Some pretty valid points here that should be considered by the MS team.
I don’t think we got a comprehensive answer yet. It was very much tech jargon that didn’t really tell us why it doesn’t work. Perhaps someone from the team can give a better answer on this thread? Surely…
The point from @Mainframe999 about Meteoblue providing historical weather, adds more doubt around their answer and opens up more questions. Is it actually a pricing issue, or is there an issue with the data?
Finally @FlyerOneZero rightly pointed out that if the weather API’s are opened up, this opens the door for 3rd parties to go in and resolve this through the old school METAR methods, as a last resort. This seems like the least likely for me though.
Ultimately if we get a better answer from MS we don’t need to keep speculating like this. I really don’t understand why they can’t talk about it in more detail. They spend a lot more time talking about completely mundane things like spotlight events, achievement bugs and download speeds, while skipping over any definitive answer for an actual simulation feature.
Probably for legal reasons, licensing, that kind of thing. But really, I don’t see this like some kind of high court super injunction, where you aren’t even allowed to report that there is a reporting injunction. Just say that due to a legal agreement they aren’t allowed to grant access to third parties, and let that be the end of it, or whatever the reason is.
It’s a bit like the discussions on download speed. Most big companies behave the same way. The worst companies will only acknowledge a problem when they already have a fix for it in the works, and if they don’t they pretend they’ve never seen it before, or the problem doesn’t exist, or worse it’s actually by design, and therefore won’t be fixed…unless enough public pressure is put on them to do something about it.
Look at the huge amount of effort it took to get rid of the “Press any key” intro screen. Completely useless, but somebody really didn’t want to lose that till the number of votes for it just made it embarrassing to keep ignoring.
It sounds like they simply misunderstood what the users want. Rather than “historical weather”, I think most people got on board with wanting, “recent weather” or “weather from the last previous weather updates”.
Because Asobo thought we wanted the weather from the Battle of Waterloo, they went and looked at entirely different data sources… which of course are not compatible at all with and totally insufficient for the weather system they created.
I think if they realized we just want yesterday’s weather, one snapshot from Monday, and maybe another snapshot from July, it would be as easy as just having the simulator point to those numerical model runs on Meteoblue’s server, and making sure Meteoblue isn’t purging the data from those extra few runs. There shouldn’t be any real cost, legal issues, or technical challenge to this.
One issue might be pulling in the other data sources like METAR and satellite (if satellite is directly used). The simulator probably cobbles together a bunch of live sources client side to make the Live Weather we have now. Going back and getting archived versions of a bunch of disparate data sources is a whole new can of worms.
But to be honest, if the “historic weather” doesn’t actually include the METARs, but is only the numerical forecast model, that might actually be a good thing. No more haze bubbles, hard transitions, and wonky cloud layers.
Careful with that wording. If we only got “yesterday’s weather”, as in 24h ago, that wouldn’t solve the biggest issue people have; Flying in the evening but wanting to fly during daytime, in which case the current real weather will not match.
Amongst a few others, the most important feature for historic weather is to provide the possibility to fly in the evening/at night but get the weather from when it was daytime.
Asobo can certainly figure that out if only they wanted to. METARs are the smaller issue here, that data is tiny in comparison and can be saved for years and years, like ActiveSky is doing for P3D.
Right, we need to be explicit. “Yesterday’s” Meteoblue model run would include hourly weather, day and night, but we shouldn’t assume they’d know that or utilize it.
The past week of numerical model weather data is probably still sitting on Meteoblue’s servers, that’s how most of these weather sites work, which would give you all the weather everywhere for the past week with every time in between. The sim probably only has to point at it when you set the simulator time in the World menu.
The original post and thread title should probably updated.
I thought that’s what the CMs were for. Hell, I’d love to work on this feature for free if they want to give me a remote dev account with limited access. Being able to tinker with a global weather simulator would be awesome.
We used to have it with REX Weather, which was the bomb back in FSX a.o.
Thing is, weather is very dynamic and flights can be very long. Looking at the same preset between Amsterdam and Marseille just isn’t the same.
With REX, it came with triangulated METAR-data which were basically only very little text files, with the meteoblue model it seems to be too hard to store all that weather in one server… but, choices can be made by the development team.
For me it’s mostly when I fly in other continents. For a while I was flying in Australia, while living in Europe. So everytime I set the sim to daylight I’d have low (night) temperatues and clouds, while the summer there would obvisouly be hot.
It’s just a lot more immersion to choose the time of day with the temperatures and weather image accordingly.
The cloud and sky textures were great, the weather engine not so much. It had a lot of sudden changes too and sometimes would just stop working in the middle of the flight. ActiveSky was much better.
Shouldn’t be. Most of these sites retain the last few days to a week worth of global data so that the users can compare how it’s changing. It should be a non issue for big commercial vendors like Meteoblue and Microsoft.
