Hello, forum.
Please forgive me if I’m repeating an existing suggestion. So far I’m thoroughly enjoying MSFS, although I’m running it on a PC that’s barely fast enough so it has to have everything turned down quite a way. But it’s still beautiful. I’ll freely admit that I use X-Plane as well, and generally choose between them depending on what I want to do. If it’s sightseeing then it’s got to be FS; if it’s longer range/IFR-type flight then I tend to use X-Plane.
I wanted to throw in a little feedback, though, and it’s related to weather settings. I have to confess I’m struggling to connect with the weather controls on MSFS. They’re… Well, I’m not finding them intuitive and weather is a little awkward to set up. This is partly because FS doesn’t use standard parameters - for example, I can’t see a setting for dewpoint, and there’s the ‘aerosol density’ setting I presume standing in for the more conventional ‘visibility’. I’m not sure how, or if, ISA temperature relates to dewpoint; and aerosol density is a technical concept I struggle to relate accurately to visibility as it’s shown in METARs. And there also seem to be some odd limitations: being unable to remove or add cloud layers whereas this can be done with wind layers; or that cloud layers seem to fix a minimum height from base to tops which makes rapid variations difficult to set up.
What I would very much like to see is something like the system X-Plane uses - and this isn’t to hold that up as a ‘better’ sim: like I said I think they both have strengths, and X-Plane has weaknesses for me. But in XP11 I can enter (albeit by importing a text file) a real-world METAR and the sim generates the weather from that. This would be nice and simple to use (I can’t speak for how easy it would be to code), and it would allow users to tweak the real-life weather for certain conditions. This morning I wanted to fly at a location in Scotland but it’s… quite windy. Ahem. That is, winds at 30+ knots and gusting to over 40. Otherwise it’s quite fine, and I’d like to be able to have taken the live weather and just edited the wind down a little. Okay, a lot. And there are cloud layers at ~1200’, and a distinct layer at ~1800, which is too narrow a height range to input into MSFS.
As I say I don’t know if any changes are planned for the weather setting features, and I’m aware that there’s already work going on for weather mods. But for me at least, because I love interesting weather, I think the ability to enter METAR data (modified to taste) directly into the sim in the standard format, and have the sim decode it and set the weather from it, would be a big improvement.