weather

[IBT853]

usually i spend about an hour after work to create flight plans for the fshost i run. i usually run low or no viz ILS aprroach.it's not the flight plans that take the time, but finding low viz real weather around the world is time consuming even though i use severel different weather services for information. what would be cool ? if there was a forced weather application that the host could use to create a low viz or storm enviroment for all players connecting.maybe , just maybe fsuipc would be incorporated somehow. i haven't a clue how to do it. but maybe we can find someone who knows. hhmmm  russell knows

[CowBoyGuy]

I second that notion. If it can be done, forcing a cingle weather pattern (and time of day) on the whole gang makes sense. What would happen if I have 50mph winds from the north and player B has 50 from the south.... could make for some interesting pattern work...

I wonder if you could also put the instructor stuff into FSHost - imagine taking out engins and wheels and such on a group of student pilots....

BTW - Thanks for everything Russ.

[Russell Gilbert]

This is a great feature, and one that I've thought about many times myself.

As I see it, there are two ways to do the weather.  One is to get real world weather from an external source, similar to the way the FS weather programs do it.  The other is to create a new screen in FSHost where the admin can manually setup the weather for all players (or individual players, or particular geographic regions, if we want to really get crazy here).

With real world weather, FSHost needs to do basically the same thing all of the other weather programs do.  Pull down the info from a web (or ftp) site,  manipulate the data somehow (this is where I get lost), and then send messages to the game.  And when the weather programs send messages to the game, they use FSUIPC, and talk directly to FS, which is running on the same machine.  In FSHost, it's not able to use FSUIPC because it's obviously not on the same machine as each player's FS, so it has to send the weather info in game messages, across the internet.

Now, I talked breifly with one of the guys that wrote one of these weather programs, and we discussed the idea of trying to get our two programs to work together.  Unfortunately we haven't really gotten far enough to know if that will even work, but I think it's still a possibility somewhere down the road.

The other option is for the FSHost admin to setup the weather manually, just like you can do inside your own FS, but with a new screen inside FSHost.  In this case, FSHost would send weather messages across the internet to each player's FS, and they would set themselves to use that weather.  I can tell you that I've had some success with this actually, and have been able to send a weather message to another machine and that machine did change its weather immediately (a nice thick fog :-) )

Both options (real wx or manual) require quite a bit of work.  But the manual option probably only requires work from me, which is always easier than trying to coordinate between two people and two programs.

So I put it to you guys...  what would you think about having a way to manually setup the weather, and then have FSHost send that to all players?  My idea is that it would send it to all current players in the game, as well as any new ones that joined later (similar to how the date/time feature works).  We could also have an option to re-send the weather to players every X minutes, to keep people from cheating and clearing their weather.  (Unfortunately there's not a way for FSHost to know what kind of weather a player has -- that requires FSUIPC, talking directly to FS on the same machine)  I would probably start by just having a way to set global weather, so everyone in the game would see the same weather regardless of where they were.

And I can also tell you that sending failure messages to players is exactly the same as sending weather messages.  So it's also possible for FSHost to have an interface where the admin could send an engine failure message to a particular player, or whatever you can do in Flight Instructor (but maybe without the fancy graphs).

The only catch is that with 2004 about to come out, I'm slightly hesitant to add major features without knowing if they'll work with 2004 also.  My understanding is that 2004 will have more advanced weather, but I don't know if that means it'll just draw prettier clouds, of if they're going to change all the weather messages as well.  Maybe someone that has the beta can tell us if they've made significant changes to the weather interface.

So let's hear it guys, whad'ya think?  :-)

Russell

[IBT853]

russell, i think you have a good wait and see idea. since century of flight(fs2004) is coming out at the end of next month, it would be a shame for you to put a bunch of hours in fshost for wx only to not have it work in the next flight sim. i think we can wait  

[Dondo]

Weather and failures would be fantastic.  I host a FSHost session 24 hours a day for a virtual airline, www.pierglass.com, if anyone is interested.  

FSHost is a godsend.  Such a cool program.  I'm looking forward to even fancier versions!

 

Dondo

[jsvw2001]

Weather would be a great feature! I would prefer the manual input method via the Admin.

Thanks again for a great program.

Johan

[CowBoyGuy]

Manual entry is nice, but with a 24x7 unmanned server, it would get stale.

IF you could build the weather push.... would it be possible for the real world programs to feed FSHost? That might make it a two stage project, first manual, then automate.

Eitherway- I'd say hold off on the major changes until someone can give you some insight to the new release...

(and something evil inside is excited about shutting off power to unsuspecting engines )

[CP44]

Ok, weather... I forgot that wasn't included in FSHost.
I think we need it, though... would be a great thing, especially if we could send weather and failures from web pages as well as the main program.  These would be great things to add right after the Date/Time tab, even if they don't work in FS2004.

