So many folks were saying that these two developers would be rendered all but
extinct by MSFS 2020. However, folks should bear in mind the live weather has
been a feature of Flight Simulator and P3D, more or less, for quite some time, yet
REX, Active Sky, Opus, have all thrived and improved in the internal weather engines
of those programs–after all, they’ve made that data their specialty and they all, from
what I understand, already respectively have a network of servers.
I suspect that they’re quite aware of the shortcomings with FS2020 live weather, and
I wouldn’t be surprised if they are among the developers looking hard at the SDK…
That’s disappointing. Guess its all on Microsoft/Asobo to fix this. To me the
weather issue is the most glaring shortcoming of the product, which otherwise
has a lot going for it.
Fanboys claimed ALL add-on developers were dead. OrbX has surely sold thousands of dollars, and there may be more.
So far the SDK may not support weather injection but maybe in the future if does as this Open Beta of the Simulator so far really needs it. If the SDK had supported it, we could probably have had winds aloft by release date.
I agree. I think that the weather injection issue is the most critical issue in the sim at the moment.
In the lead up to release the weather system was heavily promoted and great emphasis put on the data from Meteoblue being able to provide a revolutionary simulator experience. In the short term I can’t see that they are going to just give up on that and let someone else provide a competing solution.
I think it is really up to the developers to quickly come up with a solution that gets this stuff working properly.
I agree with your logic, yet by the same logic they’d have gotten it right before they
released it. Not bashing the game, because as I said, it has so much going for it.
That it offers so much makes the weather problem all the more glaring.
I personally preferred the default clouds in FSX, I found all the aftermarket addons to be far too sharp for my tastes. I did of course like the weather they offered and used REX for that alone, but considering how good the weather is here by default, it will take something pretty spectacular to get a buy from me.
My opinion: I am looking forward to potentially not having to rely on a 3rd party for weather. I have been impressed with the weather system (bugs aside). Maybe these companies can focus on other things. Airport textures, etc.
They’re already partnered with Meteoblue in that respect, and coupled with the fact that the SDK doesn’t allow client injection, I’d much prefer Meteoblue (who also has a vast network of servers). I think what we’re seeing now is an issue with how the simulator is interpreting the data from the Meteoblue api. That’s just my theory, but all-in-all I do very much believe Microsoft understand accurate weather is a key, primary feature to a next generation sim.
Active Sky would be a relative step backwards in one respect: uniformity of weather data across all pilots.
When playing in groups if I see a cloud in the sky, and decide to fly through it, everybody else can see that cloud too. They can see my flying into it and they can decide to follow me through it or go around it.
This is not possible when using Active Sky on P3D or X-Plane. The weather data is injected at different times, depending on download frequencies and when the client was started, and even if these were synchronised the actual weather depictions in the simulator never fully match anyway.
Instead of relying on a third party to bring a weather engine to the simulator, I’m going to repeatedly request improvements to the built-in weather instead, so that uniformity between pilots is maintained.