Taiganet

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Taiganet
Logo of Taiganet, an illustration of trees.
Taiganet's front page as it appeared on November 7, 2021.
Taiganet's front page as it appeared on November 7, 2021.
Type of site
  • Internet forum
  • Software hosting site
Available inEnglish
Country of originUnited States
URLtaiganet.com
RegistrationRequired to post on forums
Required to view most forums (as of April 2025)
Users1040a
LaunchedSeptember 2002; 22 years ago (2002-09)b
Current statusActive
  • a Number of users as of May 3, 2025
  • b September according to user posts, May or earlier
    according to an official simulator version log[1]

Taiganet is an Internet forum most known for being the official home of the Weather Star 4000 simulator project. Alongside TWC Classics, it is one of the oldest existent websites targeted at The Weather Channel fandom, being established in 2002 by longtime fandom member Bill Goodwill.

History

Taiganet was founded sometime in 2002 (possibly September, although a bug fix log for the simulator suggests May or earlier[1]) by Bill Goodwill as Taiga Networks, the home page for a "small hosting organization located in the little town of Sebago, Maine." In the first few years, the forum had a much broader focus, including support websites that Taiga Networks hosted, an IRC server, a server for the game Unreal Tournament 2004, and general server and broadband-related topics in addition to the Weather Star 4000 simulator.[2] By mid-2004, the main page of the site had taken on a blog format generally discussing broadband topics, with the forums being accessible through a side link. By June of the same year, the site had changed its theme to a slightly more modern one, and had put more emphasis on the simulator in its forum categories. By the beginning of December 2004, the Unreal Tournament category had disappeared due to it being moved to a new website, and the Weather Star 4000 simulator project's category became the focus of the forum.

The beginning of 2005 saw the introduction of a theme that used lighter blue colors than the previous one. By September, another dark theme was added to the site.

The website for Taiganet and the simulator's data service went down for multiple days during the latter half of July 2022, returning on the 23rd. This was caused by a network adapter issue in CentOS, the data server's operating system.[3] The downtime sparked rumors of the end of the simulator. In December 2023, the simulator's data service went offline again for several days, this time due to a historic wind storm in the northeastern US which caused extensive damage to the region's power and internet infrastructure.[4] Sporadic outages in February and March 2024 were caused by a data storage issue with the server hosting the site.[5]

In late April 2025, most of the Taiganet forums were made unavailable to non-registered users after a wave of bots attempting to index all forum posts (some 24,000) hit the site, which could be seen by the unusually high number of guests online during the incidents.[6] Goodwill stated that "rampant abuse by scraper botnets" training AI models led to a slowing of the site's server.[7] This development came after an archival effort by ArchiveTeam was prematurely blocked from completion earlier in the month, mistaken for said botnets; this caused concern from users in the TWC fandom interested in forum content archival.

Weather Star 4000 Simulator

WS4000 Simulator
Logo the WS4000 Simulator, showing a Weather Star 4000 thunderstorm icon on the left side
Appearance of the WS4000 Simulator v4 Current Conditions screen
Appearance of the WS4000 Simulator Current Conditions screen as of version 4.0
Other namesWeatherStar 4000 Simulator (former)
Developer(s)Bill Goodwill (programmer)
Nick Smith (graphics)
Initial releaseMay 2002; 23 years ago (2002-05) or earlier
Stable release
4.1.00002 / April 28, 2025; 8 days ago (2025-04-28)
Written inC++ OpenGL (2018-present)
C# XNA (2011-2016)
Visual Basic .NET (2005-2009)
mIRCscript (2002-2004)
Operating systemWindows, Mac, Linux
Available inEnglish
TypeWeather Star simulator
Websitetaiganet.com

Taiganet is the home of the Weather Star 4000 Simulator (stylized as WS4000 Simulator), the most well-known simulator project in The Weather Channel's community. The project, which simulates the appearance of the Weather Star 4000 local forecast display system used by The Weather Channel from 1990 to 2014, began in 2002 and has gone through four major updates throughout its history. The fourth major version, publicly released in December 2018, for the first time in the project's history expanded the simulator's reach to Linux and macOS. With the 4.1 update in April 2025, macOS support for the simulator was discontinued due to Apple officially deprecating OpenGL in 2018, and newer releases of macOS changing OpenGL behavior which prevented the simulator from starting up anymore.[8] Apple also changed hardware architecture from Intel to ARM CPUs, which added additional complications in creating a native simulator binary for it. A Linux version of the 4.1 release is not currently available but is planned once a newer Linux build environment can be created.

Features

The modern simulator is a recreation of the graphical appearance of the original Weather Star 4000 system with an emphasis on localization and customization. The simulator's configuration allows users to designate locations for current conditions, adjacent and regional cities' observations and forecasts, travel destination cities' forecasts, and radar. It also allows for the customization of flavors (condition/forecast product sequences), music playlists, logos, and advertisement crawls in the lower third.

