I agree Asobo/Microsoft is not focusing on the core simultaion part, but I think the audience of “core simmers” is a partially responsible for the weather being like this. In my experience a lot of us “core simmers” just fly A to B on a highly automated airliner not ever simulating failures or touching anything outside of normal procedures. For a lot of the simulation crowd, if the METAR matches and the clouds look pretty it’s realistic enough, a thunderstorm formation it’s just an inconvenience for their A to B flight on VATSIM because they didn’t check the weather maps and SIGMETs when Simbrief generated the flight. And I was this because I used to be that type of user untill some years ago.
The weather used to be better before SU7, but it was that part of the crowd that complained to Asobo to change it, not the casual players flying over their house. The weather was not always good, but where I used to fly it wasn’t off by much, which is totally normal in real life for the weather to not match METAR perfectly, and the same happened with the density altitude simulation, people were not used to that in previous sim, and i think initially vPilot was reading the wrong altitude vars, which caused problems for enroute traffic on VATSIM, but thankfully vPilot fixed the problem and i wasn’t removed from MSFS. When X-Plane 12 released, some people complained about the same, the weather was not matching METAR perfectly like they were used to, but the devs dind’t bow down and released a blog post explaining why the METAR isn’t some holy word.
The problem is discerning between the chicken and egg. METAR should follow the weather, not the other way around. That said, prior to 2020 SU7 the weather, while it looked great, was pretty inaccurate, much worse than now. You could pull observations and forecasts to plan your flight, but unless you were in an area dealing with long-term stability (away from fronts and/or diurnal storm generation), it was was way too far off of reality and it was very easy to be surprised by unrealistic, often sudden conditions that you had no way to reliably predict. That is not conducive to flying.
My understanding is that they added the METAR thing to snap at least an airport (that has one) to some sort of temporal, local truth. In this way, using an aging forecast to generate weather wouldn’t completely annihilate an area with nonsense as it diverges several hours after the run. It’s still that way to an extent - we see the weather in non-METAR areas diverge from reality until they’re refreshed every so often, leading to similar jumps. It’s just marginally better than it was and could possibly use a fresh look to see how divergent it gets and whether more improvements can be made.
But using the METARs at least provides a reliable, hourly point of reference at the airport so you can use flight planning and look-ahead tools to make decisions… near the airport. It’s just implemented too ham-fistedly and affects the visuals to the point it’s jarringly noticeable. Ultimately it’d be nice to turn that off, but I’m not willing to accept the divergent forecast runs as they stand as a replacement because it makes for sloppy decision-making (sloppier than the current blended format).
I think it was dependent on region because i don’t remember seeing much deviation from the reported weather back then, but I could be wrong because I had way less knowledge on weather at the time than now.
I think the X-Plane model would be a good middle term, it uses GRIB data and augments the local weather with METAR, as the METAR gets older, the sim relies gradually more on GRIB than METAR, the collateral effect tho, is that sometimes you get the weird looking clouds. Since 12.4.1, I’ve seen way less weird clouds in X-Plane, but the weather also got worse since that update. So i guess this is probably the tradeoff Asobo is facing, I prefer having the weird looking clouds sometimes but having a better weather simulation overall, but I think most people don’t.
For me, the lighting in X Plane 12 more than pays for the occasional odd cloud formations. If Asobo could just fix the overall lighting and relative haze, it would mask the nasty clouds.
it is basically looking just like FS2020 looked at alle the promo material AND for some time even ingame, before SU3/5
Why do I find so many posts on the quality of clouds in the sim in the “World Discovery” section? What does complaining about the clouds have to do with discovering the world? Shouldn’t these threads go in “General Discussion” or something?
(As a real pilot, I’m perfectly happy with the clouds in the sim, btw. I’m here to discover the world and fly lots of planes)
These clouds and flying environment are terrible:
It just stands out like a sore thumb. The textures/ortho/ground is so nicely done in FS2024, but the color grading of the sky and the quality of the weather just brings the whole thing down terribly.
That looks awful, I see those wavy cloud formations pretty frequently. I am not sure if that is supposed to be cirrus or not?? It’s odd because once in a while I see cirrus clouds that are pretty convincing at least from the ground. I grabbed a shot a few days ago…I was in Dev mode at the time, no other addons running and pretty sure I had live WX running…
I posted these the other day to the StrataWx Discord. Clouds are by that program, and REX Atmos Core is doing the colour correction.
Dawn takeoff from Anchorage.
There were either 4 or 5 layers of clouds here, and SWX supports up to 24. The built-in weather preset generator for 2024 only allows 3, I think.
How are you finding the StrataWx?
Is it still like Active Sky where a weather preset applies to the whole globe?
I was tempted to try it out…
Pretty much the same as ASFS but I have seen even more variety with it. Less things you can tinker with, nowhere near ASFS. Supports Simbrief OFP import to facilitate weather along the route, just like ASFS.
But ultimately it won’t give you weather in the distance. Only Asobo/Meteoblue can do that. At least until MS/Asobo give us that weather API to allow third parties to fix weather if they are unwilling or unable to do so.
Here’s another interesting comparison shot. Where I am, we had some very nice cirrostratus/cirrocumulus clouds this morning. I took a shot outside to the east and compared to XP12 and MSFS 2024. Again, XP nails the clouds and atmospheric lighting effect. MSFS…the usual low level, translucent cumulus…
Live shot:
XP12:
MSFS:
X-Plane 12 is so far ahead
So often its that collection of little individual puff ball clouds attempting to look like a larger whole that lets it down.
