That appears to be a fog or visibility layer. Quite common in the sim now.
Huh? The solid overcast I’m on top of in the first screenshot? Most definitely a stratus layer. Of course, fog is also a stratus layer…
Yeah - THAT’S what I’m talking about !!!
You haven’t encountered what? A scattered stratus layer? I mean I’m flying above a broken to overcast stratus layer in the first pic, and you get a good look at it again on the breakout.
Do you mean the smoothness of the clouds? It’s funny; a while ago someone here was telling me how unrealistic it was that the top of the cloud or fog layer was smooth (its not unrealistic; I posted a pic of the top of a fog layer in the Bay area)… and now someone else is complaining that the top of a layer has definition (which is also perfectly realistic in this type of atmosphere.)
There’s a groupthink mentality among some here that live weather is simply “broken” and can do nothing right, despite clear photo and video proof to the contrary.
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I just flew out of Madrid airport, it’s raining… just above the airport. As soon as you leave it, no clouds, no rain.
Microclimate I guess…
A broken clock can also be right.
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You mention great transitions/METAR blending and also says that thing is realistic. How can a transition/blending be realistic? Isn’t weather one fluid thing. Not a transition between different fluids/weather. Well realism we have different kind of opinions about i have laerned. You need it to be accurate to be realistic. I need it to be detailed without any kind of transitions. I don’t need it to be 100% accurate all the time to feel realistic to me. I want the weather to feel unpredicted and varied like real weather is. I don’t mean presets that some tells me to use instead. Forecasts is calculated from real weather and will be accurate sometimes and sometimes not. Presets is one setting set globally. Thats not how weather works. I would liked having 100% meteoblue source without any kind of transitions.
I’m happy for you that the devs only listening to you that wants those transition/blendings. I don’t.
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I’m curious about what the cloud/server architecture looks like for the weather.
We could possibly have the same virtual physical location look different given regional data centers.
That may be a reason for differences people see.
I’m usually impressed by the weather flying around my local area. Sometimes I find out what it’s like outside from the sim.
Only issues I see are sudden or late loading of weather.
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Not at all. Weather is all about a transition from one airmass to the next (an airmass being a parcel of the atmosphere with similar physical characteristics such as moisture content, lapse rate / stability etc.) Interesting weather phenomena often occur at the boundaries between different airmasses.
In other words, transitions are always a thing in weather. Because the weather is always changing.
Really, so now that’s your reason for when the weather depiction is great? First you said it couldn’t look great, now it’s just random chance that it occurs occasionally?
You see my point. This is just irrational. It’s not an attitude that’s going to help the devs pin down why the weather system works great sometimes but not others. It’s in our best interest to help them figure that out, so it can look this good every time.
Sure but those occure because of high & low airpreassure. Not because it need to match a METAR. And those transitions is always smooth. The real weather doesn’t need to be accurate. It is what it is.
I had a strange Experience, I was at EGAA flight to EGCC. Loaded my flight at gate Clear skys, I was setting up my flightplan on MCDU loading my passengers, looked up suddenly my windscreen was frosted and my Airbus looked like an iced lollipop. Within ten minutes sky was clear…and defrosted. I am no meteorological expert but it was not right. This is just an observation, obviously it takes me roughly 30 minutes to set everything up from cold and dark and passengers loaded. The transition was very dramatic.
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If it was that accurate, MSFS would be replacing all the weather modeling tools used by governments and industry.
Would be cool if the sim could outperform the European hurricane model!
I’m impressed as is and just enjoy the occasional rollercoaster transition.
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I used to get 99% tall volcanic CB and random cumulus in SU7 and the SU8 beta… not sure what they’ve done backend but since the actual SU8 release, the volcanic clouds are much reduced. In some places they’ve been replaced with more “normal” looking clouds but still low level cumuloform. I will say however the volcanic puffy look is much reduced as of late. I actually got some decent looking mid-level overcast during a bush flight in Idaho, but it suddenly switched (like a light) to messy cumulus. Not sure what’s going on server side but hopefully some improvements…
Yep, it’s getting better and better. Even attempting cirrus clouds. They miss the nice streaky effect, but it’s slowly getting there.
Now all we need is for MSFS ATC to read and correctly understand the weather situation. I grow tired of being directed to land with 10-20+ knot tailwinds.
This was from a flight I did yesterday/monday about noon, towards the end of a decent size snow shower that rolled thru overnight. Airport is less than two miles from me, cloud coverage was spot on and even the amount of snow on the ground wasn’t too far off as it mostly melted.
Here’s after I broke thru at around 4-5 thousand feet.
Out of curiosity, if it seems like you’re not getting live weather, before firing up the sim go to the windows start, type in “Xbox networking” and pull up that menu. Wait for the blue dots to finish and see if you get NAT type Open and Server connectivity Connected under xbox live multiplayer. If not, hit the Fix it button then the Check again to make sure all is well as stated above, then fire up the sim and check live weather again. If you reboot your PC, you’ll have to check that menu again and possibly do that again as it doesn’t always stick after a reboot. See if that has any affect on live weather for you guys.
What good does it do when the weather is depicted well by chance? Thats the point he is making. A weather model that’s depicted 80% realistically all over the world at all times is preferable than one that depicts weather 95% accurately at 20% of the places 25% of the time. We surely had the former up until and including update 6. The 95% isn’t even a fair assessment for post update 7.
I didn’t conduct one flight after update 7 where the experience was on par with what we had before update 7, not even close. Much more
unrealistic side-effects and anomalies. Sudden dissappearing and morphing of clouds, instant wind changes and many more. Practically none of these before update 7. And that also includes the overall VATSIM experience.
That’s why your photo evidence doesn’t do much good to solve the experience i am having when flying.
Weather (your own words even) isn’t only about visuals and post update 7 weather in my experience did a huge nose dive in visuals and even more so in simulation, function and behaviour.
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Can’t we all have different opinions about our experience?
I’m in the camp that the weather has improved but is not perfect.
The developers have already publicly said that there will be no option to go back to SU7 or a switch that turns off METAR data, so why the continuing arguments?
Hopefully the addition of “other sources” of real time weather data (Jorg’s words) will continue to improve things.
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