Re: [Flightgear-devel] Environment Settings dialog

[Stuart B. <stu...@gm...>]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:58 PM, Gijs de Rooy wrote:
> The original intention was that it only overwrote your custom setting when
> METAR reports snow at a lower altitude than that set by the user. So if
> you've set it to 3000m, but a station at 1500m reports snow, the snow level
> moves down to 1500m. You can then lower it even further, let's say to 1000m.
> As the station altitude is now above the snow line, it will stay at 1000m.
> Apparently this part was broken, as it was set back to 1500m after releasing
> the mouse.
>
> I just commited a fix to Git (at least it works as I intended it to work
> now), please check if that works for you.
>
> If the METAR reports no snow, nothing happens. Right now it only checks for
> the nearest METAR station, but one could think of extending that to all the
> METARS that are available in the property tree...

That might be worth thinking about, though I suspect it would be
rather laborious
to do so using property rules.

My main issue with it is that it can result in the snow level moving during a
cross-country flight.  Some time last year, when there was some snow in
Scotland, I found it quite distracting as the snow appear then disappeared
seemingly at random as I was flying, depending on whether the nearest
airport was reporting snow in their METAR or not.

Fundamentally, I don't think that the METAR information provides a good
enough proxy for the snow level.  That's a limitation of the input data, not
your algorithm, which is perfectly reasonable.

I've added a control parameter, so I'm quite happy :)

-Stuart