Ok, so the results of a few tests:
You can skip this section and jump down to conclusions, this is how I came to those conclusions Basic Weather, ALS / shaders and 3D clouds off
ALS on, still basic weather
Notice that despite the same effective-visibility, ALS renders much, much farther.
A climb reveals this:
One tap of end reveals this:
Let's say that I can see clearly from here to the storage tanks, even though I can see further. Using phi, that's a distance of 2.5 miles, or 4000 meters. That's significantly more than the 800m reported.
Ok, this might be to do with the bug that wkitty is talking about actually.
When I hit z / Z it said Max Visibility, not Visibility!. However, once I had made sure I was definitely in basic weather by opening the dialog again and hitting apply, the actual visibility was 20km. When switching ALS off, the actual visibility reduced to 800m (confirmed in Phi using landmarks about 800m away).
ALS off
ALS on
ALS on, visibility reduced
manually to 800m.
I now set ALS off, visibility to 20km again (although visibility remained at 800m with ALS off), and enabled AW.
Notice that effective visibility is 20km!
With ALS on,
I then removed FG from the metar string:
Notice that effective-visibility is now 800m, which it
never was when FG was reported.
ConclusionsTherefore, I conclude that with ALS on, the visibility reported in METAR is ignored in favour of visibility set by the user using the z/Z key. That's bug number 1 - or maybe intended behaviour?
I also conclude that AW simply cannot parse fog as set by the "FG" parameter, since it uses 3D clouds, and fog is disabled when 3D clouds are enabled.
- Code: Select all
// fog/mist/haze cloud layer does not work with 3d clouds yet :-(
bool setGroundCloudLayer = _rootNode->getBoolValue("set-ground-cloud-layer", false ) &&
false == (fgGetBool("/sim/rendering/shader-effects", false ) &&
fgGetBool("/sim/rendering/clouds3d-enable", false ) )
The real bug here is that
when FG is reported, visibility, in this case 800m, is ignored in favour of trying to render fog - which AW cannot do by design, since it uses 3D clouds!Under every combination of AW on / off, ALS on / off, visibility was 800m when FG was removed - I only got 800m visibility with FG in the METAR with ALS and AW off.
The fix to me seems simple - set effective-visibility to the reported visibility when FG is in the METAR? But then perhaps that is not done for some reason I am missing?
wkitty42 wrote in Sat Sep 22, 2018 2:03 pm:really? i ask because i understand that AW forces 3D clouds to be on regardless of their setting in the dialog...
Precisely my point - AW can't render fog when FG is present in the METAR, because it uses 3D clouds. When FG is NOT present in the METAR, it renders fog perfectly, because it sets effective-visibility to 800.