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Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Controlling your aircraft, using the autopilot etc.

Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby FoxtrotCC » Sun Oct 02, 2022 10:56 am

OS - Windows 7 64Bit
Version 2020.1.14

Test conditions:
Manual Weather -> Thunderstorm (or stormy Monday to ensure that it is raining)
Plane -> Different, tested with Cessna 172P & DHC6 (support rain from inside view)

Can anyone confirm that the rain does not stop (in pilot/inside view) when you are flying above the cloud line since Flight Gear 2020.3.X (Don´t know exactly when it starts, testet with 2020.3.12/13/14)?

Pilot / Inside view -> Rain don´t stop
Outside View -> Rain stops (but the rain sound is still on)

Cessna 172P nearly FL200 (only for test, but rain don´t stop)
Image

DHC6 Pilot view @9600ft
Image

DHC6 outside view, same altitude. Rain animation stops, rain sound not.
Image

Weather settings:
Image

Greets Foxtrot
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby Thorsten » Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:21 pm

Basic Weather doesn't have an upper rain cutoff, when METAR says rain it's on. That has always been the case as far as I know.
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby TheEagle » Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:49 pm

Thorsten wrote in Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:21 pm:Basic Weather doesn't have an upper rain cutoff, when METAR says rain it's on.

You can see on the screenshot that it doesn't rain visibly, in fact ! ;)

@FoxtroCC: both the sound and the droplets on your windows depend on /environment/rain-norm (usually), which seems to always represent the rain intensity at ground level (or, below the clouds) whereas the rain drops all around you don't. We'd need a separate boolean property that is true whenever the aircraft is really inside the rain field (so below the clouds, not above them) to resolve this, that is written to by the same code that decides on whether to show the droplets around you !
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby V12 » Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:29 pm

TheEagle :
Much better is Advanced weather option.
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby TheEagle » Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:52 pm

V12 wrote in Sun Oct 02, 2022 9:29 pm:Much better is Advanced weather option.

Uh, IDK who said that @FoxtrotCC is using Basic weather ? Please confirm @FoxtrotCC which of the two weather engines (basic or advanced weather) you are having this issue with.
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby Delta5142 » Sun Oct 02, 2022 10:48 pm

OP said that he is using Manual Weather, isn't that just basic weather? Also in my experience, I only get Foxtrot's problem when I'm using basic weather, not advanced weather.

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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby V12 » Mon Oct 03, 2022 3:53 am

TheEagle :
Check 4th image in OP.
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby Thorsten » Mon Oct 03, 2022 8:55 am

You can see on the screenshot that it doesn't rain visibly, in fact ! ;)


*shrugs* You can switch rain off in the renderer, it's a particle system basically.

@FoxtroCC: both the sound and the droplets on your windows depend on /environment/rain-norm (usually), which seems to always represent the rain intensity at ground level


That's the issue - the 'seems'. It's a property that originates being read off from a METAR report. If it's set, BW will produce rain and it'll be made invisible above the lowest cloud level, regardless of whether this makes any sense of not. Try weather with 3/8 clouds and rain - it'll not rain beneath clouds only, it'll rain beneath blue sky just as well (in fact try 0/8 coverage and rain...)

Note that conceptually the environment/ properties are local - wind-from-heading-deg doesn't refer to 'some wind somewhere' but to the wind you're currently experiencing. Pressure doesn't refer to the pressure-InHg 10.000 ft higher but to pressure at your location. So... conceptually rain-norm actually refers to the rain level at your position just as well.

In fact that's how AW treats it, because it creates a box underneath a raining cloud and tells you it's raining in that region - it stops when you leave the region.

So what you're seeing it that BW uses a purely visual trick to make the particle system rain invisible, but tells the environment manager that it continues to rain (rain-norm or snow -norm are often also read out by aircraft systems if something gets wet which should not or if friction coefficients change with rainwater or spray - so the issue actually is with BW not announcing to the environment system that the rain is no longer falling (as I said), not with rain-norm magically referring to the ground level.
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby FoxtrotCC » Mon Oct 03, 2022 9:13 am

I use the Weather settings as posted above (Basic Weather, see Image Weather settings).

