Weather Radar implementation

[JeeHell]

Hello,

Is there a possibility, with the new atmosphere model, to see a proper weather radar implementation?
I have tried the shader based PDK sample provided since v5.x though to be honest I am quite discouraged by that one since it means creating an additional view (with FPS impact etc) then needing to extract the texture somehow for use in external applications.
Is there a way to some day see a call like weather get cloudstate, but returning an actual precipitation level instead if a number of cloud layers in that area?

With best regards
Jean Luc

[Beau Hollis]

Yes. I'll make a ticket to look into this. We did have it working during the beta but visual changes adjustments to the volume clouds seem to have thrown things off. When drawing into the GDATA sensor, we're scaling the density of the volume clouds based on the precipitation of the layer to get a final intensity that correlates. The scalar is likely too small now. If you switch to the major thunderstorm theme, and open up the weather radar top down view, you should see some clouds showing up but not colorized as intensely as you'd expect.

The raw weather radar view seems to have an issue even with volume clouds disabled. We will also look into this. It looks like the atmospherics are modifying the image.

As for a version of this that does not require a view, it may be possible in the future. We do have an internal system in place for querying the precip value from the GPU. We use it to determine when the precipitation effects should draw for a given camera. Hooking up an SDK call to do a query at a given lat lon value would be fairly easy to set up on our end, but it might not scale well for generating a map. We would probably want to generate a map on the GPU and read that back. We don't have plans to do that currently, but it's certainly possible.

Another option might be a cloud-only view which would be very cheap on the CPU side since all the data needed to generate it is already on the GPU.

[JeeHell]

Hello Beau,

Thanks for the fixes on the WX radar. The sample is working for me.
Only things is I need to undock the panel or the texture flickers with the terrain background in some greyish form.
And the tilt does not seem to have any effect (the range and beam width do work).

Best wishes for Christmas and end of year celebrations,
Jean Luc

[JeeHell]

So actually the pitch is broken because the SetPBH call has no effect, I could fix it by using SetFrustumOffsetPBH and then that works;
I am still very much interested in a completely programmatic way of accessing the weather data using a LAT/LON/ALT/tilt/beam width input, and retrieving it in a binary array through the PDK.

Thanks for all,
Jean Luc