Hi All, Thorsten R. and I have been discussing off-list how we can bring the global and local weather systems closer together. While they have very different implementations, it should be possible to unify at least part of the UI and configuration models to provide a more consistent end-user experience.
The aim is to have a single high level weather dialog that is used to configure both global and local weather, with implementation-specific dialogs accessible for tweaking particular settings. Hopefully 90% of users will only need this high level dialog, while the 10% wanting to configure specific cloud layers etc. can still do so. To do this, I'm planning to add an optional local weather tile name to the existing global weather scenario entries defined in data/Environment/environment.xml. This means a weather scenario can be used by both global and local weather. Note that local weather can already handle an arbitrary METAR string if no tile definition is available so there's no compatibility issue for those adding additional weather scenarios. A work in progress UI can be seen here can be seen here: http://www.nanjika.co.uk/flightgear/weather.png Notes - The Weather Conditions dropdown contains a full list of the weather scenarios. I anticipate some consolidation/renaming of the weather scenarios. - The radio buttons allow the user to select between global and local weather. I'm still working on the wording of the radio buttons. - Pressing OK or Apply changes the weather mode and restarts local weather as required. Local weather start-up performance is now good enough that we can stop/start it implicitly rather than having separate Start and End buttons. - The Customize buttons will got to specific settings for global and local weather settings as appropriate, and are disabled/enabled depending on weather mode. In the global weather case, this will allow configuration of specific cloud layers and winds aloft, as per the existing Weather dialog. For local weather, this will allow configuration of most of the existing settings in the Advanced Weather dialog. - It's not clear where environmental settings such as the snow level should live. There may be value in having an Environment Setting dialog for these. Comments are welcome as always. -Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
