FSUIPC and Weather Themes

[mattford4]

Pete-

I would love to see an added function that would allow access to the Weather themes listed in FS2004.

Any chance of that?

Thanks,

Matt

[Pete Dowson]

I would love to see an added function that would allow access to the Weather themes listed in FS2004.

I thought FS2004 provided you that access? What else could you want? Sorry, I'm nissibg something here.

Pete

[mattford4]

Hi, Pete-

What I'm looking to do is to remotely select weather themes via FSUIPC. Right now from my instructor station, I have to dial in all of the specific variables, (cloud cover, etc) to get the weather situation I want

With people like Weather Maker Pro generating these great weather themes, it would be nice for me to access a drop down menu on my instructor station that allows me to remotely select the weather environment without having to hop into the cockpit and select it myself.

Make sense?

Hope you're well and thanks!

Matt

[Pete Dowson]

What I'm looking to do is to remotely select weather themes via FSUIPC. Right now from my instructor station, I have to dial in all of the specific variables, (cloud cover, etc) to get the weather situation I want

Aren't there some third party programs that can do that -- set up complete weather situations based on a theme?

The FS2004 "themes" are a different thing altogether. They are programmed in some new format for FS to load. I have no idea how they work at all I'm afraid.

With people like Weather Maker Pro generating these great weather themes, it would be nice for me to access a drop down menu on my instructor station that allows me to remotely select the weather environment without having to hop into the cockpit and select it myself.

Ahthat must be one of the 3rd party programs I meant. Can't that be run from your instructor station?

I don't really think FSUIPC should get involved in actually creating weather.

Regards,

Pete

[mattford4]

Pete-

I agree that FSUIPC should not get involved in making weather.

All I am asking is that FSUIPC have an offset whereby you can view the list of existing weather scenarios on the FS machine and another offset whereby you can launch one of those weather scenarios.

If you're not sure how to do it, no problem, but I had to ask :-).

Thanks,

Matt

[Pete Dowson]

All I am asking is that FSUIPC have an offset whereby you can view the list of existing weather scenarios on the FS machine and another offset whereby you can launch one of those weather scenarios.

If you're not sure how to do it, no problem, but I had to ask :-).

Well, short of writing a separate program to read the FS menus and reproduce them on a client PC, and be able to impose the correct keystrokes to active the selections made remotely afterwards, no, I've no idea. I can see that possibly a remote menu system could be devised, but it is a rather substantial project and certainly outside what I would consider the realms of fSUIPC. In fact it would probably need to be a separate EXE in both the FS PC and Client PC in any case, just using spare offsets to communicate -- FSUIPC cannot handle FS menus because it is effectively not running when the menus are in operation. A separate program sending the keystrokes directly to FS is not so inhibited.

If you rather meant somehow finding a handy procedure someplace inside FS which loads a specified Weather Theme just by calling it with the filename as parameter, much like the one I do know of to load a flight, then, sorry, but that would involve a lot of work disassembling and analysing yet more FS code, something which takes many hours and may prove useless even then. I just don't have time to consider such things at present.

Determining the filenames of possible weather themes you could load can of course be done directly by you -- just look in the FS folder "Weather\Themes". The files are those with the .wtb filetype, but the .wt ones contain the titles and descriptions for the menu. The BMPs are simply for display only. I think there's also an official Weather Themes SDK from MS which you may find useful.

Regards,

Pete

[mattford4]

Okay, Pete thanks!

Matt