weather

[piper007]

  hello all  was just wondering if in the weather part of fs host i can add new weather theams or not?  i was able to download and install some new weather for fs2004 and was wondering if i can get it to work in fshost??

piper007

[Russell Gilbert]

At the moment, you'll need to create your weather pattern manually, and then re-create it later if you change things.  But I hope to have it be able to save patterns to a file, so you could save and reload them, or share them with other people -- hopefully in a future version.

Russell

[Thr0tt]

Ohhh could you add a FSMetar for real world updates as I currently use that on FS9 which is pretty good.

That would make the weather thing great especially forcing it to others.

I think the idea of a server actually serving and pumping out how the world should look is the way it should be so weather (real world) somehow connetced to FSMetar would be really cool.

Keep up the good work.

[jonf]

The problem is that right now only one weather pattern can be sent to all the pilots and you can't send different weather to different people which is what you need to be able to do for real world weather. If your flying in NY and someone else on the same server is at YSSY then their weather should be different but FSHost can only send the same weather to each person. Once FSHost can hold each players weather in an array so each pilot can have his own weather then real-world weather for FSHost will follow immediately afterward! (I can see to that )

[Thr0tt]

The only issue remaining then (if you can sort that out) is the st00pid directx locking out out other player when one person with a router not configured right joins but I guess I need to speak to BillG to sort that one.

Still, great program, and I use the add-on weather program which can change the weather on each machine to the same but not real world which would be groovy.

FS10 to use normal network connectivity lets hope

[CowBoyGuy]

I put together a weather-push script, and it works great pulling METAR data for the local airport, and Winds Aloft data where available. There are some issues with calculating cloud cover, and a few other things you just can't get from a METAR. Also, it is rather abrupt if the NOAA weather isn't available or accessed for a period of time, and then becomes available again. I also had to add an alternate page that allowed my admins to activate/deactivate the push process.

The issue of pushing different weather to different users is still there, but I run 3 sessions, Baltimore (Weather from KFDK/EMI) and Boston (KBOS/BOS) have real weather, and San Francisco has default Clear Skies for those that don't want bad weather.

I recently added an automated command update that will allow the METAR message to be retrieved when a user enters "?wx" into the chat window.

All the data collection is done on a Linux server running wget commands, and parsing the results. Then, URLs are build to act as if I were opening the actual session web pages and typing in the data. I'm happy to share it if any one wants to look at it and improve it.

[speedpig001]

That sounds exactly what we need.
I'm sure most people would only run one session though.

[CowBoyGuy]

Did a little cleaning up based on a request from someone else for a copy. I've zip/jar-ed it up for your pleasure. Here's the response I sent via email to the other request
" Is it possible for me to get a copy please?":
Short answer first... yes, you can have a copy, and you can direct it to pull METAR from wherever you want.

The long answers... It's written in perl, so you can edit the calls to pull METAR from where you would like. I use the site adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov and have had to recently customize the script to handle some changes to that site. The typical METAR line is parsed with  some assumptions to calculations, and anything after RMK is dropped as it is less than obvious what to do with that information. There is a default string from my Local airport with METAR reports, so if/when I fail to pull real weather, it still runs the update to the site(s).

I wrote this to be as functional as possible, and once it is set up, a second set of scripts (written in PHP) allow FSHost Admins to add their sessions, Change which METAR and Winds Aloft values to use, and [de]activate the push. The FSHost Admin ID and Password are used in this script to initiate the pushes, and will be used by the first script.

I run this all on a Linux box, running Red Hat 8 with perl, php, apache 2, and other basic stuff. It would no doubt need some clean-up for other systems.

Pick it up from http://68.55.129.14/FSHost/addons/

The whole thing is in ./PushFSHWeather.zip
The README is ./PushFSHWeather.txt

have fun!