[Release] WeatherGen - A BMS random weather generator
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Great application Tyrant. Thanks a bunch for your effort. Still exploring this.
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v035 Released
This is a minor bugfix release, now available at https://firstfighterwing.com/weathergen. Fully backward compatible - no user action required.
- Fixes problem where tanker steerpoint after landing steerpoint would incorrectly have a line drawn to it.
Thanks to Zeus at the 1st VFW for the bug report!
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Tyrant: At first great work with the weathergen it is a wonderful utility, however when I click just on the “save current as fmap” or “save twx” nothing happens (I am using chrome, save settings, load settings work fine).
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Tyrant: At first great work with the weathergen it is a wonderful utility, however when I click just on the “save current as fmap” or “save twx” nothing happens (I am using chrome, save settings, load settings work fine).
Yeah, I just noticed that this week myself. Will fix soon. The workaround for now is to save a weather package and extract only the files you need - everything is in there. Sorry about that.
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Tyrant: At first great work with the weathergen it is a wonderful utility, however when I click just on the “save current as fmap” or “save twx” nothing happens (I am using chrome, save settings, load settings work fine).
The fix for this is uploading now and should be available shortly. I’ll update the initial post in a bit, too. Thanks for the bug report!
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Awesome tool! Thanks for your work.
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I like it - good job
Tutorial Videos help a lot
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Does this also adjust weather for other seasons? Looking to do a winter campaign soon.
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Does this also adjust weather for other seasons? Looking to do a winter campaign soon.
You can do it manually by lowering the temperatures in the temperature section. One of these days I’ll add seasonal presets to make that more convenient. But it’s the work of two minutes to do manually for now.
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I’ve been using the weathergen for some time successfully now, however I have one question, often the weather changes very abruptly, I am flying through a fair weather and suddenly clouds kick in and pressure jumps. Is there a possibility to make the weather transitions smoother?
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I’ve been using the weathergen for some time successfully now, however I have one question, often the weather changes very abruptly, I am flying through a fair weather and suddenly clouds kick in and pressure jumps. Is there a possibility to make the weather transitions smoother?
There are two factors: The BMS weather model and the weather data that WeatherGen produces. BMS models weather in (roughly) 9nm squares, so as you cross the boundaries, you might find yourself going from one set of weather parameters to a vastly different set, depending on how you have WeatherGen set up to produce weather (more on that in a second). Too, BMS changes the weather instantaneously at the times dictated by the WeatherMapsUpdates folder. So even if you’re not moving it can jump suddenly.
You can alleviate that in a few ways. To address time-based jumps, have the weather update more often, as it will change more frequently but in smaller ways. That’s the “step” parameter under “save weather package”. I use 15 minutes and haven’t seen any problems with it across many flights.
To address jumps between adjacent weather squares, you can increase the zoom under “Advanced”. This basically makes the weather patterns bigger, and therefore more slowly changing through space. Try values between 10 and 20 to see what you like.
Be aware that although I can’t really do anything about the chunkiness of the BMS weather model, BMS does do some smoothing/blending for things like cloud cover, so that plays into this all as well. Pressure, however, seems to change pretty close to instantaneously at region boundaries. And that’s sort of on me - the code currently produces weather that varies far too fast. I am working on improving it, but I have a lot of irons in the fire there and no ETA. A semi-fix for that is to change the min and max pressure settings and adjust the boundaries for the various weather types.
Hope that makes sense. If you’re still having trouble, post your weathergen settings file and I’ll take a look when I have a minute.
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There are two factors: The BMS weather model and the weather data that WeatherGen produces. BMS models weather in (roughly) 9nm squares, so as you cross the boundaries, you might find yourself going from one set of weather parameters to a vastly different set, depending on how you have WeatherGen set up to produce weather (more on that in a second). Too, BMS changes the weather instantaneously at the times dictated by the WeatherMapsUpdates folder. So even if you’re not moving it can jump suddenly.
You can alleviate that in a few ways. To address time-based jumps, have the weather update more often, as it will change more frequently but in smaller ways. That’s the “step” parameter under “save weather package”. I use 15 minutes and haven’t seen any problems with it across many flights.