The problem occurs with basic Weather, not with detailed Weather. I turned on basic Weather because it is recommended for use with Multiplayer (Nomally I use live data for the Weather conditions there). And that´s the Point I noticed it. If it´s raining on ground (with Basic Weather & live Data) it also "rains" above (without raining animation on the outside view). That was my surprise, the raining animation stops but the planes rain windscreen animation & sound don´t (Thorsten describes this is a purely visual trick). So, it is still raining...

On detailed Weather everthing works as it should.

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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby TheEagle » Mon Oct 03, 2022 1:06 pm

Sorry, I can't imagine how i missed that last screenshot ! :(
In that case, you can choose between having roughly the same weather as your MP "colleagues" but rain above the clouds, with Basic Weather - or possibly rather different weather than your MP "colleagues" (for example, two MP pilots are in the same spot, flying in formation with 50 feet separation, you are flying right through a rain shower but the other pilot at that moment has sunshine but rain showers close by) but better rain, snow, etc. with Advanced weather - your choice ! :)
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby FoxtrotCC » Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:29 pm

It wasn´t about the best weather settings for the multiplayer mode, that is always the choice for the user.

The problem is, that it rains above the cloud level with basic weather. This has now been explained technically, but for the user it is still a strange behavior.

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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby Thorsten » Thu Oct 06, 2022 6:59 am

The problem is, that it rains above the cloud level with basic weather. This has now been explained technically, but for the user it is still a strange behavior.


If you want to have the same visual trick, you can dial down model shader quality a notch - then the glass effect is off and you no longer see any rain splashes. Again it's a purely visual thing.
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby TheEagle » Thu Oct 06, 2022 1:01 pm

FoxtrotCC wrote in Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:29 pm:but for the user it is still a strange behavior.

I agree, but this is a result of the compromise between accurate weather representation and the weather being more or less consistent between multiple pilots. Cloud positions are determined in a random manner, and the cloud positions cannot be shared over the network - they're simply too many. So, if pilot A and pilot B at position X got different cloud positions, and rain is determined from the cloud positions, pilot A might have rain while pilot B doesn't, even though they have the same METAR / weather scenario. This is what you get with Advanced weather. But Basic weather is designed to be fast, less performance--hungry and consistent across multiple FlightGear instances - the only way to get this, is to just assume that it rains everywhere as long as there's rain indicated in the METAR.

This is my understanding - @Thorsten, if anything of the above is wrong, feel free to correct me ! :)
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby Thorsten » Thu Oct 06, 2022 6:16 pm

Cloud positions are determined in a random manner, and the cloud positions cannot be shared over the network - they're simply too many.


Well, it's a pseudo-random manner, and that's kind of the key - one could easily share the random number generator seed and then build identical sequences of random numbers on two computers.

I've in fact worked out the whole algorithm for sharing AW over network efficiently a decade ago - just nobody felt the need to implement it. :D

But Basic weather is designed to be fast, less performance--hungry and consistent across multiple FlightGear instances


It suffers from the same issue - cloud layers are also pseudo-random distributions, A can be in a cloud and B not - but, well, BW is much more homogeneous across the sky, so it matters less where exactly you are.
Last edited by Thorsten on Thu Oct 06, 2022 6:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rain don´t stop above cloud level

Postby FoxtrotCC » Thu Oct 06, 2022 6:24 pm

@Thorsten/Eagle: Thanks for your explanations!

@Eagle I didn't think so complicated and I hope I understand this right, but I don´t think about the cloud position(s), let it rain beneath them & share them over network.

For the sake of simplicity it rains erverywhere, when the METAR data say it rains, regardless of the clouds (or the cloud level from the METAR data). But somtimes (depends on your settings), with visual tricks, it seems, that it don´t rain above the cloud level but the Planes rain animation (and sound) don´t stop (if the plane support this). If you don't know this, it's confusing at first :-) I hope, I say this correctly.

The second thought was the cloud level from the METAR Data and set the environment/rain-norm to zero to stop the plane rain animation & sound. But it rains erverywhere. If your settings where low and you don´t have/see that visual trick, it rains on the outside and the planes animation & sound stops. Correct? When you see this, this is also confusing.

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