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[Steve.Wilson]

The Simul weather engine is rather attractive. 

Is this even an option for Outerra/Anteworld?  It would be excellent, and would preclude "reinventing the wheel," but I realize that there are costs and other strategies that the team has likely already considered, and that we, the faithful but unwashed enthusiast throng, are unaware of. 

I would love to fly through these clouds, though!!

[cameni]

We have been looking at it already, some time ago. The problem was that it was all CPU-generated (no wonder Intel picked it to support), not ready for spherical worlds, and mainly problematic to integrate with the existing atmospheric scattering code and lighting. There are some other options, but I fear that for the best performance and seamless integration we'll have to develop it.

The domain is well suited for parallel processing on the GPU, and we can also employ our procedural techniques to refine the detail and make it play nicely with the rest of the system.

[Steve.Wilson]

I was afraid of something like that.  I have a feeling, though, based on what I've seen in Outerra so far that the weather dynamic you'd be shooting for will be pretty realistic.  If you have individual blades of grass...why not individual water drops?  (just kidding!!)

[cameni]

I'm afraid as well
That thing that has us painting the blades and looking at the details is not good for the deadlines. Hopefully there's a compromise.

[DeltaSim]

Speaking about weather: I am eagerly looking forward to some wind in Outerra! The lack threof is currently the reason why I still run my simulator with FlightGear. FG also allows me to control the wind/weather properties over Telnet - great for teasing the guy in the simulator with some nasty gusts while he practises his landing approaches :-).

Any news or time estimates on this?

Cheers and keep going,

Martin

[cameni]

I think this would be a good candidate for an external plugin, talking more or less directly to JSBSim. What we plan to do is to take a rough global map of wind vectors and compute how they compress and flow around the terrain, and feed that to JSBSim together with some other parameters like the turbulence, computed from some model. But I don't know when we'll be able to get it done, so maybe a plugin that would be able to pass something into the simulation would be good in the meantime.

[DeltaSim]

A plugin sounds interesting - is there already a possibility to develop plugins?

[cameni]

Not yet, but APIs and plugins are to be developed soon for commercial use of OT, parts of it will be open to modding too.

[Steve.Wilson]

A function or plugin that downloads METAR information and then applies the winds to the environment model might save some time.  It's not perfect, but that seems to be one of the preferred ways for X-Plane to get its weather input when the user isn't manually setting the winds, clouds etc.