VATSIM.net

Hey, all.

I just departed KSFO bound for Chicago, with an FSPassengers flight active. But the confounded winds aloft buggered up my plans. One moment My IAS was at .79 mach and the winds almost instantly spun around and caused me to overspeed at almost mach .85. Those of you who use FSPassengers will know it considers overspeeding, no matter how brief, a grievous offense and exacts a frightful penalty for it. Since I ended up with this penalty due to the exactly same reason in my last FSPassengers flight, I elected to shut it down, crushing my hopes for a 4-hour no-time-acceleration bonus. I thought having "FSUIPC wind smoothing" activated in the ActiveSky options was supposed to prevent this sort of thing?

Long story short, is there anything that can be done to reduce this phenomenon short of simply disabling winds aloft?

in activesky options check smooth wind transitions or something like that.

if you also have fsuipc, select it in the weather settings aswell.

also id recommend disabling the overspeed penalty in fspax. open the fspax folder, then the options folder, then more_options.cfg

_________________

SimAir Force (SIMAF51/RCH51)
sLTC Ernesto Alvarez (AMC)
436th AW 9th AS

Windows XP
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics 256MB
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+, ~1174 Mhz
3.12ghz
4gb DDR2

"FSUIPC wind smoothing control" is what I already have checked in the AS options, and my copy of FSUIPC is unregistered so there are almost no options to set internally...I don't need FSUIPC to be registered for AS to use such features, do I?

to use the advanced features yes, but the wind smoothing, dont think so, that should be able to work just by activesky, fsuipc just smooths them down even further, u may have to ask the activesky dev's about that one tho but i dont think you need to register fsuipc for it

_________________

SimAir Force (SIMAF51/RCH51)
sLTC Ernesto Alvarez (AMC)
436th AW 9th AS

Windows XP
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics 256MB
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+, ~1174 Mhz
3.12ghz
4gb DDR2

Let me guess, FSX?

Cheers!

Luke

_________________
... I spawn hundreds of children a day. They are daemons because they are easier to kill. The first four remain stubbornly alive despite my (and their) best efforts.
... Normal in my household makes you a member of a visible minority.

Surprisingly, no! I'm sticking with FS9 for the foreseeable future because I've always found FSX to be too much of a resource hog for even my decent gaming machine.

Interesting. I've found most of the nasty wind shifts to be in FSX, and from what I've read on the FSUIPC forums Pete has had no end of issues getting wind smoothing working right in that sim.

If you don't have a registered FSUIPC copy, I think you should uncheck "FSUIPC Wind Smoothing", to tell AS that it should try and smooth itself. Or you can purchase an FSUIPC3 key; it's a good investment. The features a registered copy provides (wind smoothing, reverser axis operation, etc.) are well worth it, and you're supporting a wonderful add-on developer. Peter can be prickly but he has been tireless in creating, supporting and documenting a fantastic API into Flight Simulator, and I'm amazed at his flexibility and willingness to add features. If you are using one of the great flight recorder/ACARS packages, chances are it wouldn't be possible without Pete.

Cheers!

Luke

_________________
... I spawn hundreds of children a day. They are daemons because they are easier to kill. The first four remain stubbornly alive despite my (and their) best efforts.
... Normal in my household makes you a member of a visible minority.

I was under the impression that the wind smoothing was only for surface winds.. you'll have to turn off turbulence if you want to avoid wind's aloft.

_________________
http://www.pond64.net

I have turbulence on and have experienced no wind shift problems, I don't know what setting affects this, but I can say in my experience, it shouldn't have to do with that. The only problem I have is sudden weather shifting. Flying VFR it is very annoying when you are flying in clear skies and then I am flying into clouds, and it is cloudy and not very nice, then the sky turns blue minutes later. I don't know if this is the same type of problem as the wind shifts.

_________________
Jody Turner - I1
Toronto FIR - Facility Engineer

Do you find this happens/ed when you use real world weather in FSX? It's ridiculous, every now and then you'll get a massive swing of the nose because of wind direction change and then it goes back to what the wind was and blehh.. annoying. No way to stop it without ActiveSky is there? Or am I asking too much of the sim?..

Cheers

Well, while it's a limited sample (a scientific and methodical approach is hard when every test takes a few hours...), in my troubleshooting the cause of FS9 often crashing while connected to VATSIM I didn't use ActiveSky for a flight from Seattle to Denver, and it does seem that ActiveSky has a significant impact on smoothing aloft winds. While using FS9's default real world weather system and winds aloft downloading, under about 8x time acceleration I was experiencing huge hits frequently almost the whole way to Denver, some of which damn near knocked my poor Learjet right out of the sky and resulted in a 2+ G whammie, greatly upsetting the passengers aboard and forcing me to once again cancel the FSPassengers flight I had running. Based on this experience, I'd say ActiveSky does do a great deal to smooth wind transitions, just it's not -quite- good enough to prevent the occasional overspeed. So based on this I guess the best way to go when running ActiveSky (assuming it's not actually the cause of my FS9 crashes and I'll actually be able to run it online again...) is to just go at a lower cruising speed; I also took the advice of disabling the overspeed detection in the FSPassengers penalty file.

(Funny Michael should post what he did just as I was submitting this message...)

Update: Update: In the middle of another Seattle-Denver run. Without ActiveSky activated, I haven't experienced any crashes yet, but it's as if there's a sort of 'seam' in the METAR data that I find myself in between the BOI and PIH VORs; throughout that leg I'm constantly accosted by winds shifting back and forth 150 knots from one direction, then 150 knots from the other direction... according to my FSPassengers data, the passengers really didn't like the 97* bank angle or the 3.7G's that ensued. I swear I'm not exaggerating. So it seems I'm in a bit of a conundrum. Either turn off ActiveSky so my simulator doesn't crash, but have to deal with my plane being almost blasted out of the sky constantly by rogue winds...or use ActiveSky and risk the simulator simply crashing halfway through a flight.

Hello Eric,

As Luke has said a registered version FSUIPC is real plus, I still use FS9 and ASV

Here are my settings on the Winds page...

_________________

I have found anything under time acceleration is dramatized, that could be why you had the huge problems with your Learjet. Just fly a shorter flight if you need to use 8x.

_________________
Jody Turner - I1
Toronto FIR - Facility Engineer

if you are using time accel, thats your kicker. doesnt matter what you do, its not going to be smooth in time accel as both the sim and activesky will struggle to keep up. cant have your cake and eat it too

_________________

SimAir Force (SIMAF51/RCH51)
sLTC Ernesto Alvarez (AMC)
436th AW 9th AS

Windows XP
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics 256MB
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+, ~1174 Mhz
3.12ghz
4gb DDR2

Only some of my trials have been under time acceleration, but that's a good point. I'll keep that in mind.