Sim Update 7 Live Weather regression - a broken mess

And that’s exactly the reason I don’t want metar-based weather. It just doesn’t work. You fly from one weather situation into another and it’s just the weather “around” the aircraft that changes. I don’t care how smooth they manage to do it. It’s immersion breaking. The same thing if you’re flying from meteoblue weather to an airport relying on METAR. It’s still weather changing around your aircraft unnaturally. I don’t know why anyone that values realistic weather would consider this appealing and/or realistic. After all they’re roasting the devs all the time to have realistically (or what most think to be realistic) behaving aircraft. Why stop at weather? Imagine a sound system, where you just get an overlay of a recording of a real flight “baked” on top of your simulator flight. Yeah it sounds exactly like the real thing, but there is no interaction with the sim world, nor is it dynamic but feels heavily out of place, once you changes views or angles.

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At the end of the day its all about the money - whenever MS/Asobo have a new money release (This time the Reno Air races and associated planes) they release on time irregardless of the issues in the simulator. That has been pretty consistent with the bad releases in the past…They probably saw some of the issues but want to release on time for money reasons…

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Well I can deal with issues. After all that’s the nature of the business I got used to with any major title nowadays.
The “issues” are not really the problem for me. If it were issues I’d actually be relieved.
Clouds being MSL rather than AGL is not the only thing that bothers me, which most probably is an issue.
But the apparent compromise (and willingly so) of a fully dynamic weather engine to try and force localized METAR data. THAT is what worries me the most, especially since there is no option to choose.

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Yes, it’s certain they knew there were issues, they even alluded to some which Jorg called “glitches” in the last Q/A session.

Glitches? How cute… he should take a look here in the forum. :laughing:

I posted a thread in wishlist to have the ability to chose between the two types of injecting weather.

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It’s not a glitch. It’s how METAR is. Only real local static data that needs to replace meteoblue data. Accurate? Maybe sometimes when it match meteoblue data. Realisitic? Not at all.

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I still believe that the features are locked about a month before the announced release date, and anything that gets reported as an issue or bug, that doesn’t completely stop the sim from launching, is tagged for the next release. This is the problem with line-in-sand release dates - “XBOX on day y” - all the issues that came out couldn’t have been invisible to the testers, which is why the hotfix was so readily available to push.

It’s far from a glitch. It’s a disaster!

Agree 100%

Was there a hotfix already? Or an announcement for a hotfix? Just got in from work so not sure if I’ve missed something

I was talking about the SU5 (was that the Xbox release?) hotfix. There is nothing that I know of pending for SU7.

Ahh gotcha.

I’m hoping the comments the forum moderator made in the other thread are some indicator of a hotfix upcoming: Live weather down? 24/11/2021 - #172

There should be a Dev update today too, so hopefully we will get some info there.

I did, it was reasonable in LECO and EGPH as well, as was my check on LOWS this morning.

IMHO it will always be somewhat generic, because the basis of the weather simulation will be the Meteoblue weather model and depending on the resolution they can only define the general phenomena for a certain airmass per area, e.g. moisture, convection, stability or lability and so on. So basically, what we’ll see is what Meteoblue “thought” how the weather could look at a given time and location, regardless what the webcam shows.

I think, “plausible” is the keyword here. It was my impression that today the weather was more plausible, but I may be wrong. Further testing will be necessary, especially on longer flights to get an impression of the implementation of larger weather systems and especially the blending of the METAR data. Didn’t feel for longer flights with the mess from the last days.

Unfortunately not (time adjusted for daylight)

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but it was never and i sai never, generi before this update. So I hope they will work on this issues hopefully before Christmas and not February :frowning:

It’s absolutely 100% clear that METAR’s are needed. Everything else is just fantasy or dreams about having the exact copy of the real weather inside the simulator and hoping that we would get the same conditions over the airports as in reality. This is IMPOSSIBLE based on datas which such a low resolution and not even at the correct time (since based on predictions).

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I’ve just tried EGBB where although the Metar is CAVOK, there is a higher up overcast layer. In theory then this should come from Meteoblue, but in practice it just looks a mess with these generic whispy weird clouds higher up. So it seems even areas where Meteoblue should be doing it’s job are being weirdly impacted.

ANd the weird thing is when you select live weather in the menu before loading in, it shows overcast as the current weather. So it’s like it knows it should be overcast but somewhere along the line it is struggling to depict it correctly.

My only guess can be because the METAR is giving CAVOK, meteoblue is saying overcast and it’s getting itself confused.

A weather addon which has always fascinated me is FSGRW which is for XP and P3D. Somehow, it gets different METARs produced in it, and it also somehow knows information about the upper cloud layers. Look here in this screenshot at the ‘sky cover’ section, it has Broken and scattered cloud at the high levels, this is exactly what it’s like in real life. No idea how it gets this information, but it’s very accurate:

But why do we need the exact copy of the real weather in the first place. That is what I am discussing here.
So yes we agree that it is impossible to copy the real world weather 1:1, we will never be able to compute all the known and unknown variables. Not even by combining all the processing power on this planet.
Right now there seem to be an appeal for two approaches here.

a) Try and force current live conditions by utilizing METAR (and other) parameters from real world weather stations to depict current real-world weather in the simulator. (Yes I agree there is no other realistic way of doing this). Downside is the weather engine will have a hard time doings it’s own thing, because it’s always being force driven by external factors.
Trying to play it safe though by relying on old methods

b) Give the weather engine a few real world variables to play with and let it do it’s thing without any external interuption. You get a world-wide fully dynamic and seamless weather simulation resembling real world weather formation, air movements, cloud build ups, etc…! It will not be a 1:1 replica, but then again neither is the FSLabs A320 a 1:1 replica of it’s real counterpart. All it needs to be is believable. And we very much already had that in my opinion. Just a bunch of rough edges. Downside is, it will most of the times not match the exact numbers you see currently in the real-world.

I for one prefer option b). Realistically that still will probably need static data one way or another to get the full picture. But if you want to keep an uninterrupted and constant “flow” you cannot use current data, because the engine has no idea what happens next. For example it could never produce an “exploding” build-up of a thunderstorm. There are real life examples of flights getting caught in a thunderstorm cloud, because no-one was able to anticipate it. That’s how quick clouds can build up.
If however you let the Simulator inject 48 hour old weather it can use a string of historic weather data from the past 48 hours to produce a realistic “flow”. It would constantly scan the next 48 hours and anticipate.
This has a huge chance of eliminating abrupt transitions, when conditions change quicker than METAR data can update them.

Perhaps a combination of wind, visibility, pressure, winds aloft, temperature and dewpoint using a historic METAR-string system and clouds and cloud fronts being depicted by how they did it originally. And both being time-sensitive. Again I am just offering suggestions, because the weather engine is one of the main reasons I got rid of P3D in favor of MSFS. I got too spoiled at this point to ever look back.

If anything have the option to chose a) or b)

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