[PeterR]

I concur. Weather is definitely needed. If automatic updates will take a lot of work to add, then start with manual for now. At least we'll be able to insure the same weather experience for everyone during events such as fly-ins.

FS2004 supports manual weather and downloaded weather as before. In addition it has a weather engine to change the weather over time. It's fun just sitting on the tarmac and watching the clouds go by.   A new feature of manual weather creation is that you can specify weather at specific stations. As a result, you can map out different weather along your planned route. You can check out a couple screenshots of the weather dialogs in my FS2004 Preview article.

[Russell Gilbert]

It's nice to see that they've changed the way weather is set for individual stations vs. the whole world.  One of the screwy things I noticed while looking into how to do weather in FSHost was that when you're setting manual weather in FS2002, some of the changes are global, and some are local, and it's not clear as to which are which.  For example, the global wind is not the same as the wind layers you create manually.  But global clouds are the same as the first clould layer you create manually, and global visibility is the same as the local visibility layer (which you can only have one of).

Russell

[Russell Gilbert]

I should also add that since the weather is different in 2004, I'll be waiting for it to come out before tackling the weather feature.  If we get lucky, the changes won't be too significant, and I can build a system that works for 2002 as well.  However, just like general support for 2004, weather support will also require that Microsoft release the Multiplayer SDK, which they've yet to do.

Russell

[PeterR]

Yeah, definitely need the SDKs. Hopefully, they'll be out soon after, if not with, the product.

[jonf]

What about reporting the users wind speed and direction in their log. This will help with races to make sure people are using the proper weather files and prevents people from creating a tailwind when they shouldn't have one.

[Russell Gilbert]

Hi Jon,

Unfortunately FSHost isn't able to read the weather settings from FS2002.  It can only do things that are in the Multiplayer game protocol, and usually that's just sending data to FS2002, rather than getting data from it.  FSUIPC is able to do that because it's a DLL running on the same machine, but FSHost has to rely on game messages over the net.

Russell

[cb-mex01]

Hi Gilbert, hi all,

if I read the thread it all comes down to one thing:
Everybody is interested in having weather in multiplayer.

Now a suggestion from me:
run something like fsuic.dll to fshost and than let fsmetar or ANY other weathertool run on the same machine as fshost.
Weatherconditions are now send to fshost and fshost can adress these to the clients.
Examble:
pilot1 is at KAHF and pilot2 is at EDDK:
FSHOST now says FSMetar "give me weather for EDDK"
FSMetar loads EDDK and sends it to FSHost.
FSHost now sends this package to Pilot2
next FSHost says "give me weather for KAHF.
FSMetar loads KHAF and sends it to FSHost.
FSHost now sends this package to Pilot1.

This comes to the solution, that a "small" Client has to run on all FSHOST-Pilots machines, which gets the weather from the FSHOST and sends it to local FS.

It could be like this:
FSHOST creates a folder/file for each pilot.
In this folder/file are ALL parameters for this specified pilot stored.
The client now downloads this file every 30 seconds and sends this to local FS.

Hmm... I hope this isn't to much  

grts

CB

[CP44]

I thought Russell said FSHost can send the weather, though?  That would mean the only thing we'd need is an updated FSHost and another small program for FSHost to get real weather from.  With that program off or disabled in FSHost, then manual weather settings would work... sounds right to me  .

[Russell Gilbert]

I said I was able to get FSHost to send one weather packet (a thick fog) to a player and it worked.  That's a long way from being able to manually setup any weather you want :-)

It'll take a lot of work to even do it manually, and then a lot more to make it work with real weather.  Most likely I won't spend a lot more time with this until MS releases the multiplayer docs for FS2004, and I can see how much it's changed, and whether I can support both versions or not.  When I was trying to get that one weather packet to work, it took me several hours because there was a mistake in the docs for 2002.  I'm hopeful the docs for 2004 are a bit more accurate, but I'm not holding my breath.

(However, the idea of sending a thick fog to a particular player, such as during their final approach, might be interesting ;-) )

Russell

[Ace]

It would be a nice idea for the fs 2002, i donno if i, gonna get fs 2004, but im gonna just see what happens.  But with that manuel weather, you could be an evil host and play tricks on people (put 100 mph headwinds and fog on a newb trying to land).  That could ruin the game altogether. But be Horribly Funny to watch!

[PeterR]

Weather "weapons" could be an effective means of dealing with problematic players.

Warning: Misbehaving on this server could result in your aircraft being permanently shrouded in dense fog.

 

[jonf]

I love it! Why get mad when you can get even  

[Ace]

I love it! Why get mad when you can get even  

Plus you can have some fun while you are at it MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!