To address jumps between adjacent weather squares, you can increase the zoom under “Advanced”. This basically makes the weather patterns bigger, and therefore more slowly changing through space. Try values between 10 and 20 to see what you like.
Be aware that although I can’t really do anything about the chunkiness of the BMS weather model, BMS does do some smoothing/blending for things like cloud cover, so that plays into this all as well. Pressure, however, seems to change pretty close to instantaneously at region boundaries. And that’s sort of on me - the code currently produces weather that varies far too fast. I am working on improving it, but I have a lot of irons in the fire there and no ETA. A semi-fix for that is to change the min and max pressure settings and adjust the boundaries for the various weather types.
Hope that makes sense. If you’re still having trouble, post your weathergen settings file and I’ll take a look when I have a minute.
Thanks a lot Tyrant, this is the information I needed, you are most helpful. I will test your suggestions, I am certain that it will improve my (and maybe some others) experience with weathergen. All your work is highly appreciated.
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Sorry for noob question …but istill havent fouund out how to properly load weather i createdin generator?
I created package, and i doont know what to do with created package…I loaded training mission from default korea theater, randomized weather, saved pakage… and now i dont know how to properly load created zip file? -
Sorry for noob question …but istill havent fouund out how to properly load weather i createdin generator?
I created package, and i doont know what to do with created package…I loaded training mission from default korea theater, randomized weather, saved pakage… and now i dont know how to properly load created zip file?Unzip it into your mission folder. For instance, for standard KTO this is probably C:\Falcon BMS 4.33 U1\Data\Campaign\SAVE. It’ll be different for other theaters.
If that doesn’t make sense, let me know and I’ll try to give a more thorough explanation.
Or you could try VMT. It does all the same things as WeatherGen, but since it’s a desktop tool, it can do a better job saving files. It does a bunch of other things, too. VMT thread is here:
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Ok…thanks…your reply was just what i needed…it works…and thanks gor lonk, ill try VMT also
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@Tyrant
How do we expand .twx file for 128 seg theaters? -
@Tyrant
How do we expand .twx file for 128 seg theaters?That will require code changes. And again, as WeatherGen has been replaced by VMT, those changes would happen there and not in WeatherGen. Sorry - I realize a web page is more convenient for some people, but I don’t want to maintain two codebases when one is a superset of the other.
Which theater are you working with? I’m not sure which ones are larger. I will add support for larger theaters to my list and register your interest in seeing the feature get done. It shouldn’t be too bad, but I’m not sure how many assumptions I’ve baked in and .
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Thank you for your explanation.
I use your generator for 64 seg theaters (Ikaros, Korea, Balkan), it works perfect for them.
I am working on special (not published) 128SEG theater in alpha phase, so far.
I wonder is there any way to open and edit .TWX file manually like notpad etc. -
Thank you for your explanation.
I use your generator for 64 seg theaters (Ikaros, Korea, Balkan), it works perfect for them.
I am working on special (not published) 128SEG theater in alpha phase, so far.
I wonder is there any way to open and edit .TWX file manually like notpad etc.As far as I know, the TWX format is not documented. It’s a binary file, so a text editor isn’t going to help you, but both VMT and WeatherGen are open source, so you can look at the source to figure out the layout of a TWX file here: https://github.com/candera/vmt/blob/vmti-spike/src/weathergen/twx.cljc. I think it’s reasonably easy to read even if you’re not familiar with the language, although if you have no programming experience it may be difficult.
The thing is, I don’t think there’s anything in the TWX that varies with the theater size. The FMAP file, on the other hand, would definitely be different. Is that what you need to edit? If you’re not familiar with the difference, I recommend reading section 5 of the BMS manual before doing anything else.
The FMAP file format is also binary, but is very simple. My code for working with it is here: https://github.com/candera/vmt/blob/vmti-spike/src/weathergen/fmap.clj. It’s basically just a length, a width, and then an array of numbers for each of weather type, wind direction, wind speed, pressure, and temperature. For a standard theater, the arrays are 59x59. For a 128 theater, they should be 118x118, although I haven’t verified that.
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Is there a way to integrate Tom Katz new Baltic campaign into the Weather gen?