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Feature suggestion/request: Weather panel and buttons


Mark Galbraith
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Mark Galbraith
Posted
Posted

I have a suggestion for improving the weather panel and buttons.

Currently, VRC limits the number of weather stations to 20.  There may be a number of reasons for this, but it seems one of the major reasons is the number of buttons created in the button bar when there are lots of weather stations in the panel.  I know most CTR controllers are probably using other radar clients, but it would be nice if we could remove the limit on the number of weather stations, and add an ability to mark which ones we want to be displayed in the button bar.  

The reason for this is we may have a few major/minor airports for which we want to have the weather in the button bar, but need quick and easy access to the weather for those lesser-used airports in the sector.  Having the buttons on the top makes it easy to find, and having the information already available in weather panel for the rest seems to be an easy win.

As a programmer myself, the rest of this contains a possible implementation of this. 

The weather station list is stored in the VRC.ini file.  As each profile can have an individual list of weather stations, the value is stored in the WxStations value; looking something like:

WxStations=KALW|KBAM|KBFI|KBIL|KBKE|KBLI|KBOI|KBWW|KBZN|KCOD|KDIK|...

Every weather station listed would have a corresponding button created in the weather bar.

Under my suggestion, we add a boolean attribute to a weather station entry to indicate whether a button should be created.  True, a button is added; false, it is omitted.  For display purposes in the weather panel list, stations with an active button would be shown in bold text.  For storing the state of the the list and the appropriate buttons, those stations with active buttons would be stored in the .INI file with asterisks around the station name.  In this example the KBAM and KBOI stations are showing in the button bar.

WxStations=KALW|*KBAM*|KBFI|KBIL|KBKE|KBLI|*KBOI*|KBWW|KBZN|KCOD|KDIK|...

Selecting the active state of a button can be done using a drop down menu option when you right click a station in the weather panel list.  This option would alternate between "Add WX Button" and "Remove WX Button", depending on the current state.

----

I hope this provides enough information to show what I'm suggesting, but if you have any questions that would help clarify things, please let me know.  Also, as a senior level programmer, if you would like any help with your projects, I'm glad to lend a hand.

 

--Mark

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Nick Harasym
Posted
Posted

Good luck on this one

Nick Harasym
Senior Network Infrastructure Engineer 
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Ross Carlson
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Posted

Thanks for the suggestion, however, I will not be doing any further development of VRC. Have a look at the following thread for details:

 

Developer: vPilot, VRC, vSTARS, vERAM, VAT-Spy

Senior Controller, Boston Virtual ARTCC

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