Available products from the original 4000 on the simulator are current conditions, 8-city local observations, regional conditions/forecast, 36-hour forecast, extended forecast, travel cities forecast, almanac, long-range outlook, and current/local radar. Notably, the original 4000's special marine forecast, tides, and air quality products have never been added to the simulator. At present, due to changes in the National Weather Service's products, the local update and long-range outlook products are not operational.

History

Version alpha (1993-2001)

The first attempts to make a simulator that mimicked the 4000 used an early powerpoint-style program called HSC Interactive, Special Edition, for Windows 3.1. The result was similar to the powerpoint simulators that became popular in TWC communities in the 2000s, but had very primitive graphics in comparison and no automated capability other than slide show functionality. The weather icons used were first attempted by scratch, and later utilized weather.com's 1996 icon set. This version was never made public, and there is no surviving media from it.

Version one (2002-2004)

Version one of the simulator, a rudimentary version based on mIRCscript, was developed in the fall of 2001 and released sometime during or prior to May 2002, when bug fixes were first released. According to a forum post, bug fixes for the version continued from then through March 2003.[1] When this version would be launched by the user, it would start with an intro screen which played audio from a 1990s-era Local Forecast intro which said, "Now, your local forecast, accurate and dependable from The Weather Channel."[9] Files such as the intro audio clip were stored locally and could be changed if desired.[10] This version used radar and forecast maps taken from weather.com.[9] It was very limited in capability, having no efficient way to implement the type of horizontal and vertical scrolling capability required by the ad crawl, warning crawl, and travel cities forecasts.

Version two (2005-2009)

Development on version two started in December of 2004, with closed beta testing commencing on February 21, 2005.[11]. The beta was publicly released on April 30, 2005.[12] This version of the simulator included a graphics overhaul designed by Charles Abel-Lear, animated radar (from the National Weather Service and including a white background), the addition of the Travel Cities Forecast and Local Update products, and improvements to the program's handling of weather data for current weather and forecast products. The new version included an installer and executable containing necessary graphics files so users did not have to manually drag and drop them for the simulator. Improvements were also made to importing music and profile creation for songs.[13]

The program, now a standalone program in contrast to the mIRC version, was written in Visual Basic .NET. The graphics functionality still relied solely on functions available from the windows API/.NET framework which were not designed for the simulator's use case, and as such, had significant performance limitations and caused oddities. These oddities included the extended forecast and regional forecast weather icons not animating in sync with each other, and seeing the icons appear/disappear in sequence on the regional forecast and regional observations screens when they loaded and unloaded. It also included the Travel Cities Forecast performance being erratic/jerky and not lasting a consistent time, fluctuating with CPU load.

Intentions to release an upgraded version of version two, version 2.5, which would change the graphics rendering to DirectX to solve these performance issues, were disclosed publicly in 2006,[14] although it was never released. Many of the goals for this version were pushed into what would become version three, including a change of programming language to C#, more authentic regional maps, an authentic 4000 radar without a white background, a new GUI, and improved scrolling text that would allow for better warning message display.

The last release of version two, a bug fix for version 2.1, was released on August 16, 2009. All development was shifted to version three at that time. This version was still considered a public beta release; there is no evidence to suggest that version two ever officially made it out of beta testing.[15]

Version three (2011-2016)

Work on a proof of concept version three of the simulator using the Microsoft XNA framework began in November 2008, with main development starting in August 2009. Charles Abel-Lear departed as the main graphics developer, due to time constraints. He recommended Nick Smith take over the graphics work, mentioning the exceptionally high quality of Smith's recreations of the 4000's appearance. Nick agreed to join the development staff in July 2009, and a complete graphics overhaul began. This included for the first time, a radar map which actually matched the 4000's, created by Smith. Most of the code from version two was converted to C# line by line.

Closed beta testing of version three began in November 2010, and was deemed ready for public release on October 12, 2011[16]. The updated application utilized C# as its programming language and XNA (which, in turn, used DirectX 9) for the graphics rendering. This was the first version of the simulator that employed a traditional Update/Draw loop game design approach which finally allowed the fine grained control necessary to more accurately duplicate the 4000's graphical behavior, and in a far more efficient and consistent manner compared to the previous versions. All rendering was now done on the GPU, a major upgrade to the WinForms/.NET framework software rendering done in version 2. Version three was divided into two main executable files, one for program configuration and another for the simulator proper. This version was also notable for including newly re-recorded narration by Dan Chandler, the former official voice talent of The Weather Channel, who lent his services to the simulator team in 2011 and 2012 in response to a request they made for his contribution.[17]

