The weather can’t be consistent with reality if it can’t even be consistent with itself. There’s the wind overlay on the planner map, the wind the departure thingy and the ingame ATIS… all of them show different wind direction and strength, none of them are right (with the overlay being closest).
That one is close, yes, but it also deviates the most from what I experience in-game. But that’s what upsets me… the game knows what the weather is, the data is clearly there! It just also comes up with all these other values and messes everything up.
Seriously??? Have a look at @Viniter’s screen shots. The airport graphic says 276@14kts, the little wind direction arrow on the world map indicates 170~180@8kts (which yes, is close to the METAR) but then in game the ATIS says 222@5kts.
For me, this is one of the biggest issues with MSFS and has been since it was released. Useless for flight planning, you plan a flight in the world map then load into the sim and your departure/arrival is completely wrong. Its so frustrating this still is not rectified 9 months after release!!!
I mean at this point I don’t even care if the weather matches reality, I just want a way to predict what the weather’s going to be in-game… before actually getting to my destination and listening to the ATIS (if that can even be trusted, who knows). I can’t plan based on real METARs, can’t plan based on the planner page, can’t plan based on wind overlays. The weather always completely surprises me and I have to change my arrival and approach last minute just to be able to land. Not to mention winds aloft/en route weather, that’s completely unpredictable.
I’d be even okay with some dev tool that will analyze the downloaded weather data and figure out what can I expect, but I feel like I’m always flying blind. Half the joy of doing cross country is planning around the weather. That’s impossible here, just fly and pray.
Probably not. On several occasions i had strong reason to believe that the destination ATIS (from about 20-30 miles out) matched the conditions at my present location, rather than the actual conditions at the field.
Hi folks! As near as I can figure from reading these forums the WX in MSFS is based a some kind of forecast model, not METARS or even TAF’s from the actual time we are “flying”. We all know how accurate and “on time” WX forecasts are…LOL! So, this is OK for a game but not a flight sim. Right now it’s looking like we will have to wait for a quality WX add-on. Not what was promised but then very little of this game is what was promised. Except for the streaming ortho. That’s quite nice and very convenient but that’s not going to bring me back to MSFS very often when there are other options.
so frustrating when the simulator is giving me different winds from what they are using on VATSIM?? HOW IS THIS ALL SUPPOSE TO WORK IF THEY CANT GET THE WEATHER ACCURATE?? this is getting ridiculous now, especially when they claim to have fixed it over and over and over again.
Seems like a lot of things about this sim are good enough for a layman’s understanding of a flight sim, but far from actually sufficient…
Only if HiFi manage to come up with something. Asobo will not open up the weather system for third party developers.
The disappointing thing is that if they allowed third parties to interface with the weather system, and allowed them proper access to the sim, at least as good as it was with FSX, by now FS2020 would have functioned perfectly fine in all respects, and a lot more people would have bought into it. But as it stands, it falls just short of a lot of marks.
You’re posting in a thread that goes pretty deep into how the weather is supposed to work, so I don’t understand how you came to those conclusions… When around airports, the sim is supposed to use METARs for the variables that METARs get right such as barometric pressure, temperature and wind vector. For the variables METARs can’t reliably provide and when not around airports, the sim is supposed to use Meteoblue’s model, which is a really good model in my experience and provides way more data than a METAR can provide. I would much rather they use a good model like Meteoblue than just randomly guess and interpolate data that can’t be reliably provided by METARs or in areas that don’t have METARs at all. I live in an area with highly dynamic weather and micro climates, and sites like weather.com can never get it right. Meteoblue on the other hand is almost always pretty close. Their forecasts would be perfectly fine in MSFS if Asobo did their part and provided us with the appropriate data at the appropriate times, which they’re currently not doing… METAR around airports and Meteoblue everywhere else would be awesome if it was actually live. The weather would be much closer to accurate than any weather engine of the past, we would be synced with Vatsim, and we could then actually do weather-based flight planning. As it is now though, the weather is as good as random because they’re not sending the appropriate data at the appropriate times, which is amazing to me considering they’re paying for this data… It’s kinda like their cache system. The manual cache has been broken since launch, making us pointlessly use way more bandwidth than necessary, which costs them more money than necessary, yet they seem to have zero motivation to fix it. You would think they would prioritize fixing the systems that cost them money…
Based on how Asobo has shown confusion in their Q&As when other long-standing bugs are brought up, I have to wonder if the language barrier and/or lack of engagement with the community is making it so they just don’t understand what we’re talking about. It also doesn’t help that so many people see clouds and say “yup, live weather works fine for me. It’s overcast in RL and overcast in my sim, have you tried restarting your computer?” without taking into consideration that their area has overcast weather multiple days in a row, and the overcast sky they see is not from today.
The wind overlay (Ground Level) I found to be most helpful. The little arrow often matches Windy.com as well as the windsocks and the actual wind once in the sim. The bigger label and runway selection will (Still!) make you takeoff/land downwind, which is pretty horrible. So far using windy.com and the ground level arrow to do the flight planning and flights went great. Just entirely ignoring the ATC =P Voted!
this is not correct and it comes with history of Vatsim. You need understand some points, there is still some Vatsim weather system functional which is working with Metars system, this I see from very long time ago and also there was possibility to set as primary weather system in sim (FS9, FSX, …) but inside Vatsim Client. Also in that times I used no Vatsim weather but sim weather which was better and more real than Vatsim but pilot need also take to account some differencies with ATC infos. Really I can’t say for sure what channel now Vatsim use for ATC weather but if this is still with Metars system then no problem, this is most expexted option because of best info about airport weather. You as pilot can set what you want in this time and with different ATC info you can do what you want, ask alternative procedure (in some cases ATC will maybe not clear you for that in hurry hours f.ex.) or set clear weather and use same procedures as ATC give to pilots at that time. Is simply not expected to have same weather for all pilots and ask for this possibility for Vatsim.
Update: to Live weather, from 2 days after tests, it looks to me all is +/- correct where I did my flights (mostly in countries around Slovakia).
You would see this irl if there’s an inversion where the convection of the bottom layer is stopped, but thermals (ascending air pockets) penetrate the inversion and “grow” into the next layer. Definitely a feature, not a bug, if the atmospheric conditions at your position warrant such behaviour.
I am aware of that however the above was only in one spot and literally looks like blocks of images pasted all over that storm creating completely flat spots on top and bottom with clouds being torn into two entirely different textures for that specific location.
Of all the locations and weather conditions I have see this is the only time I have encountered such a thing.
No way that ^ is a feature… it was probably an error in the data.
