Official Discussion: Game of the Year Edition

Microsoft have admitted that a large proportion of Windows 10 users will not be able to upgrade to Windows 11 because of the conditions they themselves have imposed in the upgrade. They have also said that Windows 10 will be supported for a few more years.

I don’t think even Microsoft would be stupid enough to restrict their FS2020 customer base by imposing Windows 11 as a requirement.

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U think the f18 will have radar or Jettison buttons that work

I am currently sitting on the threshold of runway 20 at KCOU (Columbia, MO) in the G1000 C172.

The current METAR (at 22:54Z) shows winds 190 at 16-25 knots. There is a line of r/w thunderstorms approaching this location from the west, and Live Weather is showing the storms already in progress.

I am monitoring the simmconnect variables AMBIENT WIND DIRECTION and AMBIENT WIND VELOCITY, using the utility program “simvars.exe” that comes with the SDK.

Sitting here, parked on the runway, I am seeing the wind direction varying between 194 and 206 degrees, and the wind velocity is varying as well. I have seen it as low as 12.6 knots and as high as 19.2 knots in the 5 minutes I have been monitoring, so it appears that Live Weather surface wind is not necessarily constant.

Granted, the speed variation range is not as great as the METAR, and the highest speed is 19 knots, while the METAR says up to 25 knots.

The other current METAR parameters for pressure and temperature are being injected perfectly: 23C and 29.56 in/hg

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I wouldn’t be too sure of that… :smirk:

With the F-18 coming out does this mean supersonic flight will be added to the sim?

Yes, they confirmed this on the dev Twitch Q&A.

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Great! This will open up all kinds of opportunities. Concord, B1 Lancer, Fighter Jets!

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Unfortunately, you may be right - just the way they’ve introduced Windows 11 shows they haven’t learnt from previous experience (remember Windows 8?)

Well, my 8 physical cores/64Gb RAM computer is not invited to their party, so I’d go 100% to X-plane 11/12. Flying is better there, and the pretty scenery on FS is nice to have, but not essential.

And I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one.

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DC Designs has already figured out how to implement supersonic flight for their F-14, F-15 and upcoming Concorde projects, and TopMach have done it for their F-22. Having “proper” ways to do so via documented tools in the SDK may help others do the same, and it may allow existing devs to remove kludges and the workarounds currently necessary, but the lack of those SDK tools hasn’t stopped clever and motivated developers from doing it anyway. :slight_smile:

How unreal weather injects the gusts i think is accurate as METAR reports though.

Live weather is maybe a small amount of random gusts injected. Not live gusts that they advertise live-weather is. I can’t find where they come from. Meteoblue reports winds between 24-43kts METAR reports 19-32kts in this video i made today. As they say we should not need third party addons to get accurate weather & wind but as it is now i need to use it.

Besides they have not mentioned in any fixlist that live-weather gusts are fixed yet. I hope it will be accurate in the next update because i like live-weather if the gusts would be live also and we can forecast where those gusts are located on meteoblue webpage before we fly and then challenge us with those real gust landings :slight_smile: As it is now we need to put those in manually or use unreal weather addon.

Any updates for the f18 having radar

METAR reports are the closest you are going to get to “live” wind gusts for a given airport runway, and under ordinary circumstances, a METAR can be up to 1 hour old.

It is possible to get the exact wind speed and direction at a given moment if you are in contact with an ATC controller who can give you the readings from the remote wind instruments in the tower, or if you are listening to an AWOS transmission being broadcast at the airport, which uses a synthesized voice reading out the current observed weather parameters at a given moment.

AWOS at a given airport is also usually available by dialing a published phone number which allows you to hear the same audio being broadcast on the airport’s AWOS frequency.

But, there is no existing data feed of exact current up-to-the-minute surface weather (i.e. AWOS), that MSFS Live Weather or any other sim weather generator could tap into. METAR is as close as any weather engine can come.

Granted, if conditions are changing rapidly, METARS may be updated several times in a given hour, but it still takes a few minutes for updated observations to be pushed onto the worldwide METAR data feed so that they will be available to end users.

The MeteoBlue model (by itself), is a prediction. It is not in any way “live” and accurate to exact current condition. It is often quite close to the actual weather at a given location and time, but sometimes it is “off”.

There is a known effect with the METAR wind parameters currently being injected into Live Weather, in that the surface wind speed will typically be less than the METAR-reported speed - (usually by about 25 or 30 percent).

As it happens, official airport wind observations are always taken at a height of exactly 10 meters above the ground (approximately 30 feet), and due to friction, the wind speed right at the surface will always be less than the wind measured at 10 meters above the surface.

Live Weather does appear to model the wind speed reduction caused by increasing surace friction close to the runway, but it may be overdone.

METAR injectors like REX, might not adjust reported METAR wind speed for surface friction. I have never used any of those add-ons, so I do not know.

Since there is no such thing as a r/w data feed of “live” up-to-the-minute wind for airports, when it comes to gusts, the best Live Weather could do is vary the reported METAR wind speed (when it is not reported as being constant) - either at random, or by some repeating pattern.

In my observations last night at KCOU, I also definitely saw a continual variation in wind direction with Live Weather - by about +/- 10 degrees.

