How to achieve smooth weather transitions?

Question

I am enjoying using real world weather in X-Plane 11.35.  However, when updating real world weather during a flight, wind speed and direction can change dramatically and instantly. Real weather doesn't behave this way.  Depending on the magnitude of the instantaneous changes, aircraft attitude and airspeed can be changed violently.  I tried setting the real world weather updates to every 15 minutes hoping to reduce the magnitude of the weather changes but this has not fixed the problem.  Can anybody recommend a way to achieve smoother weather transitions during a flight when using real world weather?

Answer 1

Hey dvanwig,

As far as I'm concerned there is no true way to change how abruptly the weather changes happen. I am pretty sure the default weather engine resets and replenishes the weather at every interval you have it set to do it. Changing the time for updates is one option, as maybe faster updates like you have it at could produce smaller changes in the long run, but almost definitively will have more changes through your flight. A slower update time would have less changes in the flight, but maybe more drastic changes. I don't think so though, as weather usually doesn't work that way. I have seen that maybe xEnviro would help, but I would be hesitant to go with this option as xEnviro could cause frame drops and even then the changes in weather would still be abrupt. Not to mention the $69.90 price tag.

   A summary of what I said is that the weather will always defy basic laws of nature, and the only changes you can make are making that happen more or less often. Making it happen more often will give you more realistic weather to fly in or over, and making it happen less often will mean more stability with flight dynamics, but less up-to-date weather. Also keep in mind I do not work with Laminar, but this is the best answer I can give you based on what I have experienced and seen elsewhere.

Comments

Thanks for your response.  I agree with you about how the weather engine works now but was hoping that somewhere a genius had found a way, possibly with a LUA script, to smooth the transitions between "old weather" and "new weather."  For example, when new wind direction and speed is introduced every fifteen minutes, the weather engine could could find the differences between current wind and new wind and incrementally add or subtract a fifteenth of the changes in direction and speed over the next fifteen minutes. Or a tenth of the differences over the next ten minutes depending on the speed of the aircraft.  Faster aircraft experience weather changes faster than slower aircraft.  Gusts would be treated as they are now, which is more or less instantly. Changes in visibility would use a similar, straightforward calculation but changes in cloud types would be more complex. I probably wouldn't try to tackle changes to how clouds are displayed now.  I can imagine all this but don't have the LUA coding skills to implement it.  Thanks for responding.