DCS Reference/Dynamic Weather

Tools and workflow

To create good, deliberate dynamic weather systems, you absolutely need the following:

• A good zip manipulation tool — anything that lets you seamlessly browse, extract, and add to the file structure of a zip file.
• Notepad++ or a similarly competent text editor. No, not notepad.
• A conversion tool for angles and distances (Windows 10's built-in calculator does this well enough).
• Patience.
• Patience.
• Patience.

You need these because the basic flow of weather creation is one of:

• Creating a dummy mission where you place trigger zones as a first approximation of the pressure fronts.
• Extracting the “mission” Lua file from the dummy .miz.
• Opening the mission file in your text editor of choice.
• Copying the trigger zone coordinates (and possibly sizes) to a weather parameters.
• Re-inserting the edited mission file into the .miz.
• Reload the mission.
• Preview, hate actual result.
• Start over.

General considerations

Performance and bugs

performance hit

Preparation

DCS mission editor UI

Setting up the mission editor display options for weather editing.

Using trigger zones to place pressure fronts

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  Editing trigger zones.

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  Extracting the ‘mission’ file

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  Editing the ‘mission’ file.

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  Manually edited weather.

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  End result in-game.

Manipulating pressure fronts

Creating multiple weather fronts.

Combinations

Weather editing with CombatFlite

CombatFlite