Taxi Wind Update?

[jase439]

Hey Pete,

In an earlier thread it sounded as though you were on the trail of getting a viable solution up and working for Taxi Wind, except for a problem you were having when the aircraft started moving and the sim started scribbling over your wind data.

Is it still your plan to continue looking into this in the near future?

Cheers,

J

[Pete Dowson]

In an earlier thread it sounded as though you were on the trail of getting a viable solution up and working for Taxi Wind, except for a problem you were having when the aircraft started moving and the sim started scribbling over your wind data.

Is it still your plan to continue looking into this in the near future?

No, not the near future. It's a horrendous task. To get anything else done with weather at all I think I would have to completely crack the WEATHER.DLL. It's a complete re-write from the FS2000/FS2002 version -- and much more complex. The FS2000 version took me about 9 months to do all the weather things I did in FSUIPC for that. I was lucky nothing much was changed in FS2002. With FS2004 I reckon its a good year's work, and I have other things to do as well. I just can't afford to drop everything else, ignore everything and do only that. To start with it might not get me far. Many of the last few months were completely wasted trying to get somewhere with it. And it isn't fun.

Now that FS is almost all black-box closed-in style C++, rather than the nice open C and ASM structures of the past, it's simply horrendous. I expect FS2004 will be my last foray into this stuff. :(

Sorry,

Pete

[jase439]

I sent mail to Marc Philibert regarding your idea of having taxi wind implemented by a third party FSUIPC client. He seemed quite receptive to the idea. Maybe you guys can come up with a viable "3rd party" solution?

On a tangential note, if I could get you in touch with a developer from the MS flight sim team, would that be at all meaningful? I have some "ins" with a few people in the gaming division. I'm not sure how much they'd be able to help, but likely the FS boys are intimately familiar with your work. They might be amenable to disclosing certain facets of the engine under the right terms.

Shoot me an e-mail at jase439@nospam.excite.com (minus the nospam) if you're interested.

[Pete Dowson]

I sent mail to Marc Philibert regarding your idea of having taxi wind implemented by a third party FSUIPC client. He seemed quite receptive to the idea. Maybe you guys can come up with a viable "3rd party" solution?

Sounds good. I think Marc's pretty busy though (aren't we all :) ), so it may take a while.

On a tangential note, if I could get you in touch with a developer from the MS flight sim team, would that be at all meaningful? I have some "ins" with a few people in the gaming division. I'm not sure how much they'd be able to help, but likely the FS boys are intimately familiar with your work. They might be amenable to disclosing certain facets of the engine under the right terms.

Well I was in touch with them during the Beta phase of FS2004 development, of course. But, although individuals like to be as helpful as they can, they are under very tight restrictions on what they can release.

There's a strict policy of releasing information only through the SDKs, which, judging by past efforts, are quite good for some things, but very poor for trying to get inside FS and do things Microsoft haven't planned for. If there ever is a weather SDK I will be the first to rejoice, as it's been a complete headache for over four years now!

Thanks,

Pete