Was great to have the Dev Q&A session back, I really appreciate them and thought this was a really good one, I felt inspired afterwards! 
That ultimately depends on the type of CB, which is part of the complexity of doing it “right.”
Am I the only one that’s concerned about how little discussion there seems to be about aircraft lighting not working in daylight? No exterior lights or interior lights are visible when the sun is up. Turn the lights on and change the time of day to night, and everything glows as it should. Change the time back to day, and it’s like shutting all lights off at the same time.
I feel like I’m the only one having this problem, that’s how little I see it mentioned. I know I’m not though, so I’m baffled that it hasn’t been fixed yet.
Here’s one bug report on a/c lighting in daylight:
Supposedly “fixed” in SU3 but showing as Bug Logged again:
I’m on Xbox so am unable to purchase the Blacksquare Caravan yet - but stumbled on a comment recently where the developer said he’d discovered an undocumented feature that improves visibility of lighting in daylight. Here’s the snippet from the changelog:
“Found an undocumented feature that can be used to improve the appearance of external lighting in MSFS 2024, making them more visible in daylight. Finally!”
Not sure how much of an improvement it is.
This has kind of been beaten to death in other threads, but a huge part crux of the problem is where to draw the line between forecast and dynamic (active) weather. Certain types of weather are too ephemeral and dependent on real-time activity to accurately depict based on forecasts alone. Thunderstorms are the best example of this. Depending on how often a forecast is updated (using observations made), and how tight the grid is, it can miss these entirely in one cycle/refresh. Then the problem becomes reconciling the divergence between forecast and dynamic, leading to the possibility of large “jumps” in the weather.
That speaks nothing to the depiction of various cloud types, which is a mostly different, but important issue.
The livestream was full of other good stuff that needs discussing. Let’s not miss the opportunity to open up those to our impressions too.
Go for it! What was good stuff for you that others might like to discuss?
Because to me, what good is weather radar in a sim that doesn’t have dangerous weather to go through? I’ve flown in the simulator through what actual airliners in real world would fly around to prevent structural failure. Nothing happens. It’s just a blob of fog.
There are no embedded thunderstorms, no TCU clouds. No front of convective activity. Nothing. So what’s the purpose of the radar if you don’t have the weather to back it up.
It’s backwards thinking. For some context. Here is what we had available 10 years ago with P3D and Rex Sky Force 3D and Active Sky Next. This is the old ESP code that FSX was based of.
I plan on watching the VOD tonight.
Thanks for those. That last one was especially impressive. Look how far we have fallen behind. 9 years ago…
Yep, upvoted that a long time ago, it’s certainly not fixed.
HRRR is a forecast model that updates every 15 minutes in the continental US. While I’m not familiar with comparable models that serve the rest of the world, for the sake of this post, I’ll use HRRR as an example.
“The HRRR is a NOAA real-time 3-km resolution, hourly updated, cloud-resolving, convection-allowing atmospheric model, initialized by 3km grids with 3km radar assimilation. Radar data is assimilated in the HRRR every 15 min over a 1-h period adding further detail to that provided by the hourly data assimilation from the 13km radar-enhanced Rapid Refresh”.
Whether Meteoblue utilizes data from this weather model is something I cannot be sure of. However, this refresh rate at a 3x3km resolution seems incredibly sufficient for the needs of flight sim. No real time sensing required. You are right that short-term weather events would not be captured if they occur within this 15 minute period.
At the end of the day, like I’ve said before - weather is hard. But there are certainly better options than what we’re being provided right now.
IRL, the integration of weather data worldwide is an enormous patchwork of systems that are not really the same at all. Not sure it is realistic to expect even a rather sophisticated game to solve for the problems folks are proposing. I have heard that changes in our US government in recent years have gone in the wrong direction for what folks consider better or ideal for our flight sim hobby. Could be why Asobo is proud of what they have coded when they can control the input variables with weather presets. I get it, I rarely use them myself; but the data feed is the problem for them (and by data I mean hard data, not forecast outputs however modified by METARs, etc.).
Meteoblue uses an ensemble of forecast models to feed their own proprietary model.
While HRRR is pretty good (I use it constantly), it’s only used in the US, so you have to contend with discrepancies with the rest-of-world, specifically on the periphery of the model (“hey, why’d that storm suddenly disappear?”). Thus, there’s going to have to be some blending involved to make it contiguous.
Either way, even if those kinds of resolutions are available, we don’t know if that’s the deal Asobo has with MB. I’m guessing there’s a cost/benefit involved in various data packages.
Honestly, a lot of the debate on this could be put to bed if they were more transparent with us as to how it is actually set up to work - most of these threads are based on guesswork that runs the gamut of informed and uninformed opining. I wonder if that falls under legal non-disclosure agreements or something to that effect.
The new aircraft coming, the 5 updated aviator craft, the Australian update, the helicopter ground effect work, the PS5 MP opening, hopefully more stabilty fixes after the beta.
I get the weather issue for sure but other stuff is being missed.
Also, I think, my personal opinion, that they are doing a lot of work that appears to be unappreciated.
As has been said so many times in the forum, this is a project and will remain so until the next iteration becomes the next project. Sooo, your most desired improvements will come with time!
Lets appreciate what we have, an enormous world to explore with aircraft, addons, peripherals etc, etc.
Yeah for some reason all lighting is tied to sunrise and sunset. So if the sun is above the horizon, the lights are off. It’s not as simple as the “too dim in the daytime” that everyone claims. They are non-existent in daytime, depicted simply as a coloured dot with no illumination. Very annoying in bad weather
To be honest it’s one of my only gripes about 2024. Natural lighting is fantastically better in 2024 than it was in 2020 but artificial lighting just looks terrible. Cockpit lighting at night looked great in 2020 and closely matched what you would expect to see in real life. But in 2024, there’s just this weird yellow in all cockpits that covers everything. In the A20N, there are yellow light sources in the cockpit when you turn the cockpit lights on that don’t even come from the cockpit lights. You can see that those are on and white as they should be but there’s a weird yellow drowning them out
You’re totally right. I know the Dev Stream only happened yesterday, but a statement along one of the following two lines would do wonders for those complaining here:
- “Hey guys, we hear your feedback about the weather and are looking into what we can do to improve the depiction of clouds & storms given the data we have available.”
Or
- “Hey guys, we hear your feedback about the weather and are doing what we can but we are limited by X,Y, & Z”.
Couldn’t agree more that the lack of transparency in this area (and the apparent avoiding of the issue in yesterday’s Dev Stream) is doing the developers no favors.
It didn’t help that someone said something to the effect of “it’s not thunderstorm season in Europe, so I can’t test it.” I’m still trying to reconcile the impact of that mindset.
I did immediately think that it’s a big wide world out there when he said that. But it will always be easier to create a storm for a screenshot than it would be to go and find one that looks how you want it to, especially when those sort of towering clouds don’t exist on live weather …