CAT II / IIIb - what's going on?

[legoboyvdlp]

Hello,




You would think the first is CAT IIIb, but it is actually CAT II. I'm not too sure what's going on. Maybe Advanced Weather cannot parse the FG parameter or...?


With ground haze set to thick with CAT II, you can barely see the taxiway, while with CAT III, you can see as far as CAT II with minimum haze?

[Thorsten]

The on-screen text on the second one suggests that AW denied your request (for whatever reason).

CAT-III here gives me 100 m visibility here (you're surrounded by a wall of fog).

What can I say - Nasal seems to do weird things for you... not sure why.

[Mihajlo]

I think I know how to reproduce it. Did you disable AW autostart in launcher by any chance ? If you do that and try to start AW in-sim you'll get this error message. I think this started to occur when James fixed an autostart problem where you couldn't switch off the autostart in the launcher and AW would autostart regardless of your choice.

[legoboyvdlp]

I've had that error message ever since I've used Advanced Weather back in 3.2 (on different hardware) - it generally occurs when you try to restart AW when it is already running.

Anyway,


effective-visibility 4666m with CAT IIIB scenario

switching to basic then to advanced again,


effective visiblity over 8000m, CAT II scenario, yet the weather is far foggier.

[Mihajlo]

I don't think I've seen this error message when restarting AW, but I didn't switch between AW and BW, so maybe that's why. The first time I've seen it is when I tried selecting AW in the weather dialog when it is disabled in launcher (it occurs 100% of the time), but it may not be related to your problem.

[Thorsten]

I can't test launcher-driven issues at the moment (I compile without Qt), but I've tried on three different machines and I am seeing 100 m visibility for CAT-III on all of them, so as far as I can determine the Nasal part of things is sound.

[Mihajlo]

If it helps in any way here is a picture of the message I get in nasal console: https://ibb.co/eqCxpz

[Thorsten]

I'm sorry, unless someone tells me how to reproduce that here, there's nothing I can do. It simply does not happen for me - and it's not peculiar to one install, it happens on none of my machines (including a 10 year old computer and a new high-performance laptop).

[Mihajlo]

Unfortunately It requires the launcher which you don't have. You have to disable AW autostart in the launcher, then try to start AW in the weather dialog. AW won't start and it should trigger the same message that Legoboyvdlp posted and I'm guessing it should trigger the nasal error as well.

[wkitty42]

FWIW: i have to say that they're working OK for me, too... i have the latest 2018.3.0 beta code from the repos... i start with the launcher with AW enabled and live METAR data... once the sim is running, i go to F10->Environment->Weather, switch the "Weather conditions" drop box from "Live data" to "CAT II minimum" and click on the [OK] button... i repeated the moves and this time selected "CAT IIIb minimum"... there is a very noticeable lack of visibility in CATIIIb than CATII...

here're my CATII and CATIIIb METAR strings...

Code: Select all

CATII:   XXXX 012345Z 15010KT 0400 -RA BKN001 OVC002 08/06 Q0990
CATIIIb: XXXX 012345Z VRB01KT 0100 -RA FG OVC001 OVC002 02/02 Q0990


EDIT: Mihajlo posted while i was writing the above... i'm testing Mihajlo's scenario now... will be back with updates...

EDIT2: ok, yes... there is a problem if FG is started with the launcher and the launcher is set with AW off... when you get into FG and go to turn on AW, you get the following as well as the message on screen about the local weather being aborted... it is important that it says local weather... this does not happen if you try a second time to turn on AW in the sim...

here's the sequence from the command line...

1. start the launcher "FGFS --launcher"
2. check that Weather->Active Weather is turned off
3. click [Fly!] button
4. FG loads with basic weather and the following console output...

Code: Select all

[...]
Reading materials from /home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Materials/regions/materials.xml
Reading systems from Path "/home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Aircraft/Generic/generic-systems.xml"
Initializing HUD Instrument
Reading sound sound from Path "/home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Aircraft/ufo/ufo-sound.xml"
Creating subsystems took:3798
Splash screen progress binding-subsystems
Volcanic activity on.
Submodels: Unable to read AI submodel list
setWeight() - not supported for ufo


5. now, in-sim, F10->Environment->Weather-> enable AW->click [OK] adds the following to the above...

Code: Select all

Request detected to initialize Advanced Weather on startup...
Loading local weather routines...
Starting hard-coded terrain presampling
Nasal runtime error: vector index 0 out of bounds (size: 0)
  at /home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Nasal/local_weather/local_weather.nas, line 390
  called from: /home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Nasal/local_weather/local_weather.nas, line 3868
  called from: __dlg:weather, line 175
Reading materials from /home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Materials/regions/materials.xml
Reading systems from Path "/home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Aircraft/Generic/generic-systems.xml"
Initializing HUD Instrument
Reading sound sound from Path "/home/myuser/flightgear-dev/fgdata-ng/Aircraft/ufo/ufo-sound.xml"
Creating subsystems took:3798
Splash screen progress binding-subsystems
Volcanic activity on.
Submodels: Unable to read AI submodel list
setWeight() - not supported for ufo


AW is not active even though the dialog says it is... you have to run the dialog a second time and click [OK] and then AW starts as desired... this was also started from in the sim and NOT a "request to initialize AW on startup" like the message(s) say...

[Mihajlo]

Wkitty can you also try to disable AW autostart in the launcher and then try to start AW from the weather dialog and see if that work for you? That triggers the same error message for me that Jonathan posted.

[wkitty42]

i just did and previously noted that i would do exactly that

[Mihajlo]

Wkitty, thanks for testing this. I saw your message after I posted. This confirms the issue is not specific to my system.

[wkitty42]

:thumbsup:

[Thorsten]

This confirms the issue is not specific to my system.

I'm talking about the CAT-III issue (which I still have no clue about).

The launcher thing is probably easy - one of you can have a go at it - look closely at everything that calls set_tile() - probably the call is duplicated when the property set by the launcher changes to true in-sim.