Re: [Flightgear-devel] Weather scenarios - add ICAO standard

[Thorsten R. <tho...@sc...>]

> Not every person that develops/might develop/tests aircraft is friends 
> with
> the command line, and having CLI skills and on top of that having 
> knowledge of
> obscure Flightgear CLI flags to be able to work on/test aircraft seems 
> an
> unreasonable requirement to me.

Not as such, but it has to be weighted against other issues.

And frankly, learning how to add a commandline option in the launcher is 
a matter of 3 minutes - hardly something that'll be important compared 
to the time you need to develop even a simple aircraft.

Well, and metar isn't really an 'obscure flag' either.

> On the other hand, maybe some of the other weather scenarios could do 
> with
> some pruning, if the length of the scenario dropdown is an issue (or 
> maybe the
> order might be revised)

If we discuss the scenarios we present, I'd much  prefer the complete 
meteorology set (cold sector, tropical weather,...) and the glider 
scenarios (blue thermals,...) to be added before standard atmosphere is 
considered - these have a much wider user-base.

For the record, I think adding standard atmosphere as a scenario is a 
bad idea because of the following reasons:

a) it is not a term the standard user is familiar with and not a 
'scenario' in the classic sense (in fact, it is a non-scenario)
b) in the same vein, it won't do what it proposes to do if the user 
selects AW without an explanation given - potential issue reports on the 
horizon
c) if we make too many weather scenarios 'accessible', none of them 
really is in the current dropdown menu
d) standardized aircraft tests are a comparatively rare use case, if we 
decide to add more scenarios, I think others should be priorized
e) the standard atmosphere can easily be added via commandline or a 
config file if so desired

I'll be happy to re-investigate the question along with a general 
re-design of the weather UI - I'm not happy with the current 
non-presentation of glider stuff either - but without such a re-design, 
simply adding 'standard atmosphere' is going to make me even less happy 
for the reasons above.

Which is why I object.

* Thorsten