Side effects on thermals

[funkyp]

Hi Pete,

I've just tried out the new 4.168 with the wind smoothing. It appears, that the updating of the weather stations interrupts FSX' internal thermal engine.

The effect is, that all the thermal visuals disappear, and so does the lift. About 10 seconds after removing the checkmark "Allow to change FS own weather", the visuals reappear. Then the lift gradually ramps up again over another 10 s. Because FSUIPC makes an update every 2 seconds, thermals will never appear, unless that FSX WX changes are disabled.

The same problem I discovered with FSINN 1.3. I think I read soemthing, that it does it in a similar way, by tweaking the nearby WX stations. There you can prolong the interval to 300 seconds, still producing a highly unrealistic effect.

The internal thermal engine of FSX obviously checks the current weather conditions to a certain extent and decides then if thermals are being produced or not. Apparently, there is no gradual influence, it's just yes or no. It seems that after an update to the WX stations, the existing thermal situation is discarded entirely, and then rebuilt.

regards,

Peter

[Pete Dowson]

I've just tried out the new 4.168 with the wind smoothing. It appears, that the updating of the weather stations interrupts FSX' internal thermal engine.

The effect is, that all the thermal visuals disappear, and so does the lift. About 10 seconds after removing the checkmark "Allow to change FS own weather", the visuals reappear. Then the lift gradually ramps up again over another 10 s. Because FSUIPC makes an update every 2 seconds, thermals will never appear, unless that FSX WX changes are disabled.

All FSUIPC is doing, like any weather control program, is setting the weather using the official weather-setting facilities offered by FSX in SimConnect. There is nothing in those facilities for enabling or controlling or preserving thermals.

The same problem I discovered with FSINN 1.3. I think I read soemthing, that it does it in a similar way, by tweaking the nearby WX stations. There you can prolong the interval to 300 seconds, still producing a highly unrealistic effect.

I expect the same may occur with ActiveSky, then, unless you told it not to do any updates.

You can prolong the refresh interval in FSUIPC4 by changing the factor from 2 up to 30, which currently would be 2 to 20 seconds -- not for each WX station, as there are 10 including the Global standby. So with 2 as the factor it takes 20 seconds for a cycle. With 30 it would take a 300, like FSInn.

After SP2 is installed (when released), the factor will mean 2 = 1 second per update, so both these intervals halve (though this will only be after installing the appropriate FSUIPC4 update.

The internal thermal engine of FSX obviously checks the current weather conditions to a certain extent and decides then if thermals are being produced or not. Apparently, there is no gradual influence, it's just yes or no. It seems that after an update to the WX stations, the existing thermal situation is discarded entirely, and then rebuilt.

That's a pity. This means that any attempt to do much with the weather will defeat thermals. Looks like glider fans will have to avoid such things-- but then, for gliding, you aren't likely to need wind smoothing so much, are you? It's airliners, flying at high altitude over long distances that are suffering.

Regards

Pete

[funkyp]

I may well be, that thermals created programmatically are not affected, I will give it a try soon. It looks also, that missions and external weather "corrections" might be mutually exclusive. In that case the mission thermals may be unaffected, too,though not really being a substitute for a thermal simulation.

So hopefully, it's only the built-in thermal engine, which isn't of much use anyway (because it usually doesn't fit to the rest of the weather).

regards,

Peter