I haven't had any thoughts on how to update the weather while flying around other than the fact that it might be a good idea to have hexagonal cloud chunks each representing (a mix of) the reported cloud base at distant metar stations.
Ok, this was just too tempting to not fool with. I have some prototype changes for updating as you fly.
Nothing here is really optimized yet, but the basics are roughed in.
I modified the simple airport list so you can do a crude search for closest airport to the specified position.
I added a "has_metar" flag to each simple airport struct. This defaults to true, but for every lookup that fails, this is changed to false.
The simple search can be instructed to only return stations where "has_metar" is true.
Periodically the FGMetarEnvCtrl->update() can check for the closest airport, fetch the metar data, and update the /environment/config values.
The main annoyance I've seen so far is that there is a slight break in the action (couple hundred milleseconds?) because the data fetching happens in the main loop and the noaa site isn't spectacularly fast.
Also, I've not implimented any temperal warping or spacial interpolation so the values just change to the new ones when a different station becomes closer.
If there aren't any major objections, I can commit these changes. The performance problems of doing a live www fetch only happen with the live weather updater is on, so there isn't any difference if you run in "default" mode.
Regards,
Curt. -- Curtis Olson Intelligent Vehicles Lab FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org
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