The lack of historical weather is almost unbelievable, and I have never understood why it was not considered an essential feature from the start. There must be a huge number of users who get home from work, in the dark! and just want to have a fly from their local airport, with live weather but earlier in the day. Whatever the individual interest I’m sure we’ve all thought at some time, “this would be a great day for whatever”.
The sim gives us a wonderful world to explore, but denies us the facility to experience realistic changing weather, should we wish to change the time zone, or time of day. Using a pre-set or custom weather is hardly the answer, though I know that’s the only option, meaning one can fly across a continent and even the air pressure remains the same!
I believe that if a software is called a “simulator” it ought to be able to “simulate” any given scenario both for training and leisure. So historical weather and historical traffic should be a must.
As some of you have mentioned before, many users fly at a time when it is late evening or night at their home (i.e. when the kids are in bed), however they would like to simulate a daytime flight with the corresponding temperatures, wind conditions, clouds etc. It’s actually really sad, that this is not possible. I really do hope historic weather (be it 24 hours or a whole year) will be considered for implementation in FS2024.
Or, if Asobo don’t have the resources/desire to implement this feature themselves, let someone else do it! There’s already decades of experience re implementing historical weather within the FS industry.
I fully subscribe to the historical weather, but unless we accept METAR based static weather and flying from one bubble to another, there are quite significant challenges in it. It’s one thing to store METAR reports for some years back, but the original and the only acceptable (in my opinion at least) weather simulation in MSFS requires gigabytes of data for every hour of the past. These data must also be accessible fast, and then the MSFS weather has to be recreated for every user, on the fly. I can foresee some hybrid solution which may risk not making anybody quite satisfied.
I think most users only need the past few days’ worth of historic weather, as they just want to fly during the daylight instead of at night, or when it wasn’t (or was) raining a couple days ago. And this is a non-issue from a data standpoint. Most weather sites that host numerical forecast model data like the kind Flight Simulator uses retain the runs from the past several days. There shouldn’t be a need to process anything on the fly for the user either. The client simulator need only point to a past run’s dataset that’s already sitting on the server. Those past runs are probably sitting on Meteoblue’s and Microsoft’s servers right now even. So the only changes needed to make this happen might be a few UI controls on the weather menu. A few snapshots from other points in the year could also be retained, trivial for Microsoft Azure.
This is low hanging fruit. But there’s also an entire orchard out there waiting to be picked.
Historic Weather does not imply ‘historic’ in a literary sense.
The last 24h would be sufficient to fly in daytime conditions even if it’s night irl where you are flying.
Better would be the last 12 months so that it is possible to fly in realistic snowy conditions even if it is summer in real life. Plus you could sort of reenact a particular weather situation which took place a couple of hours or days ago.
Well said. Most people do not need to fly using weather from years ago. But having the last 24h available is a must, so as to be able to fly during daylight without using night time weather and temperatures if your day job keeps you away from the sim.
Even better would be to have real weather 3/4 of a year back, so as to allow flying during the previous 3 seasons.
Weather presets are just not a good substitute due to their uniform unrealistic weather coverage.
Given that flying 12 hours ago would obviously be without online ATC, is it ok to presume that the original model-only weather simulation is acceptable in the historical timeline? If a particular METAR is so interesting that one would positively want to fly it, it’s easy to build it as a pre-set.
I think many would like a model-only historical weather, as it would remind of original implementation.
Presets are way too simplistic - they are uniform in space and time - you cannot define things like a weather front passing from the west and conditions deteriorating to rain but only at given area - expressive power of current presets is miniscule.
As a RL glider pilot I bought MSFS fror soaring and main (even only) selling point of MSFS was live weather which indeed is way more varied in space and time and other very good glider simulator - Condor doesn’t and probably won’t have such feature. Sadly I wasn’t able to use live weather to practice where I fly in RL as in weekdays I am at work during thermal part of the day and in weekends I gues what? fly in RL.
Only metars won’t do as they only do static “metar bubbles”, only live MeteoBlue data can provide realistic/interesting weather.
Couple use cases for which this would be an amazing feature:
Missions, discovery flights, and bush flights.
Imagine a mission where you’ve got to get a turbopop into the Bahamas as category 5 Hurricane Lee approaches. You’ll have to make the call about whether or not to divert to a safer island or accept more challenging landing conditions. You’d have the real world storm dynamically moving during your mission. Or simply having a cherry picked, real-world, and dynamic weather experience for your scenic discovery/bush flight would be pretty amazing too.
Debugging the weather.
If we could enter a specific time and location, then bugs and glitches could be reproducible by other users and staff for diagnostic purposes.
This is a fantastic point that I haven’t seen mentioned before! Currently live weather bugs are hard to reproduce because the exact conditions have changed since the initial report.
I just saw a new interview with Jörg Neumann, and it seems like the idea of short-term historic weather hasn’t really found its way to upper management. When mentioning historic weather, he went on about historic aircraft etc, but apparently he totally missed the point about the usefulness of 24-48 hours “rewind” in live weather, and he was like “good suggestion, I’ll bring it up with the dev team”, as if it was the first time he heard about it.
I suppose Seb and Martial are aware of the benefits of this approach, but we should make sure to make it known that even 24 hours of rewinding live weather are of great use to us. This will be a lot easier to achieve, as there’s no problem with the availability of worldwide data, which according to Jörg was one of the points that make implementing historical weather complicated.
Take a look here, at the end of the transcript, and about 22:00 in the video, they’re discussing live weather:
Read the last paragraph again, there might be hope yet:
I mentioned to Neumann that many would at least like to be able to offset dynamic weather by twelve hours to be able to fly specifically during the day or night regardless of their location and the current time of the day. He responded that it’s good feedback and he’ll bring it to the development team.
I’m not hopeful if this is his response after this has been a wishlist item for 3 years and collected nearly 500 votes. To me it shows that Asobo is not focused on the big issues with the sim. So that’s why after 3 years we still have:
only 2 cloud types
glass material showing through fog
snow coverage during summer heat
countless flight model issues such as lack of inertia
atmospheric properties for gliding still nowhere near the promised “as good as or better than Condor”
photo textures mis-match loading in at low altitude
AI traffic that is borderline unusable, despite being advertised as a major feature of MSFS
a weather engine nowhere near as feature-rich and realistic as it was promised for the sim before release.
… and of course historical weather missing.
Most of these issues have been present since the beginning, and all are fundamental flaws for a flight simulator that is intended to be not only a game but also a serious simulation platform.
These should have been fixed with priority long ago, instead of investing money in even more arcade style local legends that independent 3rd party devs could have done instead.
So I’m not hopeful that these issues will be fixed in version 2020. I’m not bitter about it, just disappointed. I accept v 2020 as being a beta for a great sim and thus looking forward to a v 2024 with all items listed above fixed.
You are not wrong. We have a bit of an Elite: Dangerous situation going on here: lots of promises and a misunderstanding of how important some thing really are.
The sad thing is: the weather engine was REALLY good in the beginning, but then got destroyed with that METAR stuff. Makes me mad and sad that the vast majority of users have a broken weather engine for years now, just so the small VATSIM crowd is happy.
Yes, I was aware of that. I’m just baffled by the fact that it was still new to Jörg, after 3 years of talking about historic weather, and them actively looking into the possibilities to implement it in MSFS.
To be fair, I think Seb and Martial are perfectly aware that there are good use cases for short-term historic weather…
