That one raised my eyebrows.
They don’t have the tool set to inject data taken from a live segment to see how it behaves repeatedly as they tweak their modeling?
Really?
It’s an “oopsie, the data went by and we missed it. I guess we need to wait until next year’s rainy season to see how it shows up in our live weather model.”?
C’mon.
Yes, I sat up when Seb said that.
Weather patterns change over time. We recently had a few rare winter thunderstorms (thunder snow?) where I live. I’d hope live weather is data driven, not just expected seasonal average.
Yeah, for me it sounded like a “not here, not my problem” dismissal. If the conceptual aspect of this is that insular, then I don’t know what to think.
I always want to give them the benefit of the “not our native language”, but that really only goes so far.
Some of these issues have been repeated so many times that the language barrier cannot be the issue.
While I agree that weather needs some improvement, this discussion is getting progressively more and more annoying with some of you twisting every word as you see fit.
Nobody said “there are no thunderstorms in europe so we can’t test it”.
The comment from the chat started as “My biggest complaint is a lack of thunderstorm generation and depiction…” which Seb simply understood as somebody complaining about not seeing thunderstorms. That’s it, just a misunderstanding.
If we’re asking for improvements, it has to be done in a clear manner. And perhaps the community managers can also help with passing the feedback to the developers so the points are not lost in translation.
This is kind of a problem with those questions. All of you are “up to speed” on the issue because you sit here all day complaning and comparing screenshots, talking about 20 things at once, but then you run to developers yelling “it’s broken, fix it!!!” while they have a little idea in the moment what you’re talking about.
Time to take a deep breath I think.
I try to give a lot of benefit of the doubt as well, but the language barrier this smacks of is more of a technical one rather than a cultural one.
Here’s the quote:
“If it’s live weather it’s not easy because you need to be in a thunderstorm season, so um basically, find some in live weather and test that it’s happening. So right now there’s not many in Europe, for example, but yeah. In your specific cases if it’s a live weather issue we have to go look.”
I’m not reading that as a misunderstanding of the question. I’m reading it as a lack of willingness to test a condition unless it’s happening locally. Thunderstorms are happening all over the world all the time. In some places there is a plethora of near-real-time data with which to corroborate sensor observations with what’s being depicted in the sim. The Midwest US is a prime example at the moment.
Either that, or it was interpreted that the person asking questions is only flying in Europe, so they shouldn’t expect to see thunderstorms right now, anyway, which is a differently, but equally wild take.
Meanwhile, there have been numerous presentations and explanations of the discrepancies between real-world and in-sim weather in various forum threads.
To add: in no way am I saying there is an easy solution to this, but the handwave dismissals are something else.
You are right to an extent. Talking in circles and not laying out the issues in a clear, concise format does no good. I think the issue is more-so that users have laid out their perspective of live weather issues and the development team continues to not acknowledge the complaints (or at least, not respond to them with anything substantive), leading to the frustration you see on these forums.
Again. The chat question mentions “Lack of thunderstorm generation”. Then Seb starts his answer with “No thunderstorms…”. It couldn’t be more clear that Seb did not really understand the question, not sure what you’re trying to see in that response.
And IMHO, that comment wasn’t something that needed to be asked in the moment as it was extremely broad anyway.
I think there needs to be a better way of passing information to developers when it comes to complex issues like this.
That big weather thread has like 2000 posts and it’s just madness to read through it.
Half the posts are just unconstructive nonsense while people talk about 15 different things. Some want some magical visibility slider, some want anvil clouds, some want better graphics, some complain about inaccuracy, wind, cloud color, layers… it’s million different points.
But then it all boils down to “pls Asobo fix broken live weather” on the stream, while some are surprised that devs have no idea what we want.
So perhaps the community managers (or whatever) can help summarizing the points for developers in a human readable format.
The weather discussion to me is as simple as this. “They only want to talk about what they care about”.
There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of forum posts where people post their examples, concerns, and requests to open up the code for 3rd parties. But what do we get 6 years into this dual platform project? “We have to go look at it”
I remember clearly that in one of the old dev updates, a similar question was asked. Jorg said something to the effect of “ Yeah, there’s something there. We have to go talk to Meteoblue. We have several meetings with them about weather. Maybe we do open up the code for people like Hifi “. That was almost two years ago if my memory serves me correctly. Here we are, 2nd quarter of 2026. We’re acting like it’s a new problem…..
Instead, we get a lengthy conversation about CFD dynamics. Honestly, the hesitance of who wanted to answer the question when it was first asked on this dev Q&A tells me it’s something they simply do not want to talk about. Instead let’s focus on yet another 1920-1940s plane, another famous flyer, another DLC content.
People, all of these things don’t matter unless we have a good sky with realism to fly in. Let’s rethink what we’re doing here.
Like X-Plane has had for years you mean?
I couldn’t agree more. I was going to say something about the forum thread formatting. I’m in no position to tell the Moderators/CM’s how the forum should be managed. For the most part, it works very well (and thank you to the volunteers that keep this place clean).
