available even when the points are not on the current weather map.

 

Of course if you connect a networkd client computer most of this information, including all weather maps, can be displayed on the client, separate from the FSX screen, you can also control the weather, enter, import, and process flight plans from the client.

 

So not being able to run FSXSERVER program separate from FSX is really irrelevant considering the vast amount of control and information that is available to you.

 

Stephen

I will be having another look into this option in the near future. As I reported on SimForums there were problems with speed when we tried to implement it and we could not track down what was causing the delays so we put it to one side. The program is designed to run with SimConnect at the moment, that means FSX running, but we will investigate further when we have time.

 

Stephen