Credit where due: That's one impressive hurricane

I want to be clear that I don’t mean to make light of a very serious situation on the US gulf coast, but I have to compliment the Flight Sim team on the weather modelling on my flight from LIT to MSY this morning. I was landing just as the storm was making landfall. It was impressive both visually and dynamically. I landed with tense muscles and a dry mouth (a very high pucker-factor).
Very well done, Asobo team. That was a fun ride.












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Agree. These live weather events are always amazing in sim.

Here’s my landing about an hour before Ida made landfall, had gusts at 50 knots during landing

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Timelapse of clouds, over the Gulf of Mexico:

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I ran out of fuel three times. didn’t want to leave xD

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Pretty awesome…Flew for about an hour at 5000 feet basically due West out of Florida with real weather turned on. A bit scary but not as scary as what the real people in the ground are experiencing. What a monster of a storm…

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The weather is one of the best features of this sim and leaves all the other sims lacking by comparison.

There may be some issues with Real World Weather but overall it makes for a great experience to fly in.

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I really hope that was sarcasm… you don’t think that looks amazing now in SU5?

How would you rate this one?

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Another top quality, passive aggressive contribution from Machete3181!

Wait for it…

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You sure know then to fly low and when to fly high… great addon scenery :wink:

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Always a pleasure to interact with you guys. Glad you’re enjoying my contributions.

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There it is!

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The fact that not only it looks real when flying around but also when sped up is proof to how good the weather system is.
It simulates almost perfectly real weather, the only issue being extreme weather conditions not being represented in-sim due to a conscious decission by Asobo, I just hope they implement them in the future, I want cumulonimbus to throw my a320 around like it is a paper plane.

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Agree! The weather is extremely underrated and a true marvel of software engineering (that’s just my opinion ofc) None of the other sims will have weather like this for a long time. I really think they did a good job getting meteoblue on board, the guys there are total professionals and actual scientists, that surely helped tremendously. I wish people would generally be more grateful for what we have in this sim. Some aspects of it are completely lacking in other sims, and Msfs2020 is also the smoothest out of the other civilian aviation sims.

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Yes the visuals are impressive, but unfortunately, as with so much of this game, it’s just pretty pictures. The actual weather effects on flying are extremely unimpressive, people asking in threads which plane is suitable for flying into the hurricane, it doesn’t matter because this game will let you fly any of them without trouble through the storm. I crossed it several times in the Citation yesterday at different heights with barely a bump.

A hurricane isn’t supposed to be ‘smooth’…I’m still astonished that because they got complaints about turbulence being annoying from some users who obviously don’t know what can happen in the sky, they just neutered it, rather than letting the user decide whether they want it realistic or prefer an easy ride. If anything shows where their philosophy on realism sits its that.

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Asobo has stated many times that they volutarily disabled extreme weather effects because they were worried people would think they were bugs (ex: cumulonimbus pushing you up with extreme force). They planned on activating them “in the future”, but I am guessing they will still wait a while after the launch of Xbox.

I do not agree with their decission, but it is not a matter of the capabilities or realism of the weather system, but a conscious choice by the developers for now.

Edit: One curiosity: extreme turbulences are not disabled if they are caused by mountains, if you fly close to mountain formations in bad weather you will be thrown around like a rock, if you want to experience these effects try doing that, they are actually pretty great. I almost crashed the a320 when on approach to LEPA airport when passing over the mountains during a storm.

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give it a rest…

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Nothing you can do about it. He’s allowed to troll and hate, as long as rules aren’t broken. Best way is to just ignore it.

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You know it’s a good storm when you can climb 700fpm and still keep a GS over 175 in a C208B.

Because their updrafts probably actually are bugs. If they thought it was a good idea to push the lightning and icing effects out into the wild in their current state, I can only imagine what storm induced updrafts and downdrafts were like. I’m guessing you’d fly into a seemingly benign looking and small cumulus, and then just get a black screen of death for an overstress crash with no warning at all.

I love the simulator’s attempt at weather. It really is amazing. But it’s sooooo far from being ready for prime time. Lots of basic things we’re still awaiting with hopeful anticipation in next year’s weather focused sim update: visibility control, cloud types, thermals/convective updrafts and downdrafts, realistic surface winds and gusts, fixes for the wacky icing and lightning.

I’m a big snob I know, and the Ida timelapse shots really are beautiful, but they look a lot more like Perlin noise CG fire animations than they do cloud growth.

Perlin Noise Fire:

Actual Convection:

I don’t expect an advanced fluid dynamics simulation of convective processes from a $60 video game, but I’m not gushing over the clouds either.

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