As far back as August 2014, plans were made to implement graphics options into the simulator that mimicked the earlier graphics versions of the Weather Star 4000, with screenshots of progress on that update posted around the time. Progress got as far as implementing the 4000's fade transition effects via a DirectX pixel shader.[18] However, further work was delayed for years, due to the continued lack of finding any viable future options in XNA development after Microsoft discontinued it. Eventually, these plans were suspended entirely to begin work on version four instead.[19] All work on version three of the simulator officially ended on November 18, 2016.[20]

On September 27, 2016, Triple C TWC alerted Taiganet staff to an eBay listing in which a seller was selling portable computer kiosks with the simulator installed.[21] The seller advertised the simulator as the primary selling point of the listing with no credit to Taiganet.[22] Feedback on the seller's eBay profile noted that the seller was also selling the same kiosks with a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator loaded onto the system.[23]

Version four (2018-present)

Development of version four of the simulator began in fall 2015[20] and was fully released for Windows, macOS, and Linux in December 2018. Besides the application being brought over to C++ as its programming language, the GPU rendering was moved entirely to OpenGL in order to make it easier for the simulator to be cross-platform. The move to OpenGL required writing an entire 2D graphics engine from scratch (internally dubbed Taigine, a portmanteau of the words Taiganet and Engine). This was a significant contrast to the XNA framework, which already included a 2D graphics engine that handled sprite batching, font rendering, camera projections, and translating between screen coordinates. All of these had to be coded from scratch and tested before any higher level development on the simulator itself could commence.

Version four was the first version of the simulator that was able to natively run on Linux and macOS, in addition to Windows. It also incorporated a new server that handled and processed data requests for most of the simulator's products, in order to make it easier to adapt to and quickly fix issues caused by periodic format or url changes to NWS products without having to build a new version of the simulator program each time. This proved invaluable when the Aviation Weather website changed their data source URLs in October of 2023.[24] The processing and parsing code for most of the simulator's products were moved from the simulator program itself to this data server backend, and implemented with a mixture of C++, php, and bashscript. The data server was built with dual Intel Xeon server multicore CPUs to handle the high amount of simultaneous CPU-intensive (see below) requests from the simulator, and runs on CentOS.

The simulator's data server currently provides data for the Current Conditions, Latest Observations, Regional Observations, Extended Forecast, Regional Forecast, Travel Cities Forecast, Lower Display Line Conditions, and NWS advisory and warning products, which display on a full screen vertical scroll, and a lower display line horizontal crawl, respectively. The Local Forecast, Local Update, Current Radar, and Local Radar products are still downloaded and processed within the simulator itself. The Almanac relies on a built in algorithm for sunrise and sunset calculations, and has an internal calculation table for the moon phases that currently extend to the end of the 21st century.[25]

Forecast data for the Extended Forecast, Regional Forecast, and Travel Cities Forecast products rely on digital forecast grids from the National Weather Service's Digital Forecast Database, which are encoded in grib format. This is a major upgrade to previous versions of the simulator, which relied on rudimentary text parsing of NWS Zone Forecast Product text in order to generate a forecast. The discrete digital values for weather conditions, sky cover, temperatures, and wind allowed for the simulator development team to create a mapping table from the forecast value datasets to actual WeatherSTAR 4000 forecast types seen during its years of service. Most of the work on creating this mapping table was done by Nick Smith,[26] who referred to an extensive collection of vintage 4000 footage.

The grib format is highly compressed, and thus retrieving forecast information from a Continental US grib store for a given latitude and longitude coordinate point is a significantly CPU intensive process. The data server attempts to mitigate this issue by distributing the load in parallel over its CPU cores, as well as creating local caches once the data is decompressed.

One of the major changes to the simulator in this version was the configuration and simulator display applications being made one standalone application again, made possible by using the Dear ImGui project. In addition to unifying both configuration and simulation into the same application, having a GUI rendered entirely within OpenGL freed the GUI development process from having to handle the radically different GUI frameworks in Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The configuration process itself was revised so that ASOS ID numbers and other codes for weather data could be more easily found by uninitiated users by a simple search within the application. The lack of a streamlined search process for these codes was a longtime weakness of the simulator as these codes were often spread out across multiple websites and required in-depth guides to be written by development team members.

