Difference between revisions of "Other Tab"

Revision as of 18:00, 15 October 2014 (view source) Mclean (talk | contribs) (→‎Track designer settings) ← Older edit		Revision as of 18:01, 15 October 2014 (view source) Mclean (talk | contribs) (→‎Starting from your position at the last wind update) Newer edit →
Line 9:		Line 9:
	===Starting from your position at the last wind update===		===Starting from your position at the last wind update===
−	[[File:CPTrackDesignerSub1.gif|left]] Use this if you are starting a track from the position you were at when the forecast arrived.	+	[[File:CPTrackDesignerSub1.gif|left]] Use this method if you are starting a track from the position you were at when the game wind update occurred.
	This option starts applying weather from the time of the last wind update.		This option starts applying weather from the time of the last wind update.

---

Revision as of 18:01, 15 October 2014

The following control panels are on the Other tab:

Track designer settings

This control panel is a little difficult to understand at first, but it's very important to get it right. Otherwise your weather routing and track designs will be wrong and you may not know it.

Here's what it does: When you have weather loaded VRTool has access to wind data starting from the beginning of the first forecast right through to the end of the last. When you place a point on the chart to start a new track, or to start a new weather route, VRTool needs to know which point of time in this weather continuum to applies to the start of the track. The settings on this control panel do this alignment between your track and the wind data.

There are three alternative methods - choose the appropriate one depending on where on the chart you intend to start the track or weather route.

Starting from your position at the last wind update

Use this method if you are starting a track from the position you were at when the game wind update occurred.

This option starts applying weather from the time of the last wind update. Enter the wind update time for the last forecast in the [First wind update time] field. This field then updates automatically as the game proceeds.

This option is historical and is not very useful - it has been pretty much superseded by the second option:

Starting from your current position

Use this method if you are starting a track from the current position of your boat. This is what you will normally be doing. Think of it as the "current wind" option.

VRTool looks up the current time in the weather files and starts using data from that point. Weather data is stamped with UTC time, so VRTool needs your time zone to convert your local time to UTC before it does the look-up. Put this in the [time zone] field. Provided you are not doing something unusual with your system settings you can automatically fill this field by clicking in the icon.

Tip for users in New Zealand: If your system time zone is set to (UTC+12.00) Auckland, Wellington the icon returns a time zone of -12 during NZST, or -13 during NZDT. You should use these rather odd settings - they work correctly in VRTool.

Starting from some other position

Use this method if you are drawing a track starting from any arbitrary position. This is useful if you want to start a track or weather routing from a position that you expect to be in some time in the future, for example at a rounding mark further up the course.

To do the alignment you need to estimate when you will be at that position and tell VRTool to start using weather data for that time. In the [From date/time] field enter the start time in UTC.

Careful: As of version 2.30, clicking in the now! link returns the current local time, not the current UTC time. If you want to enter the current time here you must correct the hour to UTC, before adjusting it forward to the estimated time for the start position.

Global settings

Raster chart Images

Monochrome bitmap