Well I'd say the primary feature is the visibility interpolation between METAR stations. When you fly an approach that goes through say 3 different METAR station perimeters, visibility change will be smooth instead of abrupt. You will notice changing conditions, subtly, it's not a slap in the face as it is when using vanilla X-Plane and NOAA plug-in.

 

In my opinion, you should of led the post with this bit of information. That's quite significant.

 

In fact, if you were able to separate this from the stated requirements (especially the payware requirements) and make it work with default XP, I'd predict that it would be very, very popular.

 

To be honest, with all the smoothing that RWC is supposed to provide between cloud cover changes, I'm actually rather surprised, now that I think about it, that it's not something addressed by that application. Visibility smoothing should completely be the domain of RWC, hand in hand with allowing a transition between cloud cover. I think it needs to be brought to their attention.

Looks great I'd be happy to help test.

In my opinion, you should of led the post with this bit of information. That's quite significant.

 

Well, I did write this down in the initial post?

 

 

 

Realtime visibility data from the [XPGFS] NOAA Weather plug-in will be deployed seamlessly - any visibility change will be smooth (10m per frame), never again will you suffer a sudden, immersion killing switch. Visibilities higher than 16nm will always be cut to 16nm (or your desired value) prior to being deployed.

 

Thing is, it works well without the payware (SMP + RWC); but then there are no clouds. There's no way to get clouds from X-Plane itself as Ventura Sky needs a single, clear cloud layer that goes up to 46000ft. SMP + RWC is the only way to inject clouds in this situation.

 

I am in talks with Frank from Sundog (SMP + RWC), he's testing Ventura Sky also. Maybe we'll find a way to work this into the next major release of SMP, we'll see. Don't know in how far a plug-in can mimic what we're doing in Lua here. A good first step would be if the NOAA plug-in would have a checkbox to support Ventura Sky (right now a manual edit of the file is required), but Joan seems to be busy with other stuff. Fact is with never changing visible weather by RWC, and smooth visibility transitions by Ventura Sky, sudden condition changes are already a thing of the past.

 

 

Well, I did write this down in the initial post?

 

Not nearly as concise as you have now.

 

Is this purely a lua script running within FlyWithLua?

Not nearly as concise as you have now.

 

Is this purely a lua script running within FlyWithLua?

 

Yes, plus the sky color set. It does need the NOAA plug-in with small edits in the code for now though.

 

PM me for a test version (it's fully functional).

Yes, plus the sky color set. It does need the NOAA plug-in with small edits in the code for now though.

 

PM me for a test version (it's fully functional).

 

I appreciate the offer, but I'm just purely interested in the code of what's it's doing.

 

For the most part, I quit using SMP & RWC quite awhile back in favour of a set of weather 'themes' set via lua scripts. I've never had consistently good results with depiction of real weather, and half of the year I don't even want to use real weather (I see enough snow and cold and wet outside as it is), so I just simply kind of quit using it.

Thanks for giving us the chance to test it. I followed the install guide and notice the following:

 

If I replace the noaa.py file the noaa plugin is no longer showing under plugins. Also, I get a dense fog up to about 25000 feet irrespective of the real weather at my chosen location. It takes about a minute until the weather changes to that fog.

 

What could be wrong there?

Please send support requests via PM.

Sorry for the stupid question. But where do I copy the sky color texture .png's? The manual in the test package kinda presumes I know this, but I'm a rather new user of XP10.5

Standard X-Plane:

/Resources/bitmaps/skycolors (copy the .png's in there, you can restore the originals by running X-Plane updater)

 

SkyMaxx Pro:

/Resources/plugins/SilverLining/skyColors (copy the folder there, then activate the set via the SkyMaxx Pro menu in X-Plane)

anyone can make a video of this?

Looking good!

I don't have the time to do videos, but if one of the testers would like to do one, that would be great. Getting some very positive feedback.

Ventura Sky sundowner in SoCal...

 

 

 

 

 

Looks very nice!