Although I mostly fly around the world in live weather, it would be very useful to be able to set localised weather areas to my choice of weather, while maintaining live weather elsewhere.
Then I could set my departure and arrival weather to something specific so that I could practice eg depart in sunshine followed by a live weather flight, then a foggy approach into a chosen airport.
This would be sooo much more flexible than what we have at present.
Obviously the changes between the areas should be gradual, and not just kick in instantly.
Way too much of a differential between the forecasted weather model between airports and the real time METAR at airports.
Transition of the weather between the forecasted and METAR zones is too abrupt
#1 is basically one of the biggest banes of the weather system overall since launch. Having 12+ hour old forecast model leads to potentially very inaccurate weather in the sim compared to the real world. That differential gap is just way too big.
#2 is really an issue when #1 is far off from the actual METAR conditions. The closer it is, the less jarring the weather change will be. The more it’s different, the more jarring that instantaneous switch of weather is.
However, #1 is what really needs to be fixed, as that can be just unacceptably bad. And it’s compounds the issue with #2. Until they can fix #1, #2 will never be right, no matter how much they tweak it.
Yeah, that’s all well and good and agreed, but I’m really driving at trying to get custom weather based on a region.
Currently if you set a custom weather to say foggy, the entire world is foggy until you change it. That’s not very helpful.
I wasn to be able to manually set Heathrow to foggy for 10 miles around, and at the same time set Leeds to no fog, but maybe rainy, or something else for 20 miles around, and still have the option of having live weather in between.
This is impossible at present, unless you manually change the weather settings mid flight.
I want to be able to preselect these things, just like I could in FSX 20 years ago.
The problem with fixing #1 is that the entire weather system methodology is completely dependent on those forecast models to function. Afaik, forecast models are only updated twice a day so I imagine there’s no way to get more updated models.
I’m assuming they would have to abandon the forecast models entirely and rebuild the weather system from the ground up using a different methodology to depict live weather. At this stage, I’d consider that highly unlikely. Unfortunately, I think we’re stuck with this method.
I think your fix is to keep asking Asobo to open up the system to third party developers. I don’t see them getting around to these kinds of features themselves. However, if a third party could inject into the volumetric weather system, you could have a whole suite of third party tools that let you design your own enroute weather, tweak existing live weather, or use alternate data sources like METAR only, radar/satellite, different region specific models.
The weather we already have in the sim looks beautiful.
We just need more control and more options, more accuracy.
In the early days of this sim, I remember hearing about 60 layers of weather control. We are nowhere near that yet.
I also wonder if we will ever get historic weather. I had that with addons in P3D and it was excellent. I used to note down dates and times of excellent interesting weather happenings so I cold go back to them later.
So many possibilties for the future.
What I want to avoid is some of the complexities of the P3D addons I use to use - running perhaps five addons to get the weather how I wanted, and then the regular updates to each, and the potential mess you could be left with if you uninstalled them in the wrong order. I could do without that situation in FS2020, so I tend to hope that Asobo can deliver what we need in the core sim for the most part.
I believe that was in regards to the resolution of the Live Weather, not that the UI would give us control over all of those layers. And more specifically, it’s the resolution of the numerical forecast model that Meteoblue is using, and the simulator emulates this when it injects the weather from this model.
The weather settings UI has been a mess since launch, and one of the reasons why I think we’re never going to get advanced control of the weather like this. A year into launch and they can’t get the wind gusts, date/time picker, or even the visibility under control.
Lots of folks didn’t want to go down this road again, having to run a bunch of third party software to get the sim how they like it, but we’re already in add-on dependency hell. I’m currently running:
Xmapsy
PilotEdge Client
TrackIR Client
WOMic
Honeycomb AFC Bridge
SPAD.neXt
Might as well throw a third party weather engine there too.
The sim is a love/hate thing. Sooo good where it’s good, and so frustrating where there are issues.
And it kinda seems that more work is going into unnecessary new planes and the like instead of concentrating on the core sim. It begars believe that a glaring menu error at the bottom of the map page has survived 2 sim updates now. Doesn’t inspire confidence.
But I still stick with this sim and get a lot of enjoyment out of it. But I still hope for much better things as we go on.