Where’s your source on this? Did Jorg or someone from MS / Asobo confirm this? It really has been a huge want for me in this sim (and a decent long hauler), surely they’re working on it?
My source was from a Moderators reply to my question. They essentially said that there’s currently no change and perhaps it was because MB wanted more $$ than what would make sense to alter the terms of the contract. So it’s neither a no or a yes, it’s a TBD.
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I think that most of us want it so much that some would be willing to pay an extra $5-10 to have it working. If its only due to money, then give US the option to pay a little extra to have it.
Do I think that is messed up? Yes! It should come with the darn thing in the first place.
Then again, I felt tricked when it first came out in the first place. I always felt they sold us a beta version so they could raise the money needed to finish the thing. I’m a real world pilot and at best it was a very pretty VFR simulator to see the world.
I’d give anything to combine Xplane and MSFS into one sim. Now, THAT would be amazing. Anyway, give us the option to pay for the radar Asobo!
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Would be nice to hear an update as promised.
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This was (briefly) addressed in the latest developer live stream which you can see here: https://youtu.be/kce_lFLOy9A?t=4772
For anyone who doesn’t have time to watch the video, here’s what was said:
Jayne (community manager, reading question): I know a lot of… there’ve been a lot of comments here regarding full weather radar functionality. Are there any updates that any of you have to share about weather radar, in particular?"
Martial Bossard, Asobo: We are talking about this weather and terrain API?
Jayne: Mmm-hmm.
Martial: This is taking time. I don’t have a clear status right now.
Jayne: OK, that’s alright.
Jorg Neumann, Microsoft: But… but to be clear, we obviously see it as the very top of the wishlist…
Martial, Jayne: Yes.
Jorg: …so it’s not like we’re not seeing it!
Martial: No, no, no. Yeah.
Jorg: It’s an implementation question and how, how… You know… Do we even have the data that people want, that’s not at all… That’s not at all clear.
So what he is really saying is that they could do it…but…with how the system is setup now will METARS being involved…it’s trickier. If it was just MB alone I would be 100% confident they could have that taken care of yesterday.
They can render the precipitation that we can see fall in 3d. Thats what we want to be able to see in the radar as well right? If they can render the rain falling from those clouds they should be able to render it as information on the radar as well? I know they need to render the rain twice and it will for sure impact performance. But there should be other things in a simulator they should save performance on than simualated stuff especially atmosphere and aircraft should be least simplified to gain performance. In maybe other games and stuff those things could be simplified. I know those METAR bubbles are around airports and stuff. I preffered the weather overall without METAR. But those shouldn’t be an issue. They have weather rendered in the atmosphere, that means they already has the data that needs in the radar.
Well, for sure. Only Asobo knows how it works under the hood. But thats my thoughts about it.
Just discovered there’s another snippet about weather radar a little further into the video after a question about replay functionality for xbox users here: https://youtu.be/kce_lFLOy9A?t=4897
Jorg: So I just want to say, because somebody says “weather radar is a no-go.” No it’s not! What we’re trying to say is it’s not trivial, so we need to go be thoughtful about it and… and let the devs come to the right conclusions and solutions."
I’m not a programmer, but as a layman my understanding is that the rain you are seeing falling locally isn’t being rendered distantly, and for weather radar you’re interested in the distant stuff, not what you can see locally. So I’m not convinced your inference holds water, pun somewhat intended.
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Maybe you are correct. But it somehow knows it should be raining at that place and be rendered at a later time. But maybe what cloud that should contain the rain may be random and unkown. I don’t know really. Were my thoughts only as i said.
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I’m sorry but this just some bs. Honestly I’m done with all these talks. They talk like “yeah this is for simmers bla bla”, “core simmers should be happy with the sim” yet they STILL cannot provide CLEAR answer to most basic questions. Why is it so hard to get a weather and terrain API? If it’s licensing issue, just say “We as Asobo/Microsoft do not want to pay the extra fees MeteoBlue wants” and boom thats it. At this point they are just trying to stall and hope people forget it. This is crazy.
Without raw data, MSFS wouldn’t be able to render the weather anyways. It’s so simple! There is NO WAY in the world that this a technical issue. If it wasn’t a licensing issue, they would be answering questions differently.
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Yeah exactly. Obviously they cannot say publicly that MeteoBlue is asking for more money and we don’t want to pay the extra. They will not say that, no. Instead, they are just giving vague answers to stall as much as possible and buy more time, hoping people will forget. This is pathetic.
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I don’t disregard that they’re keeping their hopes up. But at the same time I think it would be simple enough to just say that MB either doesn’t want their data accessed outside of their legal contract or that they’re asking for too much $$. If they acknowledged at least one or the other of those two, people would be more understanding. To be left in the dark is not the greatest approach and reflects badly. Because MB does offer METAR options on their platform, adding that feature wasn’t an issue. Also, what I don’t understand is why is MB so hyper critical of protecting their data? They’re not providing anything that I can tell that isn’t largely freely available or provided for by government websites. Looks like the only option left for Asobo to do is to either fork out to MB or to use outside sourced data to build a separate function into their engine. I have a feeling that doing the latter would result in a violation of their contract agreement and they would be headed towards a courtroom. If they ended up dropping MB, there’s no lack of other providers that they would be able to find. And even if MB lost the MSFS account, it’s not like they’d go belly up either as per their introduction video it’s quite clear they have many clients and have been around for a long time and are also a part of a university as well. Legality aside in this matter, it just sounds like MB wants to be a stickler. Not like their data is top secret or anything.
What about a weather radar for MSFS??? How are things progressing?
I am just coming from a real flight in cockpit where an accurate use of the radar was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, due to bad weather. It’s not possible and NOT ACCEPTABLE to think of a detailed airliner without a weather radar!
Asobo, I’ll be direct: it’s USELESS that you progress with improving (useless) features and don’t give the radar the MAXIMUM PRIORITY! You’d better dump this sim once forever! A flight sim without weather radar is almost like an airplane without a wing!!!
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It would be great to get an idea what the current plan is for this and timings
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Let’s be honest here, Asobo should work on storm depiction in live weather before they implement a weather API… We don’t get CB storm clouds going up to 60,000FT as they sometimes do IRL. With the current state of the weather engine, I’m not convinced of the practicality of a weather radar in this sim—just my opinion.
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I agree, implementation of BOTH things is of primary importance! They can’t think of a sim without CB clouds (with related effects) and without weather radar!
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Clearly they have as that’s what we’ve been currently using. The problem isn’t that they can’t create and or utilize an API. They already do it with their traffic through FlightAware, although lacking. The problem is that their current weather provider MB has legally bound them to not share their data or have their data used or accessed outside of being used within MSFS and by Asobo themselves. So until that issue gets resolved if ever you’re not going to see a third party WXR outside of Asobo aircraft. The CB is up to Asobo to fix. That’s another issue tied to the amount of data and how it’s being used being changed and reduced from its original state because users were having performance issues with the full set of data being used in it’s proper form. So sorry to say that one wish is a fairytale right now and the other is something that could/should/will eventually be fixed.
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Do you have a source for the contractual issue claim?
You do realise that contracts can be re-negotiated. So this is certainly NOT a fairytale. It is way more likely that MB asks for more money and MS is not willing to accommodate that.
This is NOT something that cannot change. It can change just fine, if MS/Asobo wants that to happen. Worst case people will have to pay a small fee to get access to such precipitation data for their 3rd party aircraft.
It’s all about money really, why wouldn’t it be. MeteoBlue is a business, not a secret intelligence service.