Historic Weather (as second timeline)

Hello,

what I would love to see is a historic weather function with a timeline parallel to date/time.

“Live” mode: weather matches real-world date/time
“Historic” mode: weather matches date/time of simulator
“Decoupled” mode: weather matches any date/time selected for weather (when available)

This would give really cool control about weather being used and date/time of the simulator being used.

Best,
Andreas

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+1 A historic mode would be very cool. In the style of HiFi with Active Sky.

4 Likes

I agree, historic weather is a most essential feature for me.

Being limited to live weather is problematic if

  • you want to fly at a certain time of day in the sim and/or in a certain time zone

  • you want to fly at a certain time of year in the sim

  • you want to practice the same scenario repeatedly several times

  • you want to relive the weather you experienced once in real live

  • you need to pause the sim (at least if you pause for a prolongued time)

  • you use time compression / accelerated sim rate

  • you need to save the flight midflight and continue the flight another day

  • etc.

In all these cases live weather would just be plain wrong.

If you change the time of day or the time of year in the sim the live weather is completely unrealistic. So now we are forced to bother with manually changing the weather from the user interface which not only takes some effort but also takes away from the immersion a lot (in particular because you can’t even create different weather for different locations). I don’t like flying with scripted weather I created myself, I’d rather have the variety and imponderability of real world weather - but realistically according to the time of day and time of year I chose in-sim.

What I’d like to see is the weather changing according to real world historic weather data in sync with the in-sim time and date. We’ve had that in P3D with Active Sky for years and I used it all the time.

Given that Meteoblue offers a large archive of historic weather data I don’t see why MSFS comes without historic weather.

17 Likes

+1000

one of the most important features for me!!!

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I thought it was already doing “historical” weather when you set a custom time (in the past) but still have it set to “live weather”

I would like to have live weather from different times… Usually I can only use the SIM at night like 10pm… But to get the real wx I have to fly at real time… And not a time in the past…

So it would be nice if I can choose a certain time in the past and get the WX at that time…

3 Likes

That is what I assumed as well, but it’s not, unfortunately.

Agree with OP. Live weather with user selected time of day. Just because I work during the day, and sim at night, doesn’t mean I want to fly only at night. I paid good money to see the fantastic ortho tiles…LOL.

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Maybe I am wrong. But, I (think I) can go into Live Weather (what I call REAL weather) and just use the current time of day slider and move it, and still enjoy the active weather, regardless the time.

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Sure you can always use the live weather (i.e. the real weather at the current real world time) but it doesn’t match the time and date in the sim.

You can not fly with the weather of yesterday or this morning or last summer. For example if it’s January in the real world and you set the sim to July and want to fly in the northern hemisphere, you will get winter weather with live weather. Or you get the typical afternoon cumulus and unstable air even though you set early morning in the sim - because in the real world it is afternoon.

I think that is a significant limitation of the weather system of MSFS and a massive step backwards compared to what Active Sky provides for years in P3D.

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What weather is it then? Is it just the same as live weather?

Yes. “Live Weather” is always the current real world weather, no matter which time or date you set in the sim. So if it is a hot summer day in the real world and you set the date in the sim to mid-winter, you will still get hot summer weather in the sim.

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Well, historic weather should be a must especially if it’s dynamic and not static.

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Yes, please, historic weather is one of THE things I miss most in MSFS!

Something related: I’d also like to see an option to turn current weather into a preset you can edit. Sometimes current weather is nice but you’d like to change a little thing or you’d like to save it for future use. So it would be nice of you could ‘freeze’ current weather for this.

But anyway, historic weather is a must for me.

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Historical weather, yes please!

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Can’t upvote this enough. I remember an early video where the devs mentioned it was in the pipeline and they had tons of historical weather data. I hope we see it sooner rather than later as I live in Perth Australia but love flying in the US, unfortunately the time difference means I barely get any daylight hours to fly in.

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so what weather IS being displayed when its set to “live” but you have turned the time back a little (from night to day)?

Prozacpain that is still the current live weather, regardless of the time you set in the sim. Example I am in AU and trying to fly in the US it’s always night time. If I change the time to the day and leave Live weather on, it will still give me the night time weather during the day. This is a huge game changer and I used it exclusively in previous sims even if you are flying live time, because that way pausing is possible and the weather will just stick to the time in the sim.

We need more votes on this!

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my ground wind direction (in the USA anyway) never seems to match the real world at airports when I’m using live weather. Probably a known bug.

Now that they announced that they have no plans to open up the weather system to 3PD this is getting even more important.

Please, Asobo, give us historic weather.

Even more so in this time of year (in the northern hemisphere): In these grey November days when VFR flying is often not possible at all in many places I’d like to switch to a nice July day with authentic historic weather.

1 Like