Other Tab

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 VRTool needs to know which point of time in this weather continuum to applies to the start of the track.

The three options available are:

time from last wind update.

This option starts applying weather from the time of the last wind update. Use this if you are starting a track from the position you were at when the forecast arrived. 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This option is historical and is not very useful - it has been pretty much superseded by the second option:

windgrid timestamp + a time zone.

This is the option to use if you are starting a track from current position of your boat, which 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.

a given date/time.