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

Weather editing with CombatFlite

CombatFlite