Real World Weather-- can it be saved as part of default flight?

[b3burner]

I know plane, airport, time, and date can be preselected. What about the weather? Can one preselect Real World Weather as part of the default setting?

I had wanted it to automatically download the real world weather upon opening up the default plane, but after selecting real world weather and then saving it.... next time I reopened it, it would revert back to "clear skies".

[pivek]

Hi John:

Please, refer to this article on the official MS site "How to troubleshoot issues with the Real-World Weather feature and the News feature in Flight Simulator"

[jgf]

One problem with FS default weather is that it relies on a MicroSoft site for data; this seems about as reliable as anything else from Micro$oft. (In the sim I've flown from my local airport in clear skies even though I can't see across the street due to torrential rain.)

Payware programs such as Active Sky connect to real world meteorological sites - much more reliable, accurate, and up-to-date; another plus is that you can save snapshots of current weather conditions to use anytime

[3Green]

Here are some freeware wx engines:

FSrealWX lite <----Recommended
http://www.hanse-coders.net/index.php?page=self&id=1

FSMetar
http://personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/fsmetar/

RJ

[b3burner]

Here are some freeware wx engines:

FSrealWX lite <----Recommended
http://www.hanse-coders.net/index.php?page=self&id=1

FSMetar
http://personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/fsmetar/

RJ

RJ (3Green),

Just to follow up with your last reply, I went to both sites you posted links to and found FSrealWX a bit more user friendly for me than FSMetar. I downloaded both versions:

FSrealWX lite v1.03.1356 RC (dated April 22, 2012)
&
FSrealWX lite v1.03.1372 DEV (dated May 31, 2012)

As a new user, am I better off using one download version over another? Does the "DEV" in the 2nd one mean "development" or "beta"? What might the "RC" in the 1st one mean?

I have more questions about FSrealWX that I'd like to ask, but I'll save them for their own separate thread later.

[b3burner]

I know plane, airport, time, and date can be preselected. What about the weather? Can one preselect Real World Weather as part of the default setting?

I had wanted it to automatically download the real world weather upon opening up the default plane, but after selecting real world weather and then saving it.... next time I reopened it, it would revert back to "clear skies".

I want to steer this post back in the direction it started and report on my findings on this subject:

1. Real world weather (default from the sim, with no relation to 3rd party weather download software), appears to not be saveable as the default condition-- in most situations.

Now that being said, I did find some exceptions. A flight I saved May 23rd in a Cirrus Vision SF50 jet one evening in Oakland, CA did save the scattered cumulus (think it was supposed to be stratus, but oh well... I'm not being picky at this point), coming in through the San Francisco Bay. It may have saved the Real World Weather in this situation, simply because after saving it I immediately made it the default flight.

Now the night of May 29th, I saved (with real world weather turned on) a flight at the same airport with the default b737_400 jet. I then switched out the Cirrus jet as the default flight and made the b737 the default flight. What happened? Real weather ceased to exist, and defaulted back to clear skies, 59-deg F-- even though the radio button in the weather pull down menu still was checked "real weather".

Now in some odd circumstances, if I reloaded the Cirrus Jet flight (which had the scattered cumulus over SF Bay), and then went back to the b737 flight, it would carry over the weather scenario from the Cirrus and use that data for the b737! Really strange. But other times it wouldn't.

The important thing to note here... and this was really the question I was originally trying to answer all along... at no time will the simulator know to automatically pull down the real weather at the time that you pull down the default flight. At best it will only pull down whatever "real weather" was downloaded AT THE TIME THE FLIGHT WAS ORIGINALLY SAVED! And it will continue to use that weather scenario (in my case from May 23rd), over and over again... unless I go to the weather menu and push the button that regenerates the download from Jeppesen. Then it will get a new weather scenario for the time and date of my session in the present tense.

2. Now on the subject of how well the remembered weather from my May 23rd flight will carry over into a new session, I tried an additional experiment. Opening up a stand alone OAT gauge, would it give me readings other than 59-deg F @ sea-level airports as I opened my plane up at different airports around the country just to test? Afterall, that would be the true test of whether it was remembering station differences from airport to airport, or just reverting back to default clear/ standard atmosphere.

And what I found was, if I started off in Oakland from the default and manually slewed the plane east into the central valley, the temps would go up... so I knew that saved wx download was in effect and still working. However, if I went into the change airport menu and moved the plane across the country, it would seem to forget the wx download, and revert back to global clear [all sealevel=59F 29.92" standard scenario].

I have not really determined why it inconsistantly remembers wx saved in the saved flight-- sometimes but not other times; but I'm not sure it's worth wrapping my brain around it too much to try to figure it out.

2. On a semi-related note, if the simulator is set to "system time" instead of "flight time", it will only line up the time of simulation with the current time on your computer, when you first fire up whatever you made your "default flight". If you go into the "select a flight" menu, and choose any other flight that you previously saved, then all bets are off on making the time match your system, and it will revert back to whatever time/date it was when you saved flight.

That is my best understanding of all this, based on what I've found thus far. To conclude, system time within FS2004 can be trusted to consistently give you your computer's time and date when you open the default flight. But to try to save a real weather download within that flight and expect it to remember it, seems to be a bit hit and miss. You're almost always better off regenerating the real weather if you want it in the present tense... and/or using another weather server beside the Jeppesen one that came with the simulator.