Disable particle animation but show wind direction
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Dear developers,
thank you very much for this great app and the constant further development. It would be great if there was an option to disable particel animation and still get a wind direction shown (e.g. via static arrows). Currently only the wind force is visible via the colors but not the wind direction.
This is especially important for laptops or mobile phones to save energy. The particle animation needs a lot of performance and doesn't always run smoothly (samsung s8, iMac Safari -- latest operating system).
Many thanks and greetings
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Not a bug.
The performance is proportional to the number of particles being displayed and their length. You can get better graphics performance and efficiency via doing the following and still see the wind direction indications:
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The pictures are missing, so can't tell what the answer was, but yes, your animation is garbage. Instead of time proven, easy to read wind barbs, I have to rely on the combination of color chart and a bunch of floaters. I understand it is your selling point, but please, please, have an option to turn the barbs on.
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Wind barbs are a graphical way to show both the direction and speed of wind. They were specially useful when weather maps were black printed maps.
I used wind barbs during 40 years, but finally in a modern weather app I prefer this type of wind map:w/customised colour scale based on 5kt steps, same as wind barbs
Rather than that one:
On the first one, at a glance I can say that wind forecast in W/NW Scotland is 25kt.
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I idefix37 referenced this topic on
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Interestingly, this screenshot demonstrates that "just" freezing the animation & showing particles with their trails in static positions could be sufficient to address the performance concern, without losing the directional indication & without introducing a different visual paradigm.
I personally would use that mode to avoid my laptop fan spinning up every time I open a windy tab.
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@idefix37 I agree with gwike, it would be great to have an option to "freeze" the particles as if in a screenshot. This would save on CPU usage but still show wind direction. The current display is fine (no need to change to barbs, I dislike those too), but it absolutely bogs my CPU when animated. This would be particularly useful when embedding.
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@nkinnan @idefix37 there is already a user preference for the particle animation speed:
Maybe adding a "None" option there could do the trick, without confusing casual users?
On the technical side, from a cursory look in the web developer console, it seems JS code is driving the animation. Freezing the animation loop in the debugger stopped the animation & CPU usage. Maybe adding "exit after one iteration" logic in that animation loop would go a long ways towards implementing a "no animation" preference?
On a recent paragliding trip I really noticed wind animations chewing through my phone battery quickly. While I was day tripping & had means of recharging my phone at the end of the day, energy usage is usually really tight on extended backcountry trips. This can be a safety issue. It would be great if we could understand wind flow forecasts without quickly running down phone batteries, and without manually toggling all wind display on & off.
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@Fizzo I agree. The animation significantly bogs down my computer. I use Windy all day long to update weather conditions for my crews, but I can't keep it open as the rest of my computer is significantly delayed. We may have to look for another weather site to use if Windy doesn't take your recommendation. Thanks for bringing the topic up!
