On this map we can see where it’s raining, clouds and live lighting as it happens.
How dufficult would it be to use this data in MSFS? The area wher it’s raining is already displayed on this map ,so you could use that data to generate the associated storms that produce it. And you could use the live lighting strike data to reproduce live lighting in the sim!
You could jhave a thunderstorm in your area, and see it’s representation in MSFS. Then you could see lighting out of your windowm and a second later you’d see it in the sim as well!
I think that would be a lot of fun, and it’s relatively easy to accomplish, as long as you have access to the live data. I think for a company like Microsoft that would be trivial, so I hope to see this happen one day, hopefully in MSFS 2024!
Also, as a sidenote, I’d love to see better lighting bolts in MSFS as well. Right now there are between 5 or 10 textures being used for lightning, I’d love to see a better olgo take care of that. Either that or MORE textures please
If they create thunderstorms which cannot actually tear a small GA aircraft apart or potentially damage an airliner, it’ll be a moot point. We don’t want more cosmetics, MSFS already excels in them more than any other game in software industry’s history. We need more sim elements, or rather the ones that shouldn’t be missing in the first place. Better yet the excellent cosmetics to combine with the sim elements and have some tangible meaning.
Simply put: I don’t want fluffier clouds, I want clouds that can actually cause proper icing which affects flight model.
Agreed, the storms are a bit tame. In that respect I wonder what those tornadoes will be like in 2024.
And yes, it’d be nice to have a more realistic representation of storms in MSFS. Which is why I think it’s be a good move to base it off of live data even more. MSFS already does this to some degree of course, but I think it could be even better
All excellent points. If they actually want to make the weather more realistic (as is one of their arguments to make 2024 a standalone title) now’s the time. Let’s hope we won’t have to wait 4 more years for something other flight sims have already been doing equally well or better for a long time now (I won’t take graphics into account).
Originally, 2020 had this. Thunderstorms with lots of lightning and killer turbulence. Never hail but still pretty extreme stuff. I used to fly through bad storms a lot and lost some planes to them. But all this got turned off some while back. Nowadays we have zero lightning and not much turbulence in “thunderstorms”. Live Weather does a pretty good job of putting storms where they are in real life (which you can verify by flying in “tornado alley” this time of year) but they’ve been significantly nerfed since release.
Lightning went away first. I get the impression that this was due it not meshing well with the rest of Live Weather. For instance, I’d often see lightning from up in cirrus clouds or down in little puffy cumulous that would have a hard time just making light rain, let alone lightning. And in the actual thunderstorms, there was rather more lightning than you’d expect. But I haven’t seen lightning in about a year now, I guess.
The extreme turbulence went away more recently, about the time the “new and improved” turbulence update came out.
This is simply untrue. I was flying over the Grand Canyon last night and there was lightning. Problem was it was coming from a virtually clear sky but it is there
That’s the point really: who’s going to pay for this service?
It’s fun if a few weather nerds access your data that you (possibly) offer for free to the internet. Not so much fun if 2 million commercial clients (MSFS) start to hit your servers - and your bandwidth bill starts to skyrocket
Sure, MS could make a deal with that provider - but they already have a deal with some other weather provider (meteo blue, IIRC). Doesn’t meteo blue provide the same kind of data already? After all, we already do have thunderstorms and lightnings in the sim, based on this real weather info - no?
Well, that’s comforting to know. I sure ain’t seen any in a long time, however, and I’ve been looking intentionally. It’s a definite reduction of lightning compared to the excessive amount originally.
Did they introduce a settings switch for lightning like they did for turbulence? If so, I missed it.
Man are those lame excuses. You sound strictly like a salesman. A moderate thunderstorm can and does tear small GA airplanes to pieces. Is is good to learn how to avoid them.
I flew XPlane for years before I switched to MSFS for many reasons but NOT because MSFS had good weather depictions.
I am NOT a ‘Weather Nerd’ has some have put it but have flown out of Kansas for more than 30 years. I just flew MSFS across a current severe line of thunder storms that have tops over 50k and are putting out reported hail grearter the 2". My Foreflight Ipad and Navigraph on my PC both showed the line of severe wx included the hail areas but MSFS showed only a few puppy clouds well below my 26,000’. XPlane and there 3rd party vendors have it ALL OVER MSFS in the Wx department. Period.
