> But if this thunderstorm looks exactly the same from different angles is > not that important in case there IS a thunderstorm probably. Sharing the > center position, pressure, movement, winds and probably cloud density > over network is sufficient, in case this data could be shared in > metar-like system somehow. > AFAIK fg can get metars, probably some simple > weather situation can be shared trough artificial metars? So another > dumb question, advanced weather is not writing metars, is it? Or more > general question, does advanced weather in general deal with metars or > is this something that is only used with basic weather?
Advanced Weather can parse METAR info and translate it into a weather situation. But the METAR format doesn't include position info on a storm center, a METAR report will provide you the information that there is a thunderstorm somewhere in the vicinity of a weather station, but that's about it. Advanced Weather is not writing METAR info - admittedly I never saw the point why this would be useful, although in theory it could - internally it has all the info needed to assemble a METAR string, so we could generate METAR strings based on the offline weather engine and let airports report those if we like. Advanced Weather manages weather in discrete 40x40 km tiles. A tile has a high level representation (like 'high pressure') as long as it's not generated, when it becomes generated that info is fleshed out, it gets values for pressure, temperature, wind, visibility, light absorption of the atmosphere,... and it gets a large array of all clouds in the tile. The position of any cloud in the tile, specifically also a storm, is generated randomly inside the tile. Dependent on what accuracy you need, there are various options. From simple to complicated: * Simply feeding a METAR string reporting thunderstorms will generate multiple cells of thunderstorms - from the time on when you feed the new string, all subsequent tiles will generate storms till a new report comes in. In this way, you can generate roughly the same weather for all planes approaching a location, but your target region is 100 km sized or so, because you can't precisely control when tiles are built, as this depends on what visibility settings the various MP clients run locally. This should work out of the box. * A more advanced option is to instruct the tile manager to build a special tile when the tile center is close to a pre-defined location. This would allow you to place a storm somewhere in a 40x40 area, but two MP clients might see it in different locations inside this area. This requires ~20 lines of Nasal inserted into the tile manager, including the code which passes the location at which the storm is supposed to appear. * A low level Nasal call like local_weather.create_medium_thunderstorm = func(lat, lon, alt, alpha); will immediately place you a storm at a given location. If Advanced Weather is currently running, all the goodies like turbulence and reduced visibility will work alongside and the storm will drift in the wind. If it isn't running, all you get are the clouds. So there's a simple-to-call function to place a storm at a precise location, but you'd have to write the management structure around it - how is it called, how is it removed, ...? That's probably a few hundred lines of Nasal. * The most advanced option is to do exact synchronization over the MP protocol by exchanging random seeds between clients. That's not so much additional Nasal, maybe a few hundred lines, but requires changes in other places as well. Since I'm not sure what exactly you want to do, I can't really tell you what the best option is. Cheers, * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
