Player GUI to create weather

I’d like to see a nice interface to customize weather, think of Microsoft paint, but for layers of weather - I’d be happy with a 30 x 30nm grid with a 5-10nm or so buffer around the edge where the weather merges with its neighboring area or whatever instead of a brush.

Something like;
Select brush features: Cloud Type Cu, Base 2500ft, Tops 5000ft, Visibility 5000m, Wind 1000ft-150T/25, 2000ft-160T/25, 5000ft-100T/5… etc, paint area on map. Rinse repeat, any option left blank i.e. wind it will just do the other stuff and leave wind alone allowing wind to be done with a later brush.

Having the ability to create 2 or 3 weather scenarios for different times of the day would be cool too, i.e
Scenario 1 active from 0300UTC-0600UTC
Scenario 2 active from 0600UTC-0900UTC
etc…
and it will gradually merge between those scenarios over the 1hr period between ie. 0530UTC-0630UTC.

I think that would be good for those of us wanting to input a local Graphical Area Forecasts and Grid Point Wind forecast for a simulated VFR flight.

Also a cool feature to accompany this would be the ability to include static bush fire areas with smoke that goes with the wind - that’s been a big thing here on my recent nav flights.

Would be nice to have a save / load function, so say I could create several scenarios and attach the printed GAF and GPW charts and whenever I feel like flying one I could download the charts, plan the flight, quickly load that weather scenario in, and go flying.

Perhaps even the ability for the community to be able to share them with attached GPW & GAF’s

The organized look of your documentation makes me think that you can make it yourself if you learned some programming. Remember the ‘app’ does not have to work inside the sim, just the designed weather needs to be exported and then imported into the sim (XML).

Ofc. being able to edit/save/load inside the running sim would be nice, as i see it then making an external app that does as you describe is somewhat possible to make. With that said, then using online real data is not easy/cheap for a starter but is possible.

If i was to do it i would jump on UNITY and make it there. Unity is free and you are allowed to ‘sell’ your product, has good documentation and ‘easy’ cross-platform functionality.

You are right, I am capable of doing an external app for this, last time I looked through the SDK it just had “Weather TODO” in it so I got discouraged on making anything of the sort, I’ll update my SDK and see if there is anything new.
If this gets a bunch of interest I’ll consider trying to slot this external app creation into my current programming TODO list, would like if people could share their GPW & GAF charts / documents they get from around the world and their ideas to guide its development.

Alright, so after a quick look it appears for now 3rd party devs have no access to weather, please go to this topic and vote if you want anything like this to happen.

I’d like to set changes to weather like you propose. (either time or location based)

May I suggest to split your first post in 2 sections?
I think the post is too complex to attract a lot of votes.

First something that describes that you want to set custom weather that changes over time or set different weather settings based on location. And then you could put a line with your original post/proposal underneath. Also the title could be changed to reflect this. :wink: