Im pointing it to the Grib folder in OPUS and the test says its successful. Is Fs captain officially compatible with OPUS?

 

Also when I ask for weather at destination using rex/opus the message is "station not set in fs"

 

Awesome program by the way.

Im pointing it to the Grib folder in OPUS and the test says its successful

It will, but you will still not get weather and environment warnings etc.

 

Edit: Thanks for asking Stephen ;Zoran.

Travis, here is the link

http://www.simforums.com/forums/fs-captain_topic48131_post295045.html#295045

 

So looks like FSC weather config looks for "opusweather.txt, when it should be opusweatherreport.txt.

I don't get 'wx ahead', either; neither with ASE nor with ASN. But all the other 'bells & whistles' are there for me.

 

Sorry for any confusion I created by my "description" of the different wx engine interfaces of FSC.

I'm just going to chime in here and mentioned what a bloody fantastic program this is. I've been using it for about 3 years and wouldn't (and don't) fly anywhere without it.

 

Its level of integration with the sim is amazing and Dutch and Travis continue to provide not just great support but new builds on a regular basis. 

 

Great work guys!

 

 

Sorry for any confusion I created by my "description" of the different wx engine interfaces of FSC

No problem Ollie.

I haven't done much with failures at all. How does fscaptain work with 737ngx in terms of failures? Do I need to set the 737 failures to on and then run fscaptain? Will fs2crew emergency react to the different emergencies triggered by fscaptain? I am running asn as my weather engine. 

 

Red,  I don't use that a/c (we have to split our fleet here at ACME Airlines) so I'll let Dutch or another NGX driver take this one.

 

 

 

Hi Travis,

I mean Environment warnings. I only get TAF @ departure airport, no en route weather ( upper levels ) and destination weather about 30 miles out

If I select WX ahead, I get not available.

 

In the ACARS, are you looking at "FSX" weather or "Opus" weather?  (Toggle the "Source" LSK to flip back and forth.)

 

I ask because that tiny screen I posted earlier shows weather from the simulator (FSX in that case).  It's the simulator that introduces levels of turbulence and icing.

 

Still though, the Environmental warnings should be looking at the conditions outside, not at any weather engine data.  So in that case it should not matter if you were using Opus, ASN, or built-in weather.

 

But it's worth a check, so I'm sure Dutch will double check the code.  B)

 

 

 

Im pointing it to the Grib folder in OPUS and the test says its successful. Is Fs captain officially compatible with OPUS?

 

Also when I ask for weather at destination using rex/opus the message is "station not set in fs"

 

Awesome program by the way.

 

Zoran,

 

FSCaptain reads the opusweather.txt file - that's a list of METARs "in your surrounding area."  That file does not contain any upper level data, just local METARs.

 

The message "station not set in fs" tells me that you are using the ACARS for weather from the simulator.  Now that's fine, but it has its advantages and disadvantages.  

 

The advantages are - it's pulling weather from the simulator itself and can tell you upper level conditions (winds & temps & clouds & icing & turbulence).

 

The advantages are that all weather engines (that I know of) only inject weather into the simulator for a certain radius from your aircraft that may be user defined, but is really limited to several hundred miles.  So if you're at LFBO headed to LOWW  (as I will be this weekend) that's nearly 700 miles.  I won't be able to pull up destination weather if I'm looking at the weather in the simulator.

 

You can test this yourself by loading up at an airport which has METAR coverage, injecting weather from any engine, and then using the "Map" to zoom in to your local airport.  You should be able to see some temp/pressure/wind data there.  Now if your destination lies outside your weather engine's radius, you won't see weather info on the map.

 

Here's a silly route I entered - LFBO MEN GVA KLO LOWW - mostly to get me some good weather stations enroute.  In the first panel you can see me in my little trike at LFBO with some Opus-injected weather.  Next, I'm looking 135 miles outwards, and LFHP has weather.  Next I'm looking at LFLL at 202 miles and no weather.  (Although it's a valid weather station....)  And again LSGG with no weather.  Etc. onwards to LOWW.

 

 

If you were to look at this in FSCaptain with FS9 or FSX or P3D weather, you would see the same.  "Some data," "some data," "Station not set in FS," "Station not set in FS."

 

This is why FSCaptain allows you to also look at the METAR file generated by most weather engines.  I could switch my ACARS to read my OpusWeather file and it would see

 

LFLL 201300Z 36004KT 9999 BKN012 BKN040 08/06 Q1029 NOSIG

LSGG 201320Z VRB02KT 9999 FEW009 SCT025 BKN070 06/05 Q1029 NOSIG

 

Voila!  It looks like a clear and crisp late Autumn afternoon there.

 

Active Sky, Rex (original and Essentials Plus), FSrealWX, and FSGRW (I think) - they all write a single file with all the METAR data that they downloaded.  If I were using one of those engines right now, I could check the weather in Vienna or Geneva, or even Hong Kong, Rio, and Durban if I wanted to.

 

However Opus' OpusWeather file only contains data for a limited area around your aircraft.  Wider than what's being injected into the simulator, but limited nontheless.  For instance my current file has 139 METARs.  I don't have data in it for my "destination" of LOWW.

 

So those are currently the limits we have....

 

 

 

It will, but you will still not get weather and environment warnings etc.

 

Edit: Thanks for asking Stephen ;Zoran.

