@lknfly1 can’t agree more with the outstanding issues you’ve mentioned. The flight model and physics are the core essence of a flight simulator and they are now way behind compared to the scenery and visual progress we had since the beginning (I’ve participated the alpha testing)…
“Sim for Simmers” ™
Moreover, not only some critical aspects did not progress, they actually have a severe regression compared to previous releases.
It feels like we are a smaller group of serious simmers and aviators that really value realism behavior over visual. Don’t get me wrong, I also get mesmerized by those beautiful landscapes and clouds, but that can’t replace realism… not anymore. Surely we are still around, waiting… that’s why we trust developers to keep improving the sim. But it’s really feels like those core aspects became neglected.
I feel they want to do their best, but something feels wrong in the priorities to me. The physics aspects should have a continuous on-going improvement and definitely with priority to fix outstanding bugs ( no gusts since SU4) … that should have a reserved percentage of the efforts “budget”.
I would be much more happy if the weekly updates posts would focus about telling us what they are working on in details, letting us know what physics realism improvements are coming. That, over those eye-candy wallpapers… beautiful as they are , we need them to become alive into a simulator not a scenemulator…
Looks good. Hopefully, winter weather will be well modeled at some point. I never did see it snow in the sim last season. Winter has rights to!!! (just joking on the rights thing… kinda 
)
@MarinaraTrain42 I definitely agree with all what you say… They now have to be focus on the essential that defines a Flight Simulator which are the flight model, aerodynamism/physics, and of course a realistic Engine Weather which should have been implemented at the release date as they did promise before that MFS2020 landed on the market, I don’t make it up their advertising Youtube videos are still online! … bugs are normal at the release date I will say but the lack of realistic features is not for what we call a Flight Simulator despite the beauty of the visual of a hurricane or the gnu, elephants in Africa visually so realisitc, I like that but… yes I’m also impressed by the visual, they did a great job as it was never done so far but…
Indeed step by step, they rolled back to please what was requested on the wish-list, even adding contrails in the sky was finally much more important than to deal with the big time wind bug 200/03 kt everywhere for such a long time issue!
On the other hand I feel that the turbulence due to relief and aspirities are very well done more than every other flight sim but… no thermal, no convective wind, no realisitc updraft/downdraft and now no gust wind since SU4!!! How could it be possible and there is not a lot of complains about it, how come?!
No gust wind so that why do we need to read METAR/TAF and create a flight plan in MFS2020 if we can fly a C152 into a hurricane or into a thunderstorm for exemple? and it’s not even on the wish-list! Which makes me a little bit worried for the future of this “sim”. I can’t wait to have more official enlightenment to get back to MFS2020. I wish it!
Let’s hope! 
Thank you very much for the time and effort you put into creating that post. Greatly appreciated!
Nice job (on the flying and the video!).
When you say 50 knot gusts, do you mean you saw that on your instruments, or that’s what a METAR reported for the area?
I ask because there’s another thread/topic where a test was done with Live Weather and there were no wind gusts (as is the case currently with manually set weather conditions) .
Curious to hear what you observed during that flight. Thank you!
Issues with real-world weather? the Hurricane was incredible in the sim. I was blown away.
I have also tried landing on several airports during Ida and gusts were non existing.
it felt like there were gusts in the air (like around 3000 ft for example), but they were “negative gusts,” wind dropping from around 50 knots to 30.
As I approached the airport, those negative gusts got weaker and weaker and I was left with steady winds of around 35 knots. No gusts whatsoever, even with the METARs reporting gusts of up to 70 knots.
The landing was definitely a challenge, I was being blown away from the centerline constantly and was floating a lot, that was awesome. But with those gusts I don’t think I’d be able to land a CJ4.
I agree to that (owning both FS2020 and RDR2 on PS4), BUT: it is a difference whether clouds are “merely in the sky” or whether they follow “real-world weather data” and “you can actually fly through them” (= get close).
And yes, I know that there is an “aircraft sequence” in RDR2 (where you fly a hot air balloon ;)) and you basically get into “foggy clouds”. But again, I think we are comparing two drastically different use cases here: clouds in RDR2 “just” have to “look good” (and are probably pre-computed, that is, they are “static” (in the sense that they do not interact with rising or falling air, moisture etc.), whereas clouds in FS 2020 need to be much more versatile.
It is like comparing the world of RDR2 - which is “handcrafted” to the last tree (yes, most probably with some initial “algorithmic help”) - and the generated world of FS 2020 which is based on real-world data, and then saying that RDR2 looks better. Yes, that is true. But again: different use cases, different starting points…
UPDATE: Oh, and I completely forgot: the “visibility range” in RDR2 is much, MUCH less than in FS 2020. And the “hot air balloon” moves much MUCH slower than the average piston engine aircraft in FS 2020 as well That has a big impact on the calculation / performance requirements of the game engine, too!
As some other user said before, they most likely haven’t done it because there are tons of bugs attached to unlimited forces, maybe a small cloud pushing your VS to +9000.
It will probably take a while until we see it implemented in-game imo 
During my take-off (CJ4 - Working Title Mod) Louisiana. Pointing to the west. I was challenged like never before. the plane was being blown completely off the runway to the south, i was ailerons right (yoke right), rudders right and holding on for dear life for the take off (1 notch of flaps–why, i have no idea), I got blown off the runway 3 times. eventually got her up in the air. but the wind and rain were just pounding this airship. it sounded like my mom and dad driving me in a thunderstorm in the old family wagon, having to pull over under a bridge, then watching the rainbow driving back home and stopping at White Castle on the way back. Something about White Castles and rain-storms that keep me eating sliders to this day. Anyway, I loved the Hurricane in the sim, what an experience. Blew the CJ4 (modded) around like a twig. The Asobo one did not do that, I tested them both. Any ideas as to why, I would be interested to know…it was awesome!!!
That’s a good point. I was also struggling to keep the centerline while taking off. Didn’t try Asobo default CJ4 so it’s interesting to see the WT mod behaves that way. I’ve never seen CJ4’s operating manual so I don’t know what is the maximum demonstrated crosswind, but I’d guess it’s somewhere around 25 knots. Which would make the impossible take off under such conditions quite realistic.
Edit: I was bang on with the 25 knots of maximum demonstrated crosswind for the CJ4. Working Title states so in their manual.
No I saw 50 knots during landing on the gauge (a320).
After Ida made landfall, I tried another flight and saw 84 knot winds on the gauge as well.
So it was definitely working visually and on the gauges.
In fact when I was able to climb, my autopilot kept disconnecting, assuming because the winds were knocking me left and right (around 6,000 feet).
Same thing happened to me. My FBW 320 drove off the runway during the 50-80knot winds while Ida had already made landfall. I’ve got a video of it, will publish today.
The CRJ is beautyful and still on my list. A good choice for tornado hunters. When will it be on sale? As long as it has no weather radar to enjoy the fascinating world of meteorology even more, I buy it only while on sale.
I’m not sure if it goes on sale or not. I think the radar feature is just waiting on Asobo to open up more of the sim’s features to 3rd party developers. I’m not sure what the timeline is on that. I really love it though.
The clouds and weather in Flight Simulator are far closer to the “looks pretty” end of the spectrum than they are “behaves realistically”, and in that sense quite similar to RDR2. The moisture variable (either relative humidity or dewpoint), for example, is not used by Flight Simulator as far as I can tell. There’s no place to set it in the weather preset menu, the Live Weather doesn’t incorporate it, you can’t pull it from Sim Connect, and other components of the sim like the ATIS read-out don’t use it. It’s just a fixed placeholder value of 10 C.
Flight Simulator has prescribed weather scenes, just like RDR2. They look more or less plausible, but the clouds and animations follow simple patterns, not actual weather processes. There are animated transitions, clouds translate, and layered animations to make clouds grow and shrink as they develop, mature and dissipate. But other games have been doing this for years as well.
It’s the Meteoblue model that is doing all the heavy lifting here when it comes to Live Weather. Flight Simulator is dumb in the sense that it doesn’t understand the weather or its processes, it simply sets the local conditions and draws the weather based on what it’s told. When something meteorologically clever appears to happen, it’s simply because that data already exists in the Meteoblue model, not because Flight Simulator modeled it. And that’s totally great, and how it should work. But the implementation is only half finished at best, and the beauty of the weather is skin deep. Base features are missing, and when you get past the screenshots, it falls apart. In addition to the moisture, other missing elements include components of the wind, visibility, and density of the condensate within clouds. And the local weather itself often does not behave properly. For example, even when the Meteoblue model correctly shows a marine layer with clouds off shore, the simulator will botch it and draw broken clouds over both the land and sea indiscriminately, simply because it doesn’t know any better. Or if the model correctly handles radiation fog, the sim instead draws scattered cumulus emanating from below the terrain. When animated, you can see the cloud growth is just Perlin noise translated in the +y direction through the voxel. It looks really pretty, but it’s also a peek behind the curtain at the man working the controls, rather than the magical wizard most folks think Flight SImulator weather is.
The detail in RDR2 is also one or two orders of magnitude fine-grained than Flight Simulator. So while you can see much further in Flight Simulator, and move much faster through the world, you don’t have nearly the same amount of tiny world detail. The scales are just shifted, so they’re probably still comparable.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Flight Simulator now has volumetric clouds with a Rayleigh atmospheric scattering model. But many who think the weather is mind-blowing never-seen-before revolutionary, don’t realize that the kids playing “cowboy shoot’em up” had that two years before Flight Simulator did. And what should be the distinguishing feature, that Flight Simulator’s weather is tied to a real world forecast model, is only half baked, which is why folks are flying through hurricanes no problem in light aircraft and why we’re missing weather features we had in FSX.
Ah, nice, yea, there was a marked difference between the two as far as flight model, I could tell almost immediately upon getting into the weather.
In terms of VISUAL representation, yeah, they NAILED IT! But in terms of actual weather effects on the aircraft, in my test of flying in Ida, both X-Plane, and ESPECIALLY P3D came out far above and beyond what MSFS offered. So, it’s not impossible for a “$60 game” cause those other two are also $60 games. 
There were so many things that made it so much more believable - 100 knot winds pushed a C172 in cold and dark state and practically swept it away. That’s for a not even started aircraft! Earlier on, when the winds weren’t that extreme, both XP and P3D had a significant impact on the plane in the air - your IAS was right on point (100 knots or so) but the actual aircraft was barely moving and at one point just hovered above one spot because the winds overpowered the engine’s ability to produce enough thrust to move it forward. Even in the Boeing 737, the FINAL approach into KMSY in P3D took about 15 minutes because it was moving against the headwind and I had to increase IAS via autothrottle to get it to move in a more stable configuration.
Unfortunately, in MSFS I was able to take off in a C172 and while it wasn’t a walk in the park, it was a fairly stress-free flight. Things LOOKED great, but didn’t feel all that good. Like I said, both XP and P3D did a much better job. Not visually, but dynamics-wise (though Active Sky and EA combo in P3D looked wicked impressive at certain points).
Love your font at the beginning of Ida. Great job.
Agreed, this game is very impressive.