In Need of a Good Weather Program

[BonanzaDude]

I've been trying to make my way around the X-Plane scene and have been offered some great help. The one thing that I am really having issues with is a good weather program for X-Plane. Several times I have moved my aircraft to different location where I know the weather was bad. Mainly Friday night locally our high school football game was delayed for over an hour becuase of heavy rain and lightning. I went home, loaded the sim and moved my aircraft to KIOW. No rain and no overcast using the default weather in X-Plane. I also tried EFASS Ultra WX and it was very questionable as well.

Help please,
John

[zengei]

Give Joan's NOAA Weather a try.

[Kyle.Sanders]

Give Joan's NOAA Weather a try.

+1

[Keith Smith]

If you move to plugin-based weather, you're going to lose one of the most unique elements of X-Plane's native weather engine, which is the concept of having different weather in different places.

Plugins are not able to set different weather for different airports simultaneously AFAIK (please correct me if the SDK now allows this, but I certainly haven't seen it in the past). I've had flights where I've taken off in VFR conditions and have been able to see clouds IN THE DISTANCE and have made decisions based on those observations (just like flying r/w). Most sims don't allows this, they simply have one set of weather loaded up for the entire world at any given time. Now, that weather might have many layers, but still, it's the same weather here as it is 20 miles from here.

X-Plane's native weather works by pulling the METARs for every airport and then building a composite picture based on that data. If you were at your home airport and it was pulling weather that was totally incorrect, the most likely cause is the fact that X-Plane tends to request weather from NOAA which is about an hour old rather than the absolute latest weather. This is because each weather station receives its data at different times during the hour, so to be sure that you actually get some data back, the sim requests information which is a little older.

[Keith Smith]

Also, the next minor update to X-Plane (already in beta, I believe) is going to contain more accurate winds aloft.

[BonanzaDude]

Give Joan's NOAA Weather a try.

I was thinking that I tried that and it disabled my Real Terra Haze script.

John

[zengei]

Plugins are not able to set different weather for different airports simultaneously AFAIK (please correct me if the SDK now allows this, but I certainly haven't seen it in the past). I've had flights where I've taken off in VFR conditions and have been able to see clouds IN THE DISTANCE and have made decisions based on those observations (just like flying r/w). Most sims don't allows this, they simply have one set of weather loaded up for the entire world at any given time. Now, that weather might have many layers, but still, it's the same weather here as it is 20 miles from here.

I believe that's still true, but I find it an acceptable trade-off for the interpolation that Joan's plugin provides. Many a time with X-Plane's native weather was I flying VFR only to suddenly end up in IMC because the weather decided to update abruptly.

[Keith Smith]

I hear ya. You can change it so that it's not updating every hour if you like.

[BonanzaDude]

I installed the Terra Haze program and I am getting the following error when starting X-Plane. This is the at the end of my log.txt file in the X-Plane root directory.

FlyWithLua Debug Info: The Lua stack contains the following elements:
Resources/plugins/FlyWithLua/Scripts/RTH.lua 'for' limit must be a number
FlyWithLua Debug Info: Debug file written to "<<x-plane dir>>/FlyWithLua_Debug.txt".

Thanks,
John

[wmburns]

In case it matters, what version of FlyWithLua are you using? From what I can tell 2.4.1 is the latest.

FlyWithLua for XP9 and XP10 2.4.1 (win, lin, mac)

Were there any customizing steps required to install the script? I could see a case of a non-numeric character in a configuration file causing this.