BBC Weatherbreak
Preview release available now
BBC Weatherbreak is a project currently under development, which aims to accurately recreate BBC Weather's on-screen graphics, as a way of illustrating current weather conditions using live data.
Initially, it was a proof-of-concept demo, but as the scope of the project has expanded, its likely that it will need to be significantly rewritten. Because of the time involved in this, combustion.studios is releasing a preview version of the work so far.
This preview release demonstrates a static tour of the country, using latest observations data. The current tour takes a couple of minutes to complete, and will loop indefinitely. The final version will contain a wider variety of forecasts, localised information, weather warnings etc.
By downloading this preview version, you are helping combustion.studios in the development of BBC Weatherbreak. This is the first project to be built around a lot of new technologies, and has not yet been widely tested on a variety of configurations. Please report any issues you encounter with installation or running the application at our bug tracker.
- Real-time 3D rendering of live weather data
- Scales to any screen resolution
- Live weather summary with 'mood' images downloaded from Flickr
- Animated rain particle effects
BBC Weatherbreak will install a number of dependencies during installation, however you should ensure your system meets a number of other requirements before installing.
- Windows XP SP2+ or Vista
- .NET Framework 2 or above
- Graphics card supporting Shader Model 1.1 or greater
- Recommended: 512Mb RAM or above
- You may need administrator privileges to install certain features
This is a pre-release version, and there are a number of known issues you should be aware of.
- Currently does not install as a screensaver - an icon will be made on the desktop
- A crash on starting BBC Weatherbreak may be caused by missing DirectX components. Ensure your installation is up-to-date before filing a bug report.
- There are aesthetic issues including inconsistent colour on the map and flickering geometry edges
- Installation does not currently stringently check all dependencies are intact - missing components are the cause of many crashes
- Press Alt+F4 to quit the application