That might not be ready for the simulator to use on the fly, but again it should be a non-issue for them to just retain the last week’s runs, or even make some of those historical ones available for recreating specific events
Looks really good indeed. I do hope they’ll get round to it.
And being an sim airliner pilot mostly, I wouldnt even mind a third party offering triangulated METAR-models; being above weather most of the time myself. It’s more relevant for dep/arr weather than en rounte, for my type of usage.
Is the resolution sufficient for our needs (4km seems great, 30km - who knows?). How good is the resolution in altitude layers etc?
Can they deliver the data in the same format as the live weather? I’d say probably yes, but still there might be some work required on Asobo’s side.
How much does the historic weather data cost compared to the live weather? Is Microsoft willing to pay the price?
That said, the way Jörg expressed it in the Q&A video, it seemed like either for some reason they think this option doesn’t work (and failed to explain) or don’t even think this is what we want - he mentioned weather in early 20th century for historic aircraft.
I guess these Q&As would be a lot more efficient if Jörg, Seb and Martial prepared a bit by reading summaries of the discussion threads before the video stream starts. Let the community managers gather some more details in the forums, and write 1-2 paragraphs as a summary for each question, or feed the discussion threads into ChatGPT (or whatever the language model at MS is called)… and have them read it, should be possible in 20 minutes, plus some time for preparing / researching their answers in the team.
Live Weather is currently at 30km resolution. It would be awesome if they could do a higher resolution model like one of those 4km models, but there isn’t global coverage. I’d love if they allowed a third party vendor to provide 3km Live Weather in the US using the HRRR model. You’d have different weather at opposite ends of the runway.
Live Weather uses the NEMS 30 global forecast model. You can see that it appears to the same model as the historical one:
There may still be some data formatting that has to be done before Flight Simulator could consume data from the historical NEMS30, but I’m guessing it’s very similar if not the same to how the forecast NEMS30 is processed for Live Weather.
What’s also neat is that the Live Weather forecast model goes 180 hours into the future. So you should be able to get “Live Weather” a week into the future, for free. This would be even better than recent past weather in my opinion as it would allow you to practice or recreate upcoming real flights, you could accomplish all the other requests such as picking times when its daylight or the weather is preferable, and it would probably be easier for the developers to implement (no additional model runs to work with).
The way they license IPs from film franchises and third party add-ons, this is probably at the bottom of the obstacles. I think the data that users need to make this feature happen is already sitting on Meteoblue servers, so there may be no additional overhead or cost for creating or hosting this data.
This.
I thought they did that for at least some of the questions, as they seemed to have answers with prepared material, but other times it does seem like they are deer in headlights.
What they really need is someone in the trenches of the user forums who is also working directly with the developers, and who is using the sim as a simmer.
I hope that Microsoft seriously consider opening up the weather engine for FS2024.
Nobody is asking Asobo to implement this if they are unable to do it. Let a third-party developer do it! Hifisim has been doing this very well for decades.
I do not see how this is so difficult or confusing.
All that is really needed is perhaps weather data from the last few days/week so you can:
Save/resume a flight later that day or week without changing weather
Fly with correct weather for the time of day. E.g. you live in Australia and want to fly a European day flight. But you live in Australia, and unlike a lot of native fauna, you are not nocturnal, and you sim during the day, so the live weather is night weather for Europe. You can set the weather to a few hours ago to have day weather.
Plan a long-haul flight one day, and start it the next day.
A lot of these features are important for time-poor, working, family simmers!
The main reason I keep P3D is so I can use weather radar and have historical weather. I would love to use this fine piece of eye candy. The lack of weather radar and historic weather relegates this to a fun VFR game but not a real simulator.
Something also has to be done to improve the user interface. It is deplorable. That is for another discussion however.
Just watched another Blancolirio channel news flash from a crash of a 310… it has no deicing on it, flew last sunday in vfr condition with light icing reported by pilots flying into Dallas,TX…
This sort of thing we can replicate with historic accurate weather, to find answers for the families of those who perished. It’s macabre, in a way, but i feel with the high level of accuracy in flightmodeling msfs can be used as a tool to help understand what happend.
In fsx i replicated a flight that went into fogbanks, same flightpath, general altitude and low and behold, one fogbank contained a side of a hill… which was exactly on the flightpath of the airplane and it’s crash location. This flight was a real eye opener for me in what historic weather can provide.
Besides my investigative curiosity, usually when i go to work or am at work, there are beautiful skies or awkward weather, that i’d like to fly through (yep, like many others in here) when i finally do get home after a long days work… so yeah, an historic weather “second timeline” would certainly help in enjoying the ingame weather even more. The data is all being stored, just needs to be connected or copied. Would be lovely to have a “save weather” -option as well, for a specific flightpath , so that the data request for historic weather can be saved locally, not causing more strain on the server supplying the data than nescessary.
Or maybe a kind of way where we can input metar data for ourselves along the route? Just paste the meta’s into flightsim instead of horsing around with the sliders.
Well, here’s to future msfs dreams coming true: CHeers!