Travis, here is the link

http://www.simforums.com/forums/fs-captain_topic48131_post295045.html#295045

 

So looks like FSC weather config looks for "opusweather.txt, when it should be opusweatherreport.txt.

 

Julian,

 

opusweatherreport only contains upper level winds and temps at your location.  No METAR, nothing else.

 

It would be a small effort to write a custom parser for that data, and if the data were global in scope, I could make an argument to do such.  But for the little data we could derive, it's a big reach.

 

 

I don't get 'wx ahead', either; neither with ASE nor with ASN. But all the other 'bells & whistles' are there for me.

 

Sorry for any confusion I created by my "description" of the different wx engine interfaces of FSC.

 

I live in a state of confusion - it's named California.  :rolleyes:

 

"WX ahead" is often a roll of the dice - FSCaptain looks at the nearest airports and tries to pick the one that you appear to be flying toward.  Said airport may or may not have weather set in FS - it could be a tiny strip with no weather reporting capabilities, etc.  It's generally safest to know the stations enroute and to key them in for a formal request.

 

 

 

I'm just going to chime in here and mentioned what a bloody fantastic program this is. I've been using it for about 3 years and wouldn't (and don't) fly anywhere without it.

 

Its level of integration with the sim is amazing and Dutch and Travis continue to provide not just great support but new builds on a regular basis. 

 

Great work guys!

 

Thank you kindly for your warm words as well as for your custom!

 

We have some keen ideas to implement in the new year, both in terms of the programs their selves and for "extra aviation features."

 

 

Still though, the Environmental warnings should be looking at the conditions outside, not at any weather engine data.  So in that case it should not matter if you were using Opus, ASN, or built-in weather.
 
But it's worth a check, so I'm sure Dutch will double check the code. 

Dutch can still check the code, but I loaded up my Q4 at BGSS and had Opus bring down the snow and the cold.  I started rapidly accumulating ice and the teal Ice numbers at the top of the ACARS kept climbing.  So I'm pretty confident that the Enviro warnings are simulator-based, and not weather-engine-file-based

 

Later this weekend I'll find some turbulence to fly into for a check on that.  Maybe some thunderstorms for a change....

Some answers for you folks. 

 

As for the NGX, set the failures in that airplane however you want.  You can always send an emergency message to dispatch and have them cancel your revenue flight and switch to emergency monitoring mode.  It doesn't matter whether the failure was triggered by FSCaptain or the airplane or even another utility.

 

Although I fly the airplane every once in a while I'm not an expert on what the NGX will detect.  Most failures triggered by FSCaptain will be probably detected by the NGX (such as engine failures or fires) because we use standard FS signals when we fail something.  Others such as a fuel leak would probably not be detected since we are just slowly draining fuel out of one of your tanks to simulate the leak.  The FSCaptain failure system is not as detailed as the NGXs' because we work with all airplanes.

 

The option that puts that little colored message at the top of the FCDU (SHOWENVIRONMENT) works entirely from data coming from the airplane through the interface, or the ambient environment around it as reported by the sim.  We don't look at text-based external METARS in compiling those warnings at all.  What you see is real-time and you should pay attention to it!

 

We're taking a closer look at Opus now to see if we can enhance the level of integration in 5.1.

 

Dutch

 

 

Remember, our support forum at http://fscaptain.proboards.com is always open for answers too, and we have a very experienced user base that sometimes knows more about it than we do

We're taking a closer look at Opus now to see if we can enhance the level of integration in 5.1.

Thanks Dutch and you too Travis. It seems I had not correctly pressed the correct functions in FSC, and on my last flight from OMDB to LOWW using the PMDG T7, I did get icing reports.

Having read the questions that Travis posted on the Opus forum, I now have a better understanding about how it works. Sorry for causing any confusion to fellow FSC users.

Opus works just fine in FSC

 

Thanks for the great support.

Hi all, I have been going over all of the info here and Im still not 100% clear on Opus

Couple of questions

 

1. is it fully supported as is active sky and rex? inc, weather hazards.

2. is the correct folder to point to in opus.....C/opus/themes?

After much testing OPUS is working. I was able to pull up the weather on approach no problems including runway conditions however when I hit the source tab it says it cant find OPUS. That cant be right because in admin It finds it okay and the fsx weather engine is set to 'user defined" 

 

I didn't get any snow and icing stayed at 0 flickering uo to 2lb occasionally, so still need to test that.

 

The only problem so far ,is there seems to be an erroneous  message saying OPUS is not found under the source tab

 

the testing was done with FSC pointing to OPUS themes folder as OPUS recommends it

Zoran,

 

Opus Weather (real-time, not historic) is fully supported and works well with FSCaptain.  Opus is currently my weather engine for flights within P3D2 since it doesn't suffer from the 50-70C OAT issue.

 

Here are the relevant lines from my FSCaptain profile.cfg file.  Note that I specify the OpusWeather.txt file, but you may have it in a different folder (such as C:\Opus\Themes\)

 

METARTYPE=Opus

METARDATA=C:\OpusFSX\Themes\OpusWeather.txt

METARFORMAT=2

METARSOURCE=0

METARSHOW=1

METARSTALE=2

Travis, yes after much testing it works perfect!

Thanks for that profile.cfg changes Travis. I changed mine accordingly and we'll see what happens

Dutch @Travis,

 Thanks for your dedication to developing FSC. It  is a great tool for my flying. Combination Fs2Crew , REX and Opus Weather Engine  make flying most enjoyable. + Radar Contact and PFPX.