Yeah, I think it just depends on what type of flying you do. IFR into larger airports, it makes more sense to just use METARs at the field and some winds aloft. But Flight Simulator should already be doing this: injecting the latest METAR observation at the field instead of using the forecast model. The METAR is only used to set the temp, winds, and pressure though. Clouds are still coming from the model.
I’m a VFR bushpilot at heart, so the METAR injectors are pretty much worthless to me as they don’t simulate enroute localized and dynamic weather.
With Metar injection by “unreal-weather-live-metar” it looks like the clouds are being derived from the Metar, and I have witnessed some very nice “SMOOTH” weather transitions over a reasonably long flight.
Everyone has differing uses and expectation from MSFS, and I find the forum interesting to see what some of those different requirements are.
My primary use of MSFS is as a practice tool, for CRM, as well as to get familiar with some of the GPS systems I may or may not use in RL.
The Scenery Eye Candy is nice, but most of my flights are under IMC, so what is more important to me is a realistic Sim Cockpit … not necessarily faithful to an one particular aircraft.
All this discussion and I don’t see a single mention of how we still don’t have proper visibility settings in sim? Aerosol density is always zero in live weather. Live weather is not factoring things like humidity to generate haze and reduce visibility. How can you people keep flying in cavok without noticing this ? It’s either clouds on the ground or cavok situation…
Seb has addressed this in the latest Q&A. They’re aware of the issue and they will take steps to improve the situation. And while this hasn’t been said in the Q&A, i think they are waiting for the XBox and DX12 releases until they start making extensive changes to the graphics.
I disagree. I have had plenty of situations in live weather where it was getting quite hazy.
Screenshots? Location? I’ve seen the visibility drop due to nearby rain showers, but other than the default visibility distance (50-100 mi or so?) I’ve never seen clear air haze in Live Weather. It’s always >10 mi/unlimited.
It’s been talked about a lot. I mentioned it for the 100th time in another thread a few days ago. It’s just that there are 10,000 other important issues among which our and the devs’ attention gets divided. As CristNeagu pointed out above, what I gathered from the last dev Q&A is that after the XBox/Directx12 launch they’re going to work on overhauling the weather system.
As far as I can see, there is no Humidity or Dew Point. What passes for low viz is just low cloud, and actual viz is always 86 miles - at least I have not seem the simconnect variable for Viz shift off a rock steady 86 nm.
Please do if you see it again. The weather is a big deal to me in this game, and I’ve actually gone looking for low visibility conditions but always come up empty unless there’s some low clouds or precip.
Definitely. But I’ve not seen the injectors produce individual storms between METAR sites. Something that you’d approach and could divert around. The injectors change the “weather scene” around the plane, as if the plane is acting on a stage and the backdrop gets changed. Rather than shooting on location, in which the weather exists at certain places and you can fly to or around it.
I got my pilot certificate to tour the countryside and go on VFR joyrides. So the scenery actually is everything to me, and the volumetric weather engine is just as important. As a storm chaser, it would be super disappointing to have the clouds gradually fill in overhead instead of seeing a big storm front looming on the horizon that you can fly up to. And the devs promised us matching real world conditions and native support for supercell thunderstorms. They better deliver!
I’m gonna fanboy a little - so cool seeing you on the forums :). And I agree with the low vis, I’ve been flying since September and still haven’t encountered hard IFR (like CATIIIb) conditions… I’d really like to test autolands with the FBW’s A320 and practise go-arounds.
I would like to see an RVR setting available for solid IFR approaches.
Right now, I zoom into just the instrument panel with no window view. At 50 - 100 feet AGL I switch to outside view.
Have you had any luck manually creating the weather you want to see? That would tell you if it’s possible or not, assuming the interface can control all aspects of weather modifiers.
No, there appears to be no way to control the actual density of the condensate in the clouds. The clouds are always way too thin. And then there’s no wet haze, just that brown aerosol. And the aerosol doesn’t get dense enough to get the visibility levels down really low. I’ve overridden the UI by editing the weather preset files, and you can set the aerosol value at crazy values, but all it does is cause graphics glitching. It doesn’t actually reduce the visibility much:
You have to add cloud+rain to get it close to LIFR if that’s what you’re after, but controlling the actual visibility distance is pretty much impossible currently. There’s no good way to setup a marginal VFR boundary layer haze like you get on a soupy summer evening, and that’s what I was most interested in.
The effect they’re using to draw the reduced visibility of rainshafts would work for that boundary layer haze and fog, we just need more control over it.
“Severe weather” resulted in change of air speed of 100 knots?
It looked like a gust of wind…
What I experienced appears to be an extreme change in wind direction, (gust?) in a very shot amount of time, plane speed changed 100 knots within one second.
I was flying in Longitude at M.74 (268 knots) when experienced an instantaneous change to 368 (M.934) within one second. The wind direction also changed in the opposite direction (which is actually calculated dynamically based on navigational differences from flight path and airspeed).
This happened three time within about 10 minutes. Twice I went to overspeed, once down to stall speed. You can’t imagine the G forces on everything in that plane… it is not survivable, yet my plane stayed intact.
