Where does this term “haze” everybody is talking about come from? Was that in the release notes? Because most problems I see people describing in all those threads have nothing to do with haze, those are rather mist or fog and / or low cloud issues.
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The only thing in patch notes:
- Improved METAR ingestion into live weather
But we’ll have to use “haze” in the title as well as users search on different terms.
Huh? You’re playing a flight simulator and you don’t like having to fly in weather? That’s the whole point of this game! Some places in the world will have bad weather fly elsewhere or make up your own weather.
I’m not sure if its meant as haze. Apperently, the altitude of clouds is now projected as MSL instead of AGL. They might just be wrongfully deployed cloud layers.
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Here I’ll try to break this down again. Watch this video:
Now imagine it’s clear of clouds over your plane and you have miles of visibility in every direction, and then in the next instant the visibility is basically zero. Here are the problems with this:
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It’s completely unrealistic. This simply doesn’t happen in the real world. Yes, VFR pilots get into scrapes all the time where the weather closes in around them or they’re scud running and inadvertently fly VFR into IMC (fly into a cloud), but the situation in the above video should never happen in a game that’s simulating realistic weather behavior.
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It’s a life or death emergency for a VFR pilot. An IFR pilot, while this could still be quite problematic, totally unrealistic, annoying, distracting, or immersion breaking could deal with this. But a pilot relying on visual reference to the ground is probably going to die. This situation could happen in the sim even if you do your due diligence and obtain a weather briefing along your route, say from Airport A to B and the conditions are VMC (visual weather) along the entire route. But if Airport C miles off of your route happens to be IMC, and you happen to get within a certain radius of C, OR the METAR at C happens to update during your flight, then the weather could instantly change to extreme IMC (instruments needed or you die weather). In real life, you can actually see the weather you’re flying into. Airport C may very well be IFR in real life, but I would see the clouds/fog/mist blanketing it before I flew into it. I could divert, I could fly over it, whatever. But now the situation is that, on any given flight over the LA area (or elsewhere), I might just instantly encounter weather that totally breaks a VFR flight, and it’s because the simulator is wrong and unrealistic. Not because that’s how weather actually works.
So the major problems that SU7 has introduced are thus:
- Live Weather now behaves in a totally unrealistic manner.
- Live Weather is totally inaccurate over large areas
- At it’s best when working as expected, even with good forecast and observed weather data, Live Weather can still be significantly inaccurate.
Does it make sense now that I’m not talking about how I don’t like flying in weather, but that I don’t like flying in unrealistic and inaccurate weather?
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This topic is one that has been pushed up:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/are-cloud-bases-in-new-metar-system-in-agl-or-msl/473011
However, I have pushed a question on the best way of handing the new METAR in general.
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Has anybody noticed if it is getting better with time. Like the AI is tuning?
That could very well be happening as well. The examples I posted above from KONT were definitely from the visibility variable in the METAR though. I could see the visibility change instantly as the METAR updated, and flying above it showed that misty fog layer, not the sim’s cumuliform cloud type it uses for everything.
Wouldn’t surprise me that they’re hurriedly trying to tweak this server side, or that they launched SU7 with the METAR blending completely off line. They originally launched the game with Live Weather totally absent or broken over large areas and slowly fixed it over the first few updates.
It could also be that the weather is just different though. People thought the blue sky lightning bug was fixed and then came back again after a later update, but really it was just winter time and the lightning returned in the spring.
I can reproduce these issues pretty consistently, so I’ll give them another look. I had a flight over San Fran last night though and there wasn’t the omnipresent mist which was a welcome surprise.
Just the radio message “Can you see the Taffic” ??? How can you see the traffic in such a haze? And the best the copilot replies, "Yes, I see the traffic. The boy must have X-ray eyes. I can’t see anything. 
I’m not saying nothing has gone wrong, the haze is clearly overpowering and spoiling the sightseeing experience.
But does this need a hotfix? Is there anything wrong with SU7, or is it just a matter of faulty weather information being sent to the servers?
I think it might be the data feed but could be wrong. Hopefully they can fix it there this week. Either way it’s a big game breaker for me. Not sure if it’s just my area but I can’t see anything. And it’s clear fall day with no humidity.
I’d guess the hard transition is a simulator problem and not a server side problem. The server probably merely sends corresponding data points, and it’s up to the sim’s software to blend between them as you fly.
I haven’t done much real investigating, but this seems to be true to me. Visibility is really bad with live weather when flying in the USA, but looks great everywhere else.
Are you sure the 2nd pic is not from the mars rover?
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I just completed a flight from Detroit to Raleigh-Durham NC (KRDU) in the Aerosoft CRJ-700. METAR weather at Detroit was low overcast with rain and 4 miles visibility which was well depicted. I did not break out of the clouds in climb until almost 25,000 feet.
Descending over North Carolina the clouds became broken, then scattered. There was no evidence of haze until descending below about 8000 feet, and even then it was light, and in patches here and there - not everywhere.
KRDU METAR was calling 10 miles with a temp/dewpoint spread of 11 degrees C. Visibility was good on the approach to runway 23L and remained so until landing. I am very familiar with this airport and its environs. Visibility was probably between 16 and 20 miles. There was a very light haze layer, but nothing out of the ordinary for humidity of 55 percent.
Since I suspect that all elements of live weather can be adjusted on the servers before being pushed to MSFS clients, perhaps they are working on adjusting the haze injection logic after reading the many complaints here on the forum.
On this particular flight, I saw nothing to complain about at all regarding the weather depiction, but I will try more tests in other areas.
Just flew KEDW → KMHV and got the same hard transition from 70sm to 10sm visibility.
haze is real. Makes the sim that much more realistic. Ive seen different levels of haze since SU7 and it’s awesome
Where are you flying? Just curious, cause in my area it’s awful. Wonder if it’s location based.
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Today in southern California (took off from KSNA) I saw tons of haze all around the Los Angeles Basin and Riverside, but there are strong Santa Ana winds today that would have pushed any such haze layers into the ocean in real life.
I really think someone at Asobo thought that 10sm visibility means exactly 10sm visibility and not “10 or more, up to and including infinity”.
