Weather and XP9

Keith Smith
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Weather and XP9

Post by Keith Smith »

I've done some tests with XP9 to see how the 'real weather' option actually works. Assuming you have 'download weather' and 'scan weather file for updates' switched on, this is how it appears to work:

- X-Plane will read the ATIS for nearby airports when the frequency is dialed into the com1 or com2 radio (the latter requires com2 to be selected on the audio panel. Note, doing this will not effect COM1 operation with PilotEdge). The weather is based on what is in the METAR.rwx that has been most recently downloaded

- The 'weather', that is the current sky conditions, wind and altimeter, are updated every xx minutes, as defined in the Weather menu. The default is 30 minutes, which is generally far too long to be useful. Note: if you relocate the aircraft, the weather is NOT updated. You can tune a local ATIS and get the weather, but the LOADED weather updates strictly on the xx minute schedule. For this reason alone, it's important to set it to 1-2 minutes.

- I'm not sure if the 'scan frequency' variable affects how often the weather is actually downloaded. Can someone confirm with a packet sniffer or by checking the timestamp on METAR.rwx?

- While enroute, the loaded weather will be an interpolation based on current location and nearby weather reports. This can be seen in action by going to the local map and clicking on airports/helipads that do NOT have any native weather reporting. Notice the subtle changes in cloud settings. These are derived values based on interpolating data from nearby airports that DO have weather reporting

- the weather that xplane downloads appears to be relatively old (by 1-2 hours). I'll dig into this more. Chris P made some observations about this is another thread. We'll look into it a little more.

Note: PilotEdge makes no attempt to manipulate the loaded weather, or the weather download/scan settings at the moment. It's up to the user to enable weather download, scanning, and to update the frequency. This was done in anticipation of XP V10, which is going to support multiple, concurrent weather systems to be loaded, based on surrounding weather in all directions from the present location.
c.b.powell
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by c.b.powell »

Keith Smith wrote: - the weather that xplane downloads appears to be relatively old (by 1-2 hours). I'll dig into this more. Chris P made some observations about this is another thread. We'll look into it a little more.
Just following up: the cron solution that I proposed is, after testing, solving the delay problem for me. The weather I get in-sim is now as current as the NOAA site provides. I did dial down my cron fetch to every 20 minutes, since that seems perfectly granular enough for the data retrieval portion; I retained the scan-every-1-minute setting.

Interesting to learn about the interpolation logic that X-Plane does.
Keith Smith
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by Keith Smith »

Nice work there. The question then becomes, should I change the plugin code to fetch the latest weather and save it to the METAR.rwx file, or should I change the scope to fetch slightly older weather, matching the algorithm that XP uses for fetching its weather today?
Peter Grey
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by Peter Grey »

Id say match the pilot software to the real world stuff, that will allow us to more accurately use other weather resources (airmets, pireps) etc. from the real world in the future.
Peter Grey
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c.b.powell
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by c.b.powell »

Keith Smith wrote:Nice work there. The question then becomes, should I change the plugin code to fetch the latest weather and save it to the METAR.rwx file, or should I change the scope to fetch slightly older weather, matching the algorithm that XP uses for fetching its weather today?
If I understand you correctly, you're proposing introducing a weather-fetching algorithm into the PE plugin that overrides X-Plane. That is certainly welcome, provided this change is relatively simple -- otherwise you probably should be spending your dev resources on higher priorities. XP10 is (supposedly) being released in the next 4-8 weeks, after all. (So they allege.)

But no, I don't think you should deliberately break your scope code to work around this X-Plane bug.
Keith Smith
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by Keith Smith »

Thanks Chris,

Trust me, this wasn't going to happen any time soon :) While the imminent release of XP10 is great news (if that actually happens), I'll have to support xp9 in a commercial setting for a very, very long time. It costs thousands of dollars to upgrade a multi-system commercial xplane installation. Many users won't do that and will simply stick with 9 for years to come. I visited a flight school last summer that was using an XP6 installation, they just didn't wanna pay to upgrade.

Your fix is great, Chris, but cron is not an option for non-tech people to work with. I'd have to implement it in the plugin instead. It wouldn't override the weather, as such, it would just do the fetching of the metar.rwx file instead of having xplane do it, and it would do it using an algorithm that matches what you're doing or what we're doing on the scope.

Keith
c.b.powell
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by c.b.powell »

Keith Smith wrote:Thanks Chris,

Trust me, this wasn't going to happen any time soon :) While the imminent release of XP10 is great news (if that actually happens), I'll have to support xp9 in a commercial setting for a very, very long time. It costs thousands of dollars to upgrade a multi-system commercial xplane installation. Many users won't do that and will simply stick with 9 for years to come. I visited a flight school last summer that was using an XP6 installation, they just didn't wanna pay to upgrade.
Interesting. I forgot, of course, that there's a whole installed base of commercial XP licenses as you describe.
Keith Smith wrote: Your fix is great, Chris, but cron is not an option for non-tech people to work with. I'd have to implement it in the plugin instead. It wouldn't override the weather, as such, it would just do the fetching of the metar.rwx file instead of having xplane do it, and it would do it using an algorithm that matches what you're doing or what we're doing on the scope.
Heh, you're generous to call it a "fix" - the kindest appellation it deserves is "ugly hack." All it does is serve as a nice proof-of-concept that also tidies up the flying a bit for me.
Daddy O
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by Daddy O »

I'd suggest using the plugin to synchronize the network with the simulators. Who cares if the weather is a little stale, so long as it is the same across the board. That way pilots are dialing in a worthwhile altimeter setting and landing into the wind (provided they were using real weather.) When there ia a 300 foot ceiling, no one wants to have their altimeter off by 150 feet.

Kieth; you mentioned setting the weather download to 1-2 minutes. Did you notice any system resource issues? I had dialed mine back to 30 minutes because it seemed like in heavy weather I was getting hit with weather reloads all the time

It would be kind of cool if PE could control weather on the individual simulators. You could have days where everyone flew in really bad weather. As a training platform that may be of interest. To heck with those stupid IFR hoods, just put everhyone in some hardball IFR weather. The San Fran area is supposed to be known for the fogbanks that roll in. Pilots either have to find a hole in the clouds, or shoot an IFR approach.
Eugene Zaporozhets
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by Eugene Zaporozhets »

+1 for real time weather here. I like to look it up on skyvector before a flight, would be cool to have it match what's in the sim.
Tim Krajcar
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Re: Weather and XP9

Post by Tim Krajcar »

So, my two cents on this:

It should Just Work for pilots. If there's a possibility that the plugin can override the sim's weather settings altogether, that would absolutely be best, of course.
Failing that, as easy as possible is good. If the plugin can pull METAR.RWX from the same source that the ATCs see, and all pilots have to do is configure XP to go see the file, then that's "good".

And we should definitely stay real-synced. One thing that I have been in the habit of doing for awhile now is looking up phone numbers of airport's ASOS on airnav.com and calling on my phone and getting the real-world ATIS. This gives you runway or taxiway closures, braking action reports, and a whole mess of things that are unlikely to be in an auto-generated ATIS (plus I still am having issues getting auto-ATIS from XP), not to mention it's pretty damn cool and injects a whole lot of realism! If we're on real-time (or near-) weather, then that info is perfectly valid and usable on the network. :mrgreen:
Tim Krajcar
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