FSUIPC Visibility Settings

[MikeAdamo]

Hi Pete,

I recently purchased/registered FSUIPC 3 in the hopes that I would be able to have some control over the visibility settings FS interprets from the METAR data it recieves and am disappointed that I cannot do this anymore.

I read another post where you stated

"The main reason for its introduction on FS2000 was to help with frame rates -- the lower the visibility nearer the ground, the better the frame rates despite the increasing complexity of ground imaging. I don't think this is a consideration in FS2004."

I'm sorry to say but, like in FS2002, the lower the visibility nearer the ground, the better performance we see in FS2004. I've made several flights with varying degrees of visibility and the flights that had the smoothest appearance were the ones where visibility was less than 30nm.

Was the decision not to include this function in FS2004 due to the programming involved or on feed-back from beta testers?

Geof A made an excellent point in a post on the Avsim forum

http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=3019&page=

in regards to how FS interprets METAR visibility data and I was wondering if you noticed the same and what your opinion is?

Thanks for your input!!

Mike

[Pete Dowson]

I recently purchased/registered FSUIPC 3 in the hopes that I would be able to have some control over the visibility settings FS interprets from the METAR data it recieves and am disappointed that I cannot do this anymore.

I'm sorry, but I did actually point out in the 'blurb' that the weather filters were probably not such an important part of FSUIPC for FS2004, at least not at present.

I'm sorry to say but, like in FS2002, the lower the visibility nearer the ground, the better performance we see in FS2004. I've made several flights with varying degrees of visibility and the flights that had the smoothest appearance were the ones where visibility was less than 30nm.

You can of course apply visibility limits. Virtually none of the FSUIPC weather facilities for FS2000/2002 applied to local weather in any case, it was for global weather and for weather set from external programs. The same applies to FS2004.

The limits will achieve your objective, and the upper cut off can be set "to taste". It's only the graduation part which is then missing -- I think the vision of the murky ground below when you are above the limit is more satisfying than the clearing of vision right down to the ground as you climb, which was the case.

Was the decision not to include this function in FS2004 due to the programming involved or on feed-back from beta testers?

Neither. In fact most of the omissions are really due to the fact that I couldn't make ANY of the weather access into FS2004 work in any of the Betas. It only started to come good after I got the Gold, which was three or so weeks before FS2004 was released. I am still working 100% on FSUIPC, so thing will gradually change, and probably according to suggestions and requests. I'm currently trying to work out a way of introducing taxi winds again.

There are big technical problems too. If nobody wanted to use FS's own downloaded weather, and only either manually set global weathr, or 100% externally controlled weather, then everything would be quite easy for me. But I think the improvements are so big in FS's own weather that a lot of users will stick with it. I have never been able to provide many facilities for that, and FS2004 is even more difficult. I am looking at it still.

Geof A made an excellent point in a post on the Avsim forum

http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=3019&page=

in regards to how FS interprets METAR visibility data and I was wondering if you noticed the same and what your opinion is?

Sorry, I haven't seen that and really have no time to chase other threads. If you want to precis it here I can read it then.

Regards,

Pete

[MikeAdamo]

Pete,

Thanks for clearing that up! I've read and re-read things so often these days it all started to look and sound the same :-)

I guess this topic will be a moot point once weather utilities from FS2002 are updated to FS2004 specs.

Thanks again!

Mike