MutleysHangar.com +
by John Allard
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Back to Basics is a regular monthly feature in the Ocala Flight Sim Club newsletter, the Gosport. B2B first appeared in the April 2011 issue and is ongoing. This article is from that series, re-posted here.
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A primary factor in real-world flying is weather – it might not be an exaggeration to say it’s the most important factor. It certainly ranks as one of the most important, at very least. In Flight Simulator flying we’re fortunate to have the capability to control the WX – eat your hearts out, RW pilots. We can have it as nice or as nasty as we like, whenever and wherever we like. If you’re just drilling holes in the sky and enjoying the scenery you can have bright sun and severe clear wherever you go. If you want to practice flying an ILS to minimums you can set that up with equal ease, at any airport you like – or at all of them. Possibly the most popular option is to do what we do in so many other areas of FS, and that’s to just emulate what the RW pilots do. In that case we have an option to turn on real-world weather and take what we get, just like the guys who are actually getting paid to do this have to.
In exploring this topic in FS9 and FSX I was not surprised to find out that there is very little that differs between the two versions of the sim. Aside from cosmetics, I literally only found two substantive differences and those are pretty minor. One is a rate of change slider in FS9 that is absent in FSX; the other is the ability to specify visibility layers for user-defined WX in FSX, while FS9 is limited to a single layer. I found nothing else that differed between the two besides screen cosmetics and a few minor nomenclature differences, e.g. “low” vs. “light”, etc. I will use pairs of screen shots throughout, one each from FS9 and FSX.
WX options in FS are invoked from the top-line menu…
Accessing the WX Screens
The Main FS WX Screen
This takes us to the main WX screen where the four basic choices of FS WX are available to us. Those are indicated by the four Radio Buttons along the left edge – they are…
• Weather Themes
• Real-world Weather (static)
• Real-world Weather (updated every 15 minutes)
• User-defined Weather
For the first three options, we need go no further into the dialog boxes than this point. If you’re looking for a simple way to set WX in FS just choose one of the first three Radio Buttons and go no deeper. All the complexity of FS WX is in that last choice.
The Weather Themes option from the first Radio Button presents the user with a list box of about ten general WX descriptions. You may notice that a payware AC has added an extra choice related to a tutorial for the aircraft to my list of FS9 options. Judging from that, it must be possible to edit the list, but I’ve never done it manually and it’s well beyond the scope of where I will go with this article.
So, in a word, for Weather Themes click the top radio button, choose your poison from the list and press OK. You’ll be back in the cockpit and your FS world’s WX will conform to the general description you’ve chosen. It could hardly be more simple. You may encounter some variability in the WX but not much – you will find it to mostly be as the theme name suggests.
I’ll cover the next two options in a single description, since they are so similar. This pair of options is for the use of RW Weather. If you fly with an Internet connection open you may use either of these options. They are nearly identical.
Microsoft provides a link to a set of servers from which FS gets actual, current weather data for thousands of reporting stations world-wide. Wherever you happen to place yourself in FS, if one of the two RW WX Radio Buttons is pressed and the servers can be accessed successfully, FS will load that set of weather conditions into the sim engine and that’s what you’ll encounter when flying. Temperatures, dew points, wind speed and direction, gust velocity, winds aloft, precipitation type and severity, cloud types and heights, visibility, even turbulence and icing conditions will be replicated as accurately as FS and your graphics card can manage.
The sole difference between the two Radio Button selections is that one provides static WX, i.e. a one-time fetch from the servers and the other revisits the WX servers every quarter-hour to update the weather you’re seeing. It’s worth noting too that WX updates the user receives in FS, e.g. from ATIS, AWOS, ASOS or FSS radio frequencies, from the local control tower, from the Shft-Z top line text information, even from the FS windsock, will all reflect those conditions. You will find the real world and the FS world to be in reasonable synchronization.
NOTE: There are a few payware add-on WX applications available that enhance the WX in FS9 and/or FSX. In order to use them, the FSX WX should be set for one of the two Real-world weather options. The add-on programs then use their own graphics to provide better weather images and effects and some of them direct FS to their own weather servers instead of the ones that default Microsoft FS WX would use, usually providing more and better WX coverage.
