Realistic Dangerous Weather - Physics Simulation

I spend all of my time down low in the GA aircraft. I’ll give flying around some big convection another go and see what happens, but I don’t ever recall getting knocked around in the sim like I do irl like on a bumpy summer afternoon.

Maybe the turbulence are stronger at very high altitude. I never fly this high… I just know I see 0 effect when I enter a cloud whatever the type, same with winds and windshear.

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Yes it’s interesting to see people complaining about terrain induced turbulence. Mountain waves are a real thing that is absolutely essential to be aware of when flying around/above mountains and even far away.

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And then there’s this thread… seems expectations/experiences are different for all of us. That’s reasonable, eh?

:smiley:

“Different expectations” are one of the key factors for much of the debate on these forums, I think. That, plus the ‘translation’ from real life to screen being another factor. We all expect real life to translate to the computer screen in different ways.

As the author of the linked post above, I seem recall I was flying the Cub near Niagara Falls when I reported my motion sickness in VR. It was with live weather, late evening, and the terrain is relatively flat. Far away from any clouds and the aircraft was constantly bumping around in various directions. Though as with most ‘standard’ MSFS turbulence (away from terrain updraughts/downdraughts), it’s rather yaw-heavy without many perturbations in other directions.

I know and I understand they want to please « arcade » simmers. Same with the planes that are all very easy to fly (almost impossible to stall/spiral/spin, no torque, no adverse yaw…) They dont want people to find planes too hard to fly. But at least I know that we’ll have third party study level planes in the future. Regarding the weather, it looks like they don’t want to open that to third party developers. Everyone use it differently. For me « realistic » weather is as important as a realistic plane. I want to be able to plan flights based on all weather parameters, including icing, winds, turbulence, clouds… With Active Sky I was able to plan real time flights based on real aviation weather data. The weather engine did such a good job with prediction and interpolation, it usually matched real life conditions with icing, clouds and turbulence.

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I’ve done multiple VR flights in really mountainous terrain, never had turbulence (except small mountain waves). Will be careful to see if it happens to me too.

could of course also be - have just come across “false” weather again - not the well-known “no real weather bug” but simply false weather - as an example -.

METAR: LOWW 122020Z 24006KT 9999 -RA FEW022 SCT026 BKN040 02/M01 Q1008 R11/520195 R16/590195 BECMG 27018G28KT

(I know MSFS uses Meteoblue data)
crosscheck - Meteoblue APP / Map: quite similar to Metar, RAIN, similar cloud info → than
in the SIM: wind and temperature are correct - no rain, no clouds or only a few !

so it could be that you are right !

A few days ago I was curious about the general turbulence implementation and started experimenting, after reading this post: MSFS is breaking the VR golden rule: don't move the camera, the user is

I used the drone cam to set a fixed camera with a long focal length, and flew towards or away from the camera (as smoothly as I could from this view) to see how much vertical movement the aircraft had. The weather was set manually, with rather strong and gusty winds, but I HAVE come across similar gusty conditions with ‘live weather’ too.

Summary:

  • In normal, gusty wind conditions, the air appears to have NO vertical movement whatsoever. Just the strong horizontal, yaw-inducing gusts. That said, I was fairly low which may be a factor.
  • Around hills, as we know, there are updraughts and downdraughts. The journey over mountains can be quite a roller coaster ride at times.

Here’s a short video from a couple of the recordings I saved at the time. This shows how the regular wind + gusts appear to be horizontal only, and the last clip shows the strong downdraught on one of the landing challenges. Not very scientific, but if it helps illustrate some people’s points, maybe it’s useful:

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I agree that AS was fabulous. In the days of FSX I had things set up to be “as real as it gets” using real weather, community built scenery mods, and - for IFR into Class B airspace - VATSIM for ATC. It was great fun! I could even taxi up to the restaurant at my local strip (KSBP) and park on the apron outside.

MSFS has a ways to go with being “as real as it gets” and when you add the X-Box population into the mix, it may never be quite as robust as FSX with regard to reality. I’m hoping it will be, but time will tell.

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Yeah, lets break physics because people won’t believe it is real. I see surveys in the US indicate more people are distrusting science (even though science gives us almost everything we use in life these days, like computers!) and anything that contributes to that I find appalling.

The idea is to educate in a simulator, not cater for what a dev thinks is peoples preconceived ideas.

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I second that turbulence at altitude is definitely much improved from the “on rails” experience at launch, in fact one of my flights got downed by it on a EDDF to LRBS hop over western Romania with my CJ4 overstressing from it at ~FL350. In fact, the sim vs real life feels “almost there” at this point, at least on the Cub and Skyhawk side of things (duplicated a couple of real flights in the sim… after fighting the weather engine’s “quirks” to get things right).
In fact, I’m wondering if the OP didn’t land on another of the weather engine’s quirks where it only partially parses and implements the data (namely cloud coverage/temperature, but not the winds)

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I think that’s what’s happened here. In one of the Q&A sessions, the lead MS guy said something along those lines. People had been complaining about the realism. If I recall correctly, he didn’t actually go as far as saying they’d dialed it back, but that was what he implied.

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Right! How many people died because they thought “this can’t be real” “weather can’t really do this” ? That’s what the simulator is for to experience the unlikely and unintuitive nature of flying to better prepare you.
My scariest time flying was when I was trying to outrun a heavy rain storm. I could see a wall of grey swallowing up the ground coming right for me. I was 8 miles from the airport which was 180degress opposite from the storm. I thought if I fly 60mph and the storm moves at 40 mph I’ll make it easily. Well storms don’t work like that sometimes. Apparently the pressure change can move pretty fast and the storm caught me as I rolled out on the runway. Just made it back. Whew.

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Totally agree. A realistic windsystem is essential.

My hope is that they confirmed gliders, which does not work without up- and downwinds and influence from clouds.

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That’s an interesting point. So you are saying it’s possible to have thunderstorms clouds without the associated weather?

I won’t go back to P3D but man… any A2A plane with ActiveSky and EZdok camera for real shaking and movements… I got more sensation of achievement each flight that I ever got in MSFS…

Thank you this is a great example. That’s one of the reasons I almost always feel like my plane is being « on rails. » This makes flying extremely simple and not challenging in my opinion.

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It’s at least plausible, given how broken the weather system is in other places- ie how a lot of people have experienced on occasion ATIS telling them of weather which differs significantly from the actual observed weather or how live weather outright refuses to work if you try a second flight after returning to the main menu. I’ve personally seen one or more of temperature/visibility/clouds/winds differ… hell, I’ve even had ATIS claiming one runway was in service, yet being told to taxi to the other side,lol. Honestly, if they are working with something at least partly based on FSX, I wouldn’t be surprised if they still have the data split in “weather” and “winds aloft”, which could explain why an element is missing/acting up, while the rest is still OK - in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the data is further split in along the lines of the visual filters in the worldmap with separate wind, cloud coverage, precipitation, etc. packages. I do wonder how the system does treat invalid or partial data during weather downloads, if it were me, I’d go for a “best guess” based on the baked in weather types vs defaulting to… non-weather like it does now.

That’s plausible. Then I would at least expect a simulation of turbulence and thermals inside and around clouds based on their types, size and the overall atmosphere parameters. This shouldn’t be overly complex to do I would believe. It doesn’t have to be complicated calculations.