I must say that I am dissapointed in the conversation regarding weather on the April 2026 Dev Update. Everytime I hear Seb talk about weather he always defers back to what’s possible in preset mode. Most of us don’t use preset mode. If we wanted a really good preset mode, fine then open it up for developers like the Hifi team to have more control on preset creation with no transition. I’d argue we had better management of weather in the old ESP code. I again bring up the point of what we had in Active Sky Next and their ability to give us literally tornadoes in live weather, TCU and even wing fade.
Secondly, this constant conversation about CFD dynamics is great, but you don’t have the visuals to back it up. I have not seen a towering TCU formation ever in this sim. When I mean towering I mean what you would see in real life up to the flight levels. I hate to be the one that brings the X-Plane conversation back, but if anyone has doubts of what is possible versus what we have, look at what they do with their towering clouds versus what we have
Finally, Everyone who is frustrated with the current weather status should really make their feelings known. I keep hearing that they “monitor the forums” for feedback no what get’s prioritized. The basic reality is that we are not happy with the weather state. We have made it clearly apparent in many places. Anywhere you look, their forums, here, reddit, the list keeps going, so if they are so attentive to what the community is asking for, why are we still not having a serious conversation that involves the cloud depiction.
Here again is a topic with 300 votes on the matter. Where are the cumulonimbus clouds?
TLDR: We need a serious conversation on weather depiction with LIVE weather. CFD dyanmics are great, but do they matter if we can’t even see it in the sim with Live weather?.