The visual effects editor has just been added, and we are looking to add wing
and engine condensation (pictured below) - however, these phenomena are
dependent on temperature, humidity, dew point, and other aircraft data in
order to calculate whether they should appear or not. Currently, there are no
simvars for retrieving the ambient humidity and dew point in the area
immediately surrounding an aircraft. We would really appreciate if these were
implemented.
Can’t believe we still don’t have this variable in 2023.
How hard is it to add?
Seconding this with another use case: I need to to calculate buoyancy in
aerostats. With dewpoint alone we could calculate relative humidity. I wonder,
is this simvar missing because the data isn’t present? I admittedly don’t know
what all would be dependent upon it to know if that’s a silly question.
We’d like to get this as well please.
Will be extremely useful when implemented!
In case it is more or less impossible to get that information from the sim, I
wonder if there might exist some (suitable licensed) library (in C or C++, so
that it could be incorporated into WASM) that could be used to “guesstimate”
relative humidity based on temperature, pressure, altitude, time of day, time
of year, and geographical region? Like “in Winter, the air over continental
Canada is very dry” or “the air over the coast is typically quite humid in
summer”, or “when rain is falling, and you are inside the rain, the relative
humidity is typically also quite large”.
This might have been easier in previous simulators like FSX/P3D, when you
could query the Weather and get a Metar report, which is the only way you
could get the Dew Point from the sim, by decoding the Metar string so, all you
needed was either write your own Metar-decoding routines, or use some existing
library ( there are plenty to choose from, usually free ). However, since all
the Weather API has been deprecated in MSFS, this approach is no longer
feasible, so there must be some other way to obtain that info, an adding a
couple of Enviromental Simvars seems to be the most obvious choice. However,
considering the sim now has an in-game option to read the actual Metar
available to users, I wonder why the Simconnect API is still deprecated:
couldn’t be just reinstated (at least the REQUEST API calls), and pass to the
application the same data users can see when choosing the Metar option ?
I believe I hard somewhere that this will be coming in SU10+, can anyone
confirm this?
Bump. Would like to make AI contrail lifetime dependent on humidity etc.
Would also be beneficial for scenerymakers to guesstimate visibility for
things like approach light activation.
This is actually a great idea, even if it’s day, a scenery package for example
could have the lights turned on automatically depending on the environment
variables like the OP suggested.
A workaround for this would be requesting METAR of the current
position/airport and do it according to that however this is obviously a
workaround and would not yield correct results all the time.
Has anyone been able to implement the “engine inlet condensation” effect?
