SU5 was the Xbox thing. SU7 was the weather thing. Funnily enough I’ve just been digging through the old release notes for this related subject. This is probably where the most damage was done, admittedly to fix other things though.
SU7 build 1.21.13.0 November 2021:
Weather
- Improved METAR ingestion into live weather
- You can now consult real airport METARs during flight from the Weather panel (only when Live Weather is active)
- Updated .WPR file versioning for weather preset edition. Now handles both coverage and density for cloud layers (Formerly density became coverage). Backward compatibility has been handled
- It is now possible to put clouds below sea level (-400m) for regions such the Dead Sea
- Fixed AGL / MSL UI display in weather panel
- Setting wind with weather panel is more coherent with in-game wind near ground
- Fixed unit conversions in weather panel
- Minor UI improvements in weather panel
SU7 build 1.21.17.0 January 2022:
Weather
- Test - Better management of different METARs to avoid hard weather transitions
- Test - Fixed abnormal temperatures above FL450
-Fixed custom weather preset save data
- Test - Live Weather clouds on ground are now displayed as fog
- Test - Rain and fog now correctly receive shadows from clouds above
- Test - Fixed “10SM” metar visibility
- Test - Fixed live weather refering to AMSL instead of AGL
SU7 build 1.21.18.0 January 2022:
Weather
- Improved management of high proximity METARs to avoid hard weather transitions
- Fixed abnormal temperatures above FL450
- Fixed custom weather preset save data
- Live Weather clouds on ground should now be displayed as fog
- Rain and fog now correctly receive shadows from clouds above
- Fixed “10SM” metar visibility
- Fixed live weather refering to AMSL instead of AGL
You can find all these here:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/tag/release-notes
Though rolling back through the older releases, concentrating on items that are weather/cloud related, I came across this one:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/release-patch-notes-1-16-2-0-now-available/404619
- Reduced weather data bandwidth
It doesn’t go into any more detail than that, so I’m unsure as to whether that means they managed to reduce the amount of bandwidth used between Meteoblue, and MS, or weather data between them or us. And also how was the data reduced? Did they compress or did they just send less data, potentially less fidelilty?