I must mention that the time-of-day settings and the WX in FS are independent. If you turn on RW WX in Florida in the middle of the day (real time) and choose to set the sim time to 0200, you will get the current daytime WX conditions. That may be unrealistically warm for nighttime flying but that’s the way it works in FS.
The final radio button on the Main FS WX screen is the most complex of the options. That one is labeled “User-defined weather” and opens up the next dialog box which presents more options and choices.
Selecting the User-defined weather button from the Main FS WX screen un-grays the “Customize Weather” button at the bottom. There is a minor difference to note here between the versions, The FS9 screen has a “Rate of change” slider at the bottom of the dialog box; the corresponding FSX screen does not.
If you choose User-defined WX, press the “Customize Weather” button (simply “Customize” for FSX) at the bottom to reveal the next FS WX dialog box.
Weather Scope and General Setting Screen
This box has three Radio Buttons at the top for the user to choose the scope of the User-defined WX. The first is a global setting – if pressed, WX everywhere will be the same – as specified by the user.
The second and third Radio Buttons permit setting different WX at different stations, which are identified by using the Choose Station button. Note that only places that FS recognizes as valid WX stations can be chosen. They can be identified on the map with a green symbol similar to an hour-glass; the “W” button at the top must be on (green) for them to show. You may select and set WX individually for any number of stations.
The four sliders and the wind rose at the lower right are for general WX setting of the applicable parameters. The user can set cloud coverage, precipitation, visibility and wind speed with the sliders. The rose sets wind direction, either by dragging the red pointer around the rose with the mouse or incrementing it with the up/down cursor keys.
If these options provide sufficient detail and precision for the user, he need not go further. Pressing OK to leave this screen locks in the choices made. If, however, the user wishes to make the weather settings in even more detail, there’s another level.
The next (and final) dialog box is the most complex. It has four tabs, and each tab still contains the three “WX Scope” Radio Buttons that were on the previous dialog box. Their operation on this dialog box is identical to the previous one. Using these Radio Button options the user can set the detailed WX conditions globally or with different conditions for different WX stations.
NOTE: For most FS users, most of the time, it will be unnecessarily laborious to delve this deeply into the bowels of WX setting, particularly with different settings for different locations. It seems that this would not be useful unless there is a very specific set of conditions that the user wishes to model for his own flying, or as a challenge for others. Barring that, the functionality documented to this point in the article is probably more than sufficient for most people, most of the time. Read on if you have the fortitude. What follows is relatively short and repetitious since the only things that change across the four tabs are the specific parameters that can be set.
Weather Scope and Detailed Setting Screen – Clouds
The first tab, labeled Clouds, permits detailed setting of type, coverage, tops and bases, turbulence, icing and precipitation. Note the four buttons above the graph. The left-most pair zoom the graph in and out. The right-hand pair allow for adding (or removing) various cloud layers with different parameters for each. Clicking on a layer makes that the active layer for editing parameters.
Weather Scope and Detailed Setting Screen – Wind
The second tab, labeled Wind, allows detailed setting of wind speed, direction, gusts, turbulence and shear strength, with the same buttons and capability for zooming the graph and setting wind layers that the Clouds tab had.
Weather Scope and Detailed Setting Screen – Temp/Pressure
The next tab - the third, which is labeled Temp/Pressure, gives the user the means for detailed setting of temperature, dew point and barometric pressure, including the same capability for zooming the graph and setting various layers that the previous two tabs had.
Weather Scope and Detailed Setting Screen – Visibility
The last tab on this dialog box, labeled Visibility, provides the means for detailed setting of that property of the FS environment. The only parameters are for tops and bases and a slider for the actual visibility distance. Note that in this case, the buttons for adding and deleting additional layers are absent from the FS9 screen, but are still included in that for FSX. In FS9 only one visibility layer may be defined.
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[i]This regular monthly feature will focus on some of the more basic topics of Flight Sim flying. Suggestions for topics are appreciated – e-mail John Allard at allardjd@earthlink.net[/]
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