This has possibly been discussed elsewhere in the forum… but I haven’t seen it so maybe someone in the community can set me straight. To start, I think that we generally agree that both weather injection (imposition of atmospherics on the flight model - 225@3Gate) is partially or completely broken, and that “live weather” is also partially or completely broken. Let us assume for the sake of this thread that the developer corrects both.
What is “live weather?” In English, the implication is that if I look out the window of my residence and there is a thunderstorm, I should be able to fire up the simulator and there should also be a thunderstorm with roughly the same characteristics at the same location. But is that actually how the game is even intended to work?
It struck me that it would be pretty tough from a programming perspective to do that world-wide. The only way would be the import and parsing of things like weather radar - something that not everywhere in the world is lucky enough to have (not everyone has an organization as well resourced as the NWS in the US, or the MET in the UK). Even if you used METARs from every site in the world, the space between those sites would have to be generated using some sort of approximation, and certain phenomenon like storms would be placed randomly in space around the METAR site. Development wise, it would seem easier to recreate weather based on a forecast model (which is worldwide) such as the GFS, NAM, ECMWF, etc. However, that is not “live” weather.
It would be nice to see a thorough explanation from the developer, or someone else knowledgeable about how “live weather” is implemented. As this was a major selling point for me in purchasing the game, I’m curious if it is ever going to live up to my expectation of what “live” means. I have a feeling that I’m going to be disappointed, and that this is deceptive marketing on Asobo’s part. They probably need a different word like near-live, or close-to-live, approximated or forecasted weather… Anyways, if anyone in the community could enlighten me, I would appreciate it.