In September 2019, the simulator's Outlook product was reported malfunctioning due to data format changes from the Climate Prediction Center.[27] This was temporarily resolved by contacting the CPC regarding the changes,[28] but several months later, the source data again got corrupted and was not fixed. This resulted in the Outlook product no longer functioning correctly. It was determined that the best solution to the issue was to change data sources to use the CPC's shapefile products instead, which will be done in a future release.[29]

In December 2020, the National Weather Service discontinued its n0r radar image echoes product, which broke the simulator's radar functionality.[30]

On April 16, 2024, following multiple website and data outages caused by repeated malicious on-site acts of disconnecting the data server's network and power cords, developer Bill Goodwill took down the public download for the simulator. The data outage affected nearly all simulator products besides the 36-hour text forecast and Almanac products, in addition to the already existing long-term radar and outlook outages. The data server remained offline for several weeks while Goodwill coordinated long distance efforts to get the server temporarily relocated to a safer location, and then arrange transportation from there to move the server across the US. The download was made available again in June 2024 once the data server was successfully relocated and brought back online.[31]

On April 28, 2025, version 4.1, the first public release for the simulator in over five years, was released. This new update drastically overhauled the program's radar data handling structure, changing the radar source to Iowa State University's radar data repository. The update also incorporated a radar basemap revision by Nick Smith, and made it more clear to users that the simulator's long-range outlook product was not currently operational. The outlook itself was changed so it would no longer attempt to download the corrupted files on the Climate Prediction Center's server, and show blank for the time being.[32]

Graphical history

Version 1 (2002-2004)
  • Intro

    Intro

  • Current Conditions

    Current Conditions

  • Latest Observations

    Latest Observations

  • Local Forecast

    Local Forecast

  • Almanac

    Almanac

  • Extended Forecast

    Extended Forecast

  • Current Radar

    Current Radar

See also

Other community forums

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Bug fix history of the old mIRC version". Taiganet. March 6, 2003. Archived from the original on December 13, 2007. Retrieved April 7, 2024.
  2. ↑ "Taiga Networks". Taiga Networks. April 10, 2004. Archived from the original on April 10, 2004. Retrieved November 7, 2021.
  3. ↑ "Forecast Obs and Bulletin data server status". Taiganet. 2023-06-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. ↑ "Forecast Obs and Bulletins data server status". Taiganet. December 18, 2023. Retrieved April 4, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  5. ↑ "What causes this site to go out?". Taiganet. March 12, 2024. Retrieved April 4, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. ↑ "Re: Forum visibility now restricted to registered members only". 2025-04-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. ↑ Goodwill, Bill (April 22, 2025). "Forum visibility now restricted to registered members only". Taiganet. Retrieved April 27, 2025.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  8. ↑ "Mac OS app not opening at all". Taiganet. 2024-06-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "The old obsolete mIRC version". Taiganet. February 27, 2007. Retrieved April 7, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  10. ↑ "Alternate intro". Taiganet. July 1, 2004. Retrieved April 7, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  11. ↑ "The closed beta has begun as of Feb 21". Taiganet. February 21, 2005. Retrieved April 7, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  12. ↑ "How the public beta will work". Taiganet. April 30, 2005. Retrieved April 7, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  13. ↑ "A list of features of the new 2.0.x version". Taiganet. January 12, 2005. Retrieved April 7, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  14. ↑ "A list of goals for the new overhauled version of the emulator". Taiganet. July 25, 2006. Retrieved April 8, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  15. ↑ "Get The Public Beta Here". Taiganet. August 16, 2009. Archived from the original on March 26, 2010. Retrieved April 7, 2024.
  16. ↑ "v3 Progress pt 2". Taiganet. October 12, 2011. Retrieved April 4, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  17. ↑ polarbear (September 21, 2012). "A behind the scenes look at how the narration was created and integrated into the simulator". Taiganet. Retrieved February 15, 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  18. ↑ "Re: Discussion & screenshots of upcoming v3.5". Taiganet.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  19. ↑ "Discussion & screenshots of upcoming early 90s styles". Taiganet. August 28, 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 "Version 3.x end of life". Taiganet. November 18, 2016. Retrieved April 4, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  21. ↑ Triple C TWC (September 27, 2016). "Selling the simulator?". Taiganet. Retrieved April 4, 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  22. ↑ "Weather Station custom location weather channel wireless internet". eBay. Archived from the original on September 29, 2016. Retrieved April 4, 2024.
  23. ↑ "eBay Feedback Profile for deeltree". eBay. Archived from the original on September 29, 2016. Retrieved April 4, 2024.
  24. ↑ "Forecast Obs and Bulletins data server status". Taiganet. 2023-10-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  25. ↑ "Re: v4 - New engine, new language, cross platform". Taiganet. 2017-09-09.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  26. ↑ "Re: Questions about the forecasting system". Taiganet. 2025-03-17.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  27. ↑ "30 Day Outlook not working?". Taiganet. 2019-09-03.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  28. ↑ "Re: 30 Day Outlook not working?". Taiganet. 2019-09-11.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  29. ↑ "Re: A Sight for Sore Eyes". Taiganet. 2025-05-02.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  30. ↑ "Radar data not loading "Temporarily Unavailable"". Taiganet. December 28, 2020. Retrieved January 23, 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  31. ↑ "Downloads down for the future?". Taiganet. 2024-06-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  32. ↑ Goodwill, Bill (January 1, 2019). "Changelog". Taiganet. Retrieved April 27, 2025.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

External links

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