I know that METAR is old data. It was not that i wanted to show. I wanted to show the variation between the reported wind and gust value. In live weather it was fluctuating up&down approx 2kts up and down and in unreal weather it fluctuated between the reported wind and gust value. The accurate about it is that the wind is fluctuating as it should between those reported values because wind is never constant and is measured avarage windspeed over time i think it is in a 10-min interval. Not how accurate the wind is there right at the moment.

And as you say the wind could be lower at groundlevel depending on how much buildings and such things it’s around the gusts should be more noticable there because of the frictions and the wind should fluctuate more there.

If meteoblue injects the wind it should fluctuate between those values on groundlevel in my opinion. Then we can predict how the winds is even if we not using METAR

or like those in a calmer place

Then we get some variations in windspeed everywhere.

The variation in windspeed should decrease the higher above ground we are though.

I made a comparison between metar and meteoblue at the bug thread about gusts here and i think the METAR and meteoblue is almost identical because we need to know that the gusts mostly not are reported if they are below 10kts difference from the measured avarage windspeed. But the windspeed does not stop fluctuating because the gusts not are reported. It always fluctuate more or less.

Yes, it definitely appears that the variation in wind speed by injected by LW is less than Unreal Weather or Rex. The highest speed is less, and the amount of variation is less. I have not personally used either of the 3rd party weather injectors, but I will take your word for how they work in-game.

Live Weather (currently) is using METAR for the airport wind (and has been for many months) but is evidently applying a reduction to the speed to simulate ground friction. This also (apparently) reduces the total variation when the METAR reports gusts. The reduction may be excessive - but in a real-world weather scenario, the amount of friction will depend on multiple factors, especially the surface (grass, dirt, asphalt, concrete etc.)

However, a METAR report does not always show gusts - many times it shows only one wind speed, so the question is: should Live Weather (or any other weather engine) inject gusts if the METAR shows a steady-state wind?

It is possible for real-world surface winds to be almost constant velocity with little variation for many minutes at a time - especially for airports located next to a large body of water, where the primary wind is from a sea breeze. Gusts (of any significance) are not necessarily inevitable.

In any case, I guess we will have to see what the upcoming changes in the weather with SU7 bring.

The easiest and the best for everyone i think would be to implement a gust per minute slider like the one in custom weather that we can use to set the gusts rate how frequent we want them. The gust slider in custom weather goes from 1-18 if we set some gusts value if gusts are 0 the 0 gusts per minute appear. In live weather the slider should be from 0-18 then we can decide if we want gusts to be off or customize how many gusts per minute we want to have. I think number 1 or 2 are the most realistic but we have different opinions all of us. And then the higher above from ground the difference between the wind and gust value should decrease like the wind increases the higher we are like this.

ground= wind 10kts gust 20kts
1000ft/agl = 12kts gust 18kts
2000ft/agl = 14kts gust 16kts

Like that until the difference are like 2kts up&down from the windrate

About the gust rate in METAR without gusts reported i think a kind of random value could be injected but never above 9kts because then METAR should report them anyway.

What do you think should be a good way to implement them? For me gusts are very important for some maybe not that much.

Yes SU7 i looking forward to. But i have not that high expectations for it to be fixed in it though. Hope they can prove me wrong :slight_smile: They fixed the custom weather gusts and that i’m realy happy with :slight_smile:

Have you tried set you up on an approach with realy heavy gusts in custom weather? It’s so much fun and challenging!

I have not done all that much with Custom Weather for quite some time, but will do so on my next flight since there have been improvements. I can say that aircraft behavior when landing or taking off in a crosswind is much better in SU6 than in any previous version of MSFS. Not perfect, but definitely improved. Perhaps I will try setting up a gusty crosswind scenario right at an aircraft’s published crosswind limit to test my hand flying skills!

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This is an approach i did with 33kts 51kts crosswind. Did not go that well :rofl: landed almost on the runway though :slight_smile: It’s real hard to keep track of the centerline when the wind pushes the plane sideways and with all the wingdrops gusts causes. And i know i should have go around there or used another airport if it where real and it was over the airplanes limit too. This is a sim, we can challenge us in whatever wind conditions we like :slight_smile:

I will try on the limit of the aircraft next time though :slight_smile: Thats a good idea.

I only have it uploaded with passenger view and runway view though.

Let me know if you want some help setting it up. Can be little tricky to get right. I would recomend set the gust per minute slider between 1-4. I have it set at around 2 or 3 in the video.

Do u think even like a simplified air to air radar will work

I think it might because if u zoom in on the ddi on the top gun expansion video it shows that the ddi is in the tac mode and it has all the correct modes implemented such as electronic warfare (ew) and attack radar (rdr attk) do I’m not sure they’ve had 6 months almost to work on it so I guess we will have to wait

I don’t have a lot of answers for you, but you may find this relevant to what you are seeing.

To my understanding once this releases, the editions will work like this:

GOTY = Standard + GOTY content
Deluxe = Standard + Deluxe + GOTY content
Premium Deluxe = Standard + Deluxe + Premium + GOTY Content

I’m hoping that when this update comes out (with SU7 I believe?) that they finally fix the memory leak or whatever that crumbles fps over long flights. No workarounds work for me.