I've found the fog and dust storm work great as a wind direction indicator. To me they are less distracting than the "wind arrow". Great feature and nicely rendered! But could we have a slider to control the amount of fog / dust? As of now, it is quite a lot of it...
Another thing - it seems that fog / dust storm setting is not saved. It goes off anytime you restart neXt. This would need to be persistent to work as wind indicator..
And yet another thing - "nice to have" one. It would be great if neXt could randomize wind direction each time it is started. I made myself some scripts to do this for other sims I use, and just making one for neXt to randomize it and put to prefs.ini before starting neXt, but not everybody can do this probably. An option in neXt would be great for everybody. Could be an option in the combo box with different directions..
Yes, all weather particle effects are not saved in the preferences because they can cause system crashes on older computer systems.
I have just added the random option in the wind settings. If you select 'random' there, the wind direction is determined randomly. And when you restart the simulator, it will also be randomly set.
I will add another particle effect to do what you are looking for.
Wow, I just can't wait for new version. It will be so easy now to get used to wind for everybody - just turn it on once, with random direction, and forget it. Try to not disable it (first week might be hard) and after a few months you know how to handle the wind. Great option, I always wondered why SIM don't have it, thanks a lot :)