But like you said, a 2000 post weather thread is not easy to read. And when new threads are opened up about specific issues, they just get merged with the larger thread. It’s unclear to me if the weather complaints should be under “Wishlist” or “Bug Reports” because technically it’s operating “as designed” as far as we’re aware. Maybe the moderators can provide some insight into how the community can best make their voices heard about focused weather complaints, without their thoughts being lumped into a mess of an unreadable thread.
The chat question was “I am a professional pilot. One of my biggest complaints is lack of thunderstorm generation and depiction. While I see the weather is being partially worked on, why isn’t it getting the full attention and development it deserves? Good, bad, or indifferent, the weather we operate is 100% of the time [sic]. What is being done regarding weather and what is occuring to make it better?”
Prior to the quote I started above, his response started with:
“So I think, uh, no thunderstorms. I think that’s probably in live weather because in custom presets you can create thunderstorms yourself. So if it’s live weather, we have had a lot of issues in the past about the live weather having too many, too little, too many [thunderstorms]. So I haven’t looked into this lately. It’s not… I don’t know if anyone has this on the bug list or if there’s a thread but we can definitely look into it. Uh it’s not always thunderstorm.”
I’ll reiterate the remainder of the quote for easier context:
“If it’s live weather it’s not easy because you need to be in a thunderstorm season, so um basically, find some in live weather and test that it’s happening. So right now there’s not many in Europe, for example, but yeah. In your specific cases if it’s a live weather issue we have to go look.”
I’ll also add that immediately after this part of the response, the answer pivoted to improvements in cloud turbulence and onboard weather radar.
I take this to mean either of the options from what I surmised above - that they’re not taking the person who asked the question seriously because they’re couldn’t possibly be flying in an area that has thunderstorms right now, or they haven’t had the awareness to test it because it’s not happening locally - out of sight, out of mind.
As far as the noisy threads - that’s on them to an extent because they haven’t really ever addressed it. I mean, it’s right there in the quote - they say they don’t know it’s even happening (back to out of sight, out of mind).
The longer the discrepancies go on without explanation, the more people pile into those discussions, again with the gamut of informed opinion (or lack thereof). (To add: @SN0WY33 is right - the moderation and conglomeration of those threads also makes them unwieldy, but back to the point above - a lot of it is happening because there hasn’t been much acknowledgement, much less explanation from the dev team). It wouldn’t take much for someone with a modicum of aviation weather or a meteorological background to explain the discrepancies in a digestible way.
What’s the point in having a weather radar if the weather depiction (and interaction with the aircraft) is terrible? That’s why noone cares as much as they otherwise might.
I have been waiting on the hub to open back up but I have given up hope. I retired just before 2024 was released and upgraded a few airports using the previous hub and I have created some scratch-built airports. I was looking forward to picking up the hobby of upgrading as many airports as I could during my retirement. When they originally took it away, they said it would be back after 2024 released. That has been about 1 1/2 years ago. Then they said they needed to get the scenery aligned so that 2020 and 2024 matched. That happened many months ago. Now they are saying something different and still we have no idea of when it will open back up or frankly if it even will. I am done waiting. I could care less now if it ever opens up. I won’t be volunteering any of my time to work on the airports if it does. You would think if you had a community of people who are willing to spend their own time to make your product better, and only want a simple tool to do so, that you would be willing to give that to them.
In last night’s stream I flew into so many airports that needed quite a bit of work. It’s not just about the visual alignment, though that’s problematic, it’s the flat-out dangerous to unusable airfields left in the wake of the oft-poor AI interpretation upon building them. And I had to laugh, because the last airport I landed at the sim runway (AI generated) was shifted about 15 feet laterally from the image, anyway, so the problems exist even before the Hub. That, after the trees that are 3x too tall, and way closer to the threshold than reality.
They need human touch, full stop.
So we fix these and might have to re-work them upon new imagery - so what? Make that part of it easier. Notify us when there’s a change and give us the tools to easily slide everything over (the current method in the SDK is cumbersome). If they want people to be less frustrated, especially in career mode, we have to fix this stuff, and they obviously don’t have the labor force or intelligent-enough AI to do it on its own.
I didn’t watch the entire stream, due to time, but probably 75% of it. All in all it is encouraging that the enthusiasm and desire to keep improving is there. However I did not hear anything about 2020 updates/fixes. Did I just miss it? There are still many 2020 users (I just read it still has more than 2024) so I would hope the developer streams would spend some time on that.
The thing is he said the same thing years ago in another Q&A…tried to put the blame on it being winter in the northern hemisphere, he missed the point entirely then and again yesterday which leaves very little hope well ever see improvements.
In my experience at companies this is a downstream trickle effect from executive management… in other words someone up there just don’t get UI, so not much trickles. If I was pessamistic I’d also surmise they don’t play the sim too often themeselves. Compare in the extreme to someone named Steve Jobs… detailed, detailed, detailed, and then relentless detail.