I wonder, if Asobo/MS has considered renegotiating / amending the Meteoblue contract that would allow for a subscription based 3D weather aystem? Funding should allow for an API 3rd party vendors could license (for a fee of course).
I donât understand the question. It is a 3D weather system. What needs to be renegotiated or changed?
What would 3rd party vendors offer? What would they license?
Asobo/MS does the integration of data from MeteoBlue. Putting somebody else into the equation would take several years of API writing most likely (given the pace weâve seen of SDK development so far), and, wow, you want to see problems with slow data/ connection issues as multiple systems are streaming into the stream⊠eek!
Itâs not a desktop software anymore. Way more complex than what used to be done when they were just supplying cloud textures.
4 Likes
Asobo has a contract with Metroblue for weather data. Itâs very exclusive and one of the reasons why we donât have any (good) 3rd party weather apps currently. heâs suggesting reneging that contract so that 3rd parties can come in and create their own weather app based on another meteorological data source (NWS, Accuweather, The Weather Channel etc) so that a player of Flight sim may decide whether they want to possible have "more accurate weather services.
But you are otherwise correct. Even if 3rd party weather was feasible from a contractual standpoint there are far too many moving parts to simply âadd it in.â
Exactly⊠Itâs not just the data. Thereâs a massive system behind the whole thing, integrated all over the place, making it well nigh impossible to integrate with somebody else writing some plugin module. Itâs not a plugin, itâs an integrated part of the flight modeling AND streaming code.
Theyâre getting to the point where they are modeling the atmosphere.
In the old days, it was just triggering âprettierâ textures based on weather data. That is long, long past.
The same issues that Seb discussed about keeping things in sync for multi-player interaction come into play here as well. Best to leave that where it is. Youâd need a pretty big server / coding team to take over the business from MS.
3 Likes
Then thereâs the issue of that third party going under. This is why all basic IaaS in the sim is under MS Control - Playfab, Azure, XBox Live. Probably some interesting charge back models.weâll never really get to see or calculate, but that guards against infrastructure failure for a critical sim environment layer.
7 Likes
REX does this with WeatherForce.
Itâs not impossible.
There are issues because they basically have to brute force in but itâs possible.
The weather is much more accurate, includes storms with thunder and lightning.
right but what people want is a 3rd party app that doesnât require any trickery or brute forcing in order to have âbetter weather.â Thats the point of the original wishlist item was opening up the weather API to 3rd parties so that they didnât have to resort to such tactics. I suspect development time as well as support down the road is easier with an API to work with as opposed to creating something entirely from scratch then figure out how to work those with MSFS
Much more accurate? As far as I know it ingests a metar and applies that globally, so youâll never see weather building along the horizon. The way I see it, no weather mod for any sim in the past (and any for MSFS) comes anywhere close to what MSFS live weather manages to produce.
Iâd say keep it fully closed, so that integration with the rest of the sim can be optimal, and let MS/Asobo keep iterating on it. Iâm not at all interested in third parties messing with weather.
So no, I donât think itâs âmuch more accurateâ. It will match the metar, because thatâs precisely what it is. IRL youâll often see weather not matching metar, because metar is generally updated once per hour, based on predictions, while real weather is not that predicatable, and updates every second 
Always matching metar is unrealistic by definition.
9 Likes
I agree. I think people âwishing on a star for 3rd party weatherâ are living in a past that no longer exists or is possible with the current sim. I think Microsoft and Asobo are very aware of how important weather is and it is in their best interest to keep improving it, for many reasons, including business reasons we arenât even aware of, and I trust they have a plan to accomplish that over the next 3 years.
6 Likes
The current weather system is barely existent and needs a huge amount of work but it should be done internally with all the access to everything thatâs required to be adjusted. What we currently have is the same ugly popcorn cloud built together to large structures and that needs a rework. The basic principle is there, it used to work very well until some people called for metar injection. You can create a metar from weather but you canât recreate weather from a metar. Thatâs the current limitation. If we could get back to the large weather systems that influence each other we could have the greatest weather in flightsim ever.
2 Likes
For the casual simmer the weather is fine. However, there are more and more serious simmers that fly airliners and require weather radar. Using radar though is impossible due to the 2D construct of the current weather system. This is why the large devâs wonât even waste their time as there is no way to currently make the radar functional.
there is no â2D construct of the current weather systemâ. The weather is obviously fully 3D.
Whatâs missing is an API to view that 3D information, which currently simply doesnât exist.
4 Likes
I would trust Asobo if they would just come out and explain what their plan is.
-What is their vision?
-Will the aircraft devâs be able to implement an accurate radar system?
-etcâŠ
You can see from the below Discord link that REX (being experts at weather) has reached out and never received a response. Being experts, perhaps REX could advise and provide assistance to speed things along.
" Murray â 05/03/2023 5:46 PM
@Skipper77 @N347DT I know Reed has tried to work and reach out to Asobo several times, with no real response."
As a general rule Iâm a very patient individual and donât usually cause trouble, but the more I learn about flying airliners and always have nice weather above FL250, and see the INOP flag on the weather radar controller, the less patient I become.
Asobo: PLEASE provide your vision for a true weather system.
Thank you
it looks that youâre not looking for a new âreal weatherâ system at all. You just want weather radar to work. Thereâs a wishlist topic for that already, which already has quite a few votes.
3 Likes
The issue the aircraft devâs have is, without a true , or as close (they are calling it 3D) weather system, the radar systems are useless.
and again, the problem is not that MSFS weather system is not 3D, itâs that there is no API to access that information.
Right now, MSFS provides a simplified 2D radar image which third party developers can use if they want. Most donât want that. The solution would be to create a new API from scratch to access that information, which hasnât happened yet.
Why? thatâs unknown. Could be just that itâs a lot of work, that priorities lie elsewhere for now, or that there are maybe licensing issues with that.
4 Likes
The fact that all the real 3rd party devs do not use current weather API because itâs âawfulâ (their words, not mine) is what the OP is asking; this has been a wishlist item for over a year.
Exactly. Well said.
That last sentence is the key point: Weather may be great in the game if you fly over it at 35 000 feet (and through it IFR), but hose of us who fly down in it or below it probably disagree. I do most of my flying VFR in the LA area on PilotEdge. More often than not, I have to turn off live weather because it doesnât match MeteoBlue (which is supposed to be the gameâs data source), and I canât remain clear of clouds in the areas that the PilotEdge controllers expect me to be able to.
I think what is happening is that the game has just one tool to render clouds - cumulus. There isnât enough nuance in that one tool to render more complex cloud types and visibilities, so we end up with wonky weather. It might look fine from 10 km up, but it sucks when youâre VFR down low.
VFR is an abbreviation⊠R means Rules. There are clear rules for you how far away you have to stay from clouds in a certain airspace and in VFR isât your responsibility to do that, not the controllerâs. If you canât comply you tell ATC and if necessary and if youâre rated to (which you obviously are in the sim) and your plane is certified for it you may check in for an IFR approach. if not⊠go somewhere else.
But yes, the sim in its current form doesnât really have predictable weather or anything that would come close to âweatherâ. It needs a lot of work which is terribly overdue but it doesnât need anyone to inject anything. The whole sim is built to recreate a dynamic world of moving airmass over terrain. To get this done it doesnât matter if itâs Asobo or Active Sky or Rex or whoever as long as itâs done internally. If necessary they could do it like the do with Working Title and outsource the job but within the MSFS system.