Realweather for Xplane?

[cptCaptain 122]

Hey guys...

 

I'm new to Xplan10, and i wonder what is the best way to get real weather? Currently i use Xplan 10 64bit and Skymaxx Pro.

I installed the NOAA plugin today, but i dont know how to get it work. The weather i get is not correct. No matter what day it is i get always the same weather as you can see in the screenshot.

Is there any other "Weatherengine" like OPUS or REX, or maybe someone can explain to me how i get this NOAA thing to work?

 

[jcomm 5,890]

Unfortunately the NOAA plugin stopped working correctly ( winds are completely unrealistic ) after 10.25. It doesn't have to do with Sky Maxx Pro, but rather with some modification, probably in the datarefs (?)

 

I hope the author can update it - I really liked using the NOAA GFS plugin :-(

[Longranger 148]

 

Is there any other "Weatherengine" like OPUS or REX, or maybe someone can explain to me how i get this NOAA thing to work?

No, in fact these weather engines wouldn't have any interface at this moment to get their weather into X-Plane.

Even the NOAA plugin had to fool X-Plane by exchanging the METAR reports.

But since their are already several companies interested in writing/modifying a weather engine for X-Plane this should be pretty high on Laminars to do list.

[benrussell 20]

Even the NOAA plugin had to fool X-Plane by exchanging the METAR reports.

 

 

Where did you get this information?

[cptCaptain 122]

Thanks.

Well, then i have to stick with the stock weatherengine. :mellow:

[Longranger 148]

Where did you get this information?

Since this is what it did!

What is the real purpose of the NOAA plug-in? High weather. It normally doesn't intervene at lower levels unless you set it to VATSIM.

X-Plane only knows three layers of clouds. It simply expects that the basic winds above the highest cloud layer continue. And this is where the plug-in kicks in. It uses the NOAA reports to overwrite the METAR informations once certain hights are passed so that the situations in this zone are the same as predicted. This can mean that you have up to 9 different cloud layers in your climb while X-Plane only shows three layers at the same time. It doesn't know and doesn't care where these weather informations came from it simply draws the three laers as they are given. The knowledge about the different zones is only in the plug-in that simply publishes new Metar informations once the plane changes its flight level.

How would you describe this behavior otherwise?

[benrussell 20]

The NOAA plugin talks directly to x-planes internal values by using "Datarefs".

 

At no point does the NOAA plugin make use of METAR; it does not read or write METAR data. This is A Good Thing™

 

 

It does have the option to revert to X-Planes built in METAR reader below a given ceiling.

 

 

METAR is a hideously broken format.

 

 

Background: I spent about a week pulling the NOAA python scripts apart to see why they're broken and how they work... there are multiple bugs; from not downloading the server data packets correctly, to parsing the data poorly and injecting junk values into x-plane causing weird results.

 

 

edit:

 

Here's a link to the relevant section of the python source code for the NOAA plugin where you can find it binding to x-planes internal data via a set of dataref names.

 

https://github.com/joanpc/XplaneNoaaWeather/blob/master/PI_noaaWeather.py#L297

[jcomm 5,890]

Yep Ben, I tried to play around with it to try to implement Geopotential height, because it would be great to have even a non-perfect form of this implemented in the sim...

 

This will only really be possible when non-ISA variation becomes available, but we can somehow tweak the datarefs to be able to get the temperature side of the "from high to low" work as well as the pressure side :-)

 

I also heard that 10.30 might bring news regarding additional weather modelling hooks ( datarefs, et al...) allowing for 3pds to start building weather injectors more closely matching what we have, for instance, with ASN for FSX. As a long time beta tester of the "Active Sky" line of products, I would love to see something like that, or FSGRW ( another great weather injector for FSX )  available for X-Plane10...