I've been looking at the weather settings in MFS and the available weather presets available for free. I have some thoughts I'd like to share.

First and foremost, the interface available within the simulator do not fully expose the acceptable atmospheric values. For example, the Precipitation(s) slider only allows values up to 10 or 10mm/h. If you look at the Tropical Storm preset (available as a free addon) you'll see a value of 100mm/h.

Another item of possible interest is the Scattering or CloudLayerScattering value. This value seems to have a midpoint value of 0.5 with a range of 0.1 to 1.0. So, you might think that moving the slider all the way to the right is the maximum value. In fact it seems the extreme left or extreme right position results in the same affect. The mid point is, in fact, the maximum value. Interesting.

There are other values that are not fully exposed through the simulator interface.

There isn't the notion of visibility modeled in the simulator. This is different from X-Plane and P3D. You'll have to settle for creating a facsimile of a visibility value by adjusting cloud layers and Aerosol Density. Kinda works, but explains the situation where an ATIS reports of such and such visibility doesn't correlate to what you see within the simulator. 

What this suggests is, if you want to create your own presets with a full range of possible weather conditions, you'll need to edit the weather preset files yourself. These files are in XML format. Using an editor which understands XML, this isn't too difficult (Sublime Text and Notepad++, for example). Or, obviously, you could support developers who are creating presets and use those.

This all my be self obvious to many here, but I thought it couldn't hurt to spell it out. Check out the free weather presets to get a feel for what does what.

Now. Go forth and create the weather you want; not including visibility values 😛

 

1 hour ago, RichieFly said:

I've been looking at the weather settings in MFS and the available weather presets available for free. I have some thoughts I'd like to share.

First and foremost, the interface available within the simulator do not fully expose the acceptable atmospheric values. For example, the Precipitation(s) slider only allows values up to 10 or 10mm/h. If you look at the Tropical Storm preset (available as a free addon) you'll see a value of 100mm/h.

Another item of possible interest is the Scattering or CloudLayerScattering value. This value seems to have a midpoint value of 0.5 with a range of 0.1 to 1.0. So, you might think that moving the slider all the way to the right is the maximum value. In fact it seems the extreme left or extreme right position results in the same affect. The mid point is, in fact, the maximum value. Interesting.

There are other values that are not fully exposed through the simulator interface.

There isn't the notion of visibility modeled in the simulator. This is different from X-Plane and P3D. You'll have to settle for creating a facsimile of a visibility value by adjusting cloud layers and Aerosol Density. Kinda works, but explains the situation where an ATIS reports of such and such visibility doesn't correlate to what you see within the simulator. 

What this suggests is, if you want to create your own presets with a full range of possible weather conditions, you'll need to edit the weather preset files yourself. These files are in XML format. Using an editor which understands XML, this isn't too difficult (Sublime Text and Notepad++, for example). Or, obviously, you could support developers who are creating presets and use those.

This all my be self obvious to many here, but I thought it couldn't hurt to spell it out. Check out the free weather presets to get a feel for what does what.

Now. Go forth and create the weather you want; not including visibility values 😛

 

Aside from creating your own, the other thing you could do is edit the addon presets to tweak them a bit to suit your own preferences and then save them under a new name.

 

Hopefully someone will eventually knock up a stand alone preset editor.

Edited October 7, 20205 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

thank you, very interesting.  You told us everything except were these files are located?

7 minutes ago, Mike S KPDX said:

thank you, very interesting.  You told us everything except were these files are located?

On my steam installation (custom folder in drive D:), the files are located here:

C:\Users\<Your Name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Weather\Presets

Maybe this is also Ok for MS Store users.

Cheers, Ed

 

1 hour ago, edpatino said:

On my steam installation (custom folder in drive D:), the files are located here:

C:\Users\<Your Name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Weather\Presets

Maybe this is also Ok for MS Store users.

Cheers, Ed

 

I think ms store installs the weather folder in "c:\program files\(some-path-or-other) " unless you have moved the install to an alternate drive in which case it pops up somewhere under "/wpsystem "  ?? The location is different in different installs.

 

Simplest way might be to use search in explorer to locate the "weather" folder on the relevant drive. if you have no presets other than default the folder will be empty.

Edited October 8, 20205 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick