Discussion: Live dev Q&A January

And it would seem it doesn’t like the MX150 GPU on my laptop. I get a “Your system does not meet the minimum requirements” window that quickly flashes up before returning me to desktop. Unfortunate, really. The CPU is definitely up to snuff (i7 8665U), it has 16GB and an NVMe. :frowning:

In any case, I’m not optimistic that the live weather issue will be resolved any time soon considering the response we got suggesting it’s caused by user error (using Live Time vs Live Weather). This has been their stance on this all along it seems that we’re just doing it wrong.

Too many people are having issues.
They can’t be an be like an ostrich forever.
Sooner or later they will need to raise their head.

@Crunchmeister71
can you please create a topic discussing these problems and keep this topic on the subject? You’ll get more exposure and probably more relevant feedback as well.

@Jummivana can you please split the discussion between what’s relevant to the Q&A and this other thread with all answers back and forth with @Crunchmeister71 ?

2 Likes

Jummivana just closed and locked the topic related to this subject about an hour ago.

I’m making a video about the problem and will start yet another thread.

1 Like

They do, maybe not high enough for some, or not at all for others, but they do I believe.

Do you remember “Flight” which was built around a market place pretending to be a simulator? No one believe they’d make the same mistake twice so they must be doing differently even though it might not show they are.

So again, I do believe they are raising their head for sure, but the question is are they looking to the right direction and this is debatable, but it is not our decision nor our product, it is theirs.

1 Like

I agree. Been simming since late eighties
I do remember Flight quite clearly.
I would call it a Flight Flop!

That actually was my point as well, I guess I could have used a better analogy!
Yes, it is their simualtor to make.
We can only hope to influence the direction it takes, and thankfully these folks are doing more to go with that influence than any sim I have known.

Right now they have a lot on their agenda, and everyone seems to want everything at once.
So they are intentionally I believe, doing a bit of head burying.
That’s just the way some things are done, time will be the teller, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what this sim is like in a few years. !

I could see how the LOD variance would be by the square root of the value of the slider. If you linearly change the LOD density, as you go further out, the cost to processing increases by the square of the distance out (since it’s acting on an area and not a linear line). So I don’t think it’s a bug that it varies by 1.4. That way the processing cost increases linearly with the slider.

1 Like

It is debatable: the slider is indicating percentage, and you’d expect usually this being linear, not quadratic.

But the point is not whether this is normal or not, whether the end user expectation is linear or quadratic with a slider indicating percentage.

The point is:

  • the slider is in percent which most of us would think as linear but nevermind,
  • the code for terrain textures is using the slider percentage value as a disc coverage, not a distance.
  • the code for trees is showing a problem where at a certain distance tress are disappearing then reappearing.
  • the trees behave like this differently if their are conifers or deciduous.
  • several items are popping in too late now, whereas during the alpha/beta they were fading in at a longer distance.

You see, if the slider is meant to be linear, but the code to ground texture is using square root instead, while trees are using linear, or even worse square root of an already squared root value they were expecting being linear to get started…

This is what I want to point out: these are odd inter-related problems all dealing with “distance to the viewer” and because there are different developer teams working on these different game engine feature (C++, Shaders, UI, etc…) there could have been a problem right in the middle of each-other expectations about the value domain and causing all these LOD problems reported in the forums.

PS: please make sure to read my reports about Trees LOD depending on species and how they disappear then reappear as the distance between you and the trees is diminishing.

If he did say that, great, everyone will be happy. I don’t think he did. He started with (31:30) “It looks like people are complaining about… the visual being a bit too strong…maybe the visual is to strong, so we are going to do some tweak there…you can disable the physical relationship of the icing on the plane…you can remove all the icing, including the visual”.

  • Tweak the visual model
  • Disable the physical model
  • Disable everything

I didn’t get from that that they agree that there is currently something wrong with the phyiscal model. They have a formula that defines the physical effect. That cannot be altered without going back to the experts. He didn’t say they’re going to do that.

It sounds like they might give us a slider that goes from lots of ice to no ice. That is a bad solution, IMO. How would you know where to put it? They believe the current physical model is accurate, so the slider at 100% would represent the current model.

It hope its not their solution to every problem, “here is a slider, adjust it to your liking”, same with the new sliders we are gonna get to adjust flight control stops :sweat_smile:. They think the visual appearance is too strong, its not only that its also the wrong type of ice visually (frost) adhering to the wrong surfaces in flight. The icing in MSFS is what an aircraft would look like after parking in freezing fog overnight.

The real question is why does it look the way it does, no real world pilot would claim that this is what in-flight icing looks like in real life. If they would have consulted people with knowledge about flying in icing conditions they would come up with a less gamey effect. And that is the real overlapping problem in a lot of bugs and flaws, its either a lack of knowledge or intentionally done to satisfy the casual user with the only knowledge of icing being the kind of ice they find on their car in the morning.

Even if they tone done the effect on performance I would like to have an option to turn the visual effect completely off. I mean there hasn’t been a sim which shows icing effects that I know off. What I don’t understand is, if you do put effort in coming up with an icing effect, why not do it right?

3 Likes

I can’t reply on the actual Thread as it’s been locked, but this part on Icing leaves me a bit worried:

Icing: It won’t be brought in the next sim update – We are going to improve this. We are going to bring
a system in which you will be able to tweak the system if the visual effect is too strong.

Surely if the “visual effect is too strong” then it’s wrong to start with, no?
I don’t see how being able to tweak something (presumably a slider) is the right way to go about solving an obvious issue. Surely the correct way is to implement the feature properly across the board, not use ways to mask over the effect. Either there’s ice working correctly, or there’s not.

2 Likes

I’m not sure I may have missed, but did the guys ever mention the current situation on the seasons update ?

This is an old but good photo of a King Air 90 just after landing after encountering rime ice.

Ice is a natural phenomenon and as such is organic. There is no one type of icing encounter and it varies by the weather that creates the conditions and the surfaces that it adheres to. Yes, in aviation we classify ice as rime, clear, mixed, or frost and trace, light, moderate, or severe. But that is more of what it looks like on the airplane and the rate it accumulates over time.

There are also various types of anti-icing and deicing equipment. Hot wings, boots, TKS fluid type systems are the three most common. Well, there is also the no equipment guys.

Deicing equipment does not mean a clean aircraft in flight either. There is runback icing and residual icing. Here is the infamous video of boot inflation.

Then there are the unprotected surfaces.

3TY36Y57SINKKD4I25VM35EJYM

Here is in-flight ice testing done a number of years ago.

So you are trying to simulate a very organic system across a wide variety of airframes with varying types of deicing equipment and please everyone’s opinion of what it should look like. I doubt it will ever be perfect, but for the effect of simulating an encounter, you do get a visual indication and a physical effect. Those indications and effects seem to be reduced by using anti-ice and deicing equipment and limiting exposure.

This is not even including Super-cooled Large Droplets (SLD) encounters which far exceeds the certification requirements for anti-icing and deicing equipment.

9 Likes

Yes, I totally agree with you, it is nearly impossible to simulate (yet) Icing to that level so everyone can be satisfied or to reflect reality to 100%. There always will be someone who doesn’t like this or that.

However if we take airliners and jets in general into to the consideration and aerodynamic heating due to the friction of air, it is not very realistic to have airliners covered in ice so much in cruise at 0.78 mach like shown at the attached picture.

I do fly CJ1 for living and the aircraft never ever was so contaminated in cruise. I do not have the luxury to switch to the outside view :slight_smile: but I never saw wings and engines so iced up.

Maybe some script or something would help at specific speed and altitude to slowly remove that accumulated ice.

2 Likes

The Ram Rise is not gonna prevent icing in cruise you could approximate the temperature rise due to speed by square of TAS / 100, its around 20C maybe. I’m not sure if this is simulated in MSFS, its interesting to find out. Otherwise icing is not very likely anyway during cruise as SAT is probably below -40C, you definitely won’t get any severe icing at those temperatures.

Sure its impossible to simulate all different kind of ice accretion by moisture content, droplet size temperature etc. Still the current icing effect has nothing to do with reality. Actually it is pretty realistic for ground icing conditions, leave the aircraft overnight in freezing fog and it will exactly look like that.

Ice will primarily form on frontal surfaces in flight and not on the side of the fuselage, side of the vertical stabilizer, cockpit side windows and cabin windows or on top of the wings in flight, apart from some flowback in case of SLD. The ice they have tried to recreate is some kind of frost you would expect on the ground.

Otherwise I found on the TBM (probably more aircraft are affected) that after ice has formed on the cockpit side windows and cabin windows in flight, turning on the windshield heat will de-ice the side windows and cabin windows. First of all those windows aren’t heated at all, so windshield heat should not have any effect. Second, as explained before those areas are not susceptible to ice accretion in flight.

3 Likes

Reading this discussion about icing leads me to see things maybe under a different angle: this is icing you’d expect on the ground because this is consistent with the rest in the game: it is visually what the target audience, most likely Xbox players or casual gamers, know and will recon (re: dumbing down the updrafts otherwise people won’t know what is happening).

This is why this current form of icing might just be what was planned from the get go, hence the comment about “visually toning it down” which is fitting a gaming model. This is also why in this current form it is not satisfactory for most simmers talking about this here, because it is mostly a visual implementation (which is wrong on top of that).

2 Likes

Possibly, I assume this is what most people think icing should look like, the way they find their car in the morning…

I once ended up in a pretty large CB with a small single engine piston, pretty scary moments. The aircraft remained fully controllable, and it was not even that turbulent. Lots of static on the radios. Vertical speed was off scale on the vertical speed steam gauge, never climb so fast to FL90 in any single engine piston :sweat_smile:. During level-off idle power, nose down, speed approaching Vne and still not being able to level off. I was actually more afraid that we might encounter hail…

Its a shame they have created a platform which potentially could simulate all of those scenarios but they haven’t opened it up fully as not to confuse people :expressionless:. A working weather radar instead of the current cloud radar would be appreciated though, otherwise everybody might crash their A320 in IMC without prior warning :joy:

3 Likes

You are lucky to be alive. At my country 15 years ago small piston aircraft entered into the CB too and the extreme turbulence from a developing thunderstorm ripped the aircraft to pieces, killing the pilot and his two passengers.

Witnesses said debris from the disintegrated airplane continued falling for up to 10 minutes after the encounter. Several large pieces of the aircraft were never found.

2 Likes

It wasn’t that extreme luckily but yes the potential is there. In my case those CBs weren’t forecasted either so there wasn’t much we could do to prevent it. Turning roughly upwind away from the green, purple and blue flashes did the trick and we popped out soon after turned out to be a developing squall line. That was a fifty shade of brown moment :joy:.

A simulator able to accurately simulate those conditions is a game changer.

4 Likes