Friday 2010-10-15 Dev. update and Discussion

[Blackdog_kt]

Sorry to bump up a topic from previous pages when we're expecting the new update, but to be honest modelling thermals and ridge lift in a sufficiently accurate manner is already possible and done by freeware 3rd party applications for the MS flight sims.

To Xilon: Most of what you ask for is included in the description of a dynamic weather engine. Oleg said a lot of times in the past that SoW will have dynamic weather. Relax and don't worry so much

To the people shouting at Xilon: No, you don't need a supercomputer to run thermal, ridge and wave lift simulation in real time, as long as you are willing to maintain some approximations to cut down on the CPU load.

In FSX the stock thermals are simplified and ridge/wave lift needs you to specifically place "lift boxes" in the mission editor (aka they are not dynamic, they only work in pre-made missions). However, there are external tools that do all of it on the fly.

Some concessions still have to be made but on the whole it's pretty good. For example, the tool i'm familiar with places thermals in random cells around the map and uses a randomized atmosphere texture method, but it still manages to include thermal life cycles, thermal strength is dependant on time of day and season that the flight takes place, ridge lift depends on wind, there's also combined ridge and thermal lift when a ridge is heated by the sun and so on. And this is a freeware tool (recently a payware version with some extras was released, but the free one still works fine)...take a look here if you want, grab the download and have a brief read through the manual just to see what's possible with an external program: http://luerkens.homepage.t-online.de/peter/

If it's possible for FSX with all its shortcomings and in some cases shabby coding to do it by communicating with an external tool running on the background without any loss of frame rates, i'm willing to bet it's possible for SoW since it will be handled by a built-in part of the engine that's seamlessly "plugged-in" to the rest of the software.