Problems with setting weather in FS2004

[Andi1982]

Hi Pete,

we have once some some problems with setting weahter in FS2004 using the new Weather Interface.

We Have 3 Buttons (Clear-WX-Button, Set-WX1, Set-WX2).

The Clear-Button works very fine. We send the command NW_CLEAR, set uDynamics to Zero and chICAO to "GLOB".

The Buttons Set-WX1 and Set-WX2 should put som clouds on the sky and should change the visibility. Therefore we set uDynamics to 0, chICAO to "GLOB" and as uCommand is used NW_SETEXACT. We use this command because we first read out a valid weather and do our changes there. So NW_SETEXACT should be no problem.

Now the misterious situation:

If we first click the Clear-WX-Button, the weather is cleared. If we then click within 10 seconds later one of the WX-Set-Buttons, the weather is set as we wanted to.

But if we first click one of the Set_WX-Buttons, the weather does not change. But if we take a look in the FS2004 Weather config page, then we can see that our weather is in there. If we leave the config page by clicking OK, our new weather is set.

Do you know why the Weather-setting works when we cleared the weather a few seconds before, but it not works without clearing the weather via fsuipc? There must be a simple reason why our new weather is not yet activated.

Hope you can give us a hint...

Best regards

Andi

[Pete Dowson]

Do you know why the Weather-setting works when we cleared the weather a few seconds before, but it not works without clearing the weather via fsuipc? There must be a simple reason why our new weather is not yet activated.

Yes, the explanation is that GLOB weather is only sent to weather stations which have not already got localised weather. GLOB weather is just the default weather for stations which don't have their own.

When you clear all the weather, no WX stations have any weather, so when you set GLOB this populates all of them.

The only way to set weather without clearing it first is to set all of the local WX stations as well as setting GLOB. this is what WX programs do (ActiveSky, FSMeteo, and some others).

Worse, with your method, within about 15-30 minutes, all of the local stations will become localised, so further GLOB weather updates again won't affect them. This occurs even with dynamics at 0, because the weather is always changing slightly, as it is in reality.

After lots of complaints about this and requests for local controllable weather for Instruction purposes, Microsoft fixed it. In FSX you can set a GLOBal weather mode (via FSUIPC4 or SimConnect) and if this is used before any updates the GLOB weather overrules the localised weather.

Regards

Pete