Open up the weather system WRITE access to 3rd party devs

We need SNOW EFFECT on windshield !!!
And wipers being able to wipe rain and snow away!

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I agree,also after a while developers tend to turn off servers rendering the product useless,so end up buying another product to work,i have had this done to me by two big players in FS community so now i’m cautious over spending money on 3rd party products.

Hm. Back when traveling was allowed, I took a RL flight from Toronto to Halifax. Severe rainstorm in Halifax, no ILS on the given runway, so pilot had to go around for not seeing anything at minima and try a different runway. Quite exciting! Since I only had X-Plane back then, I fired it up with Active Sky, loaded the historical weather (displayed to a t) and landed in the floods of Halifax. Used similar features always, miss them here.
In MS the clouds look nice, but I really want an option to set a date in mid-July and fly in the summer breeze at home instead of having to go to BFE with terrible Bing coverage, but some sunshine in January.

What I’m missing is the turbulence. When there is red or purple on the WX radar there should be turbulence.

This would do for now.

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I would like to see more turbulence too.
Especially more upwinds and downwinds and effects from ckouds.
Here is the wishlist entry for upvote: No cloud turbulences, no weather turbulences, planes seem to be « on rail »

Already upvoted and filed a bug report. Themoreupvotes and bug reports, the better.

I do not understand. Asobo/Microsoft told us that they will not support 3rd party weather and ORBX is offering 3rd party weather. What do I not get? Or has ORBX another weather definition than Asobo/Microsoft? Please explain!!

This addon has been out as long as MSFS2020 came out, quite honestly I think the MSFS2020 weather is awful, the lighting is terrible, the clouds look like cotton balls.
I miss Active Sky clouds and effects.September 2020 Development Update | HiFi Simulation Technologies Forums

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Asobo doesn’t open the SDK for 3rd parties to make their weather engines “properly”. What ORBX has done (and HiFi Active Sky reportedly started to do) is a workaround, when you need to start with clear skies and then their engines inject the real world metar weather. As with all MSFS bug-workarounds their solution is far from perfect either for this reason, but at least works

I think there are 2 things they don’t intend to open to the weather 3rd party add-ons.

1 - SDK won’t feature any tools to make it possible to work with the default weather engine.

2 - They can’t/don’t want to make available the meteoblue data and technology.

That’s what I got between the lines. The 3rd parties working on weather add-ons will need to do things out of the “sandbox environment” of the sim and it’s SDK.

Thanks, man! I wait for playback (free from Asobo) and better weather (free from Asobo). METAR is not my interest, I have METAR at work and SPECI and MOTAFW and …

You dont have to buy. Some of us consider it mandatory

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Hi Damian,

I perfectly understand what you might be feeling about his too. You’ve pioneered the weather add-on market with your products nearly 2 decades ago, and we’ve pioneered the gauge add-on market also 2 decades ago, and we’ve both been developing a unique and renown expertise in our respective fields, with thousands of customers flying our products every day. I’m sadden with this situation but for what it’s worth, there are other categories of add-ons completely excluded for now as well.

Asobo previously said they would have a historical weather option available, times have changed my friend.

But I still think they should open up the system, would be cool to see large storm cells modelled accurately, or tornadoes, volcanic ash, stuff that was not possible in previous sims.

Its unfortunate they are still not opening up the SDK to 3rd parties.

Programs such as ProSim utilise the weather data from ActiveSky to feed back into the radar systems.

As of now, we have a non-functional radar system in ProSim (with use in MSFS).

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MS/Asobo has partnered with so many other 3rd party devs to bring great content to the sim I’m not sure why they won’t do the same with a company like HiFi. Surely this would be beneficial for both parties. HiFi get access to a great weather generation system and MS/Asobo get access to proven, successful weather engine developer that can bring all the realism and features to the sim that pilots want. Seems like a win/win to me so I’m not sure what the reluctance is here.

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I know nothing about how Asobo operates so this might be totally inapplicable, but I’ll try to give you some general ideas on why opening up internals is not always a default option in software development.

Opening up anything requires a certain level of commitment on maintaining the interface to avoid breaking everyone relying on that interface when the internal system evolves. To a brand new and unstable infrastructure, that kind of maintenance can be a damning task. Changing becomes more and more difficult, tech debt piles up, and I have seen systems rejecting important upgrade simply because it affects interfaces.
Without interfaces, dev knows that everything is upgraded and tested as a whole. When you open up the internals, everything is a question mark.

Those issues are definitely not impossible problem to solve, but are not “free” to do either. Although there are a lot of best practices on designing a flexible interface, they all need a certain assumption on how the system will evolve in the future, and that again can be a very difficult task.

Then if your interface involves exposing data, there comes questions on licensing. Do you own the data? If not, does your license on the data include exposing to 3rd party?

With that kinds of additional effort and the small number of developers and products on weather, especially if you compare that with sceneries and aircraft, I don’t see it’s really a win for Asobo/MS to target this instead of fully focus on working with meteoblue (I hope I don’t offend weather dev here, I do enjoy both HiFi and REX’s products very much).

All in all, I do hope Asobo will open certain part of the weather system such as ATIS, but I would expect a huge number of votes before this can overweigh all additional effort. If you really want a single part of the weather system (e.g weather injection), I guess that a separate ticket on that particular item would be easier for Asobo to pickup.

P/S: also, REX releasing their product doesn’t help the situation. Asobo/MS can (and did) say that dev can still access weather system while not having to give any commitment. REX uses a hacky way to change weather so no support can be expected from Asobo/MS.

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Yes please, active sky has been my weather engine for more then 10 years. Archive weather is what I use the most. Some times its winter but I want to fly in summer autumn or spring. If I want to renact a flight I can have the actual weather that day.

It would be great to see what Hi Fi could bring to MSFS.

I imagine Asobo amd MS may have contractual commitments with the weather information provider but maybe Hi Fi can work with the contracted weather info provider?

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5 months later … weather not fixed so we need 3rd party devs.
Still waiting for the best weather engine “Active Sky”.

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