Well, those are the facts… you can dispute my conclusions, they are not provable. Just what seems most logical based on the facts.
There are many weather bugs, and their acknowledge was in the most tangential and fudged way possible, which is strange considering it is not just a bug but a complete absence of one of their core features.
I don’t why it working or not working ‘in lesser traveled countries’ has anything to do with it. I just suggested that it wouldn’t work in areas where that source is mixed in, that could be anywhere.
It was an issue since the alpha and it didn’t block release, which actually only goes to show that it can’t be a regular bug, because a bug can be fixed within a reasonable time-frame whereas lawsuits can go on for decades.
If you have a better explanation to explain them I would be curious to hear it. Occam’s razor and all.
Surely you realize that there are many private companies who also provide data and other companies who have proprietary algorithms to repackage that data, adding value that is marketable? There are many reasons people buy it, and if they didn’t nobody would sell it. I am not an expert in weather data, but if somebody is selling it, somebody is buying it.
After 15 years away from flight sim forums it is lovely, on my first comment, to find the needlessly aggressive and unpleasant discourse has been maintained by the community.
The only conspiracy theory I would suggest is that perhaps “Interest in flight simming” is caused by childhood vaccinations.
Like Halber has said, all of the weather data needed for meteoblue to build their model is publicly available and free in the US. Sure I could set up a windsock in my back yard and you could pay me to tell you the wind at my location. But all of the data they would ever hope to need is in fact freely available.
The live weather, which includes the clouds AND wind data (on the days that it works for your client, depending) IS working for the USA.
We can see this in windsocks (if you keep your distance) and waves. And maybe if somebody watched AI aircraft, perhaps they would be affected as well (metal bird on my todo list).
What IS a problem for the USA, and other locations, is that it appears there is this strange bubble that shows up around the aircraft. I’ve seen many youtubers zoom in on a windsock that is far away, go OOO~ we have wind today, get ready to take off, and then notice the windsock is suddenly limp.
So between the sometimes interment live weather issue, the wind bubble around the aircraft is a 2nd issue. Why this is happening is up to debate, but it would be weird that they could show wind in the world all except within this 50-100m bubble of your aircraft.
Sorry,maybe my initial comment on this conspiracy theory was out of line. However there is no fact underlying this so far that keeps your theory anything but a theory and a few observations that are pointing to a technical glitch more than anything.
Wrt legislation, if this was indeed the issue, why partially Mexico, why Canada too? Why only EU? Picking the facts is not facts it’s a conspiracy theory. Your certainly entitled to believe in it and also complain about people not believing it.
Absolutely, and I mentioned that in both of my posts. But there is no reason why a company like MeteoBlue would buy repackaged weather data from a third party company when that data is freely available.
It would kind of be like someone whose business is cutting down trees and turning them into firewood, going to a cross-town retailer to buy firewood for his own use at home.
MeteoBlue itself is a creator and reseller of custom weather data derived from government-supplied source data. The global computer forecast model that MB is using to generate weather data for MSFS is their own proprietary in-house software creation.
Again, I cannot emphasize this too much, first tier (original real time) aviation weather data in the United States is a freely-available public resource.
Yes, this particular bug has existed for a long time, but that in no way is proof that some kind of secret back room negotiations and threats of lawsuits are taking place over the use of source data that is not privately owned, and for which no “negotiations” are required or even possible.
Frankly, I think the reason that Asobo has not addressed the problem before now is that they just didn’t see it as a high-priority item, with all the other pressure to get the sim released (and probably sooner than it should have been). Especially if fixing the bug is not a “quick and easy” task.
The “WOW factor” part of the Live Weather system (the clouds) is working everywhere, (including the US) - as are temperature and pressure. Asobo may have assumed that would be “good enough” for the time being.
The wind data is the only thing missing and until the public release, I don’t think Asobo realized how important having “complete” weather data (especially wind) would be to the more experienced simmers who have purchased MSFS.
Occam’s razor is that it’s a bug, maybe even a trivial goof like a negative longitude or bad UTC time is breaking the weather. And it’s the result of Asobo being railroaded by Microsoft into delivering x number of features by an unexpectedly early date. They were stretched way too thin, couldn’t deliver, and we got a half finished game as a result. Asobo isn’t acknowledging it because there are a couple thousand other outstanding issues among which their attention is divided. They’re again stretched too thin to even properly communicate to the clamoring hoards on here, and probably under their own NDA from Microsoft not to talk much about these outstanding issues if the advertised feature has some minimal implementation, somewhere.
No discourtesy was intended on my part, but when you start presenting theories based on a limited understanding of how real world weather data is gathered and distributed, it only raises the noise level on these forums, and leads to rumors and speculation that helps no one - Asobo least of all.
My own knowledge of this subject comes from 46 years of professional experience in aviation, and avionics, much of which has involved navigation, flight planning and weather, along with a life-long interest in meteorology. It was my college degree minor and something I have practiced as an avocation and hobby since childhood.
I have seen this windsock thing mentioned a couple times, just need to clear this up. The windsock popping is a LOD related issue. When you are far away from the windsock, it doesn’t display based on actual conditions. You can see this even when using custom weather - up close, the windsock responds to direction/speed changes made on the weather panel, but then if you move a distance away and change the winds again, the windsock is stuck in the last position it was when you were close to it. Then, move near it again, and it pops into an accurate depiction.
Why it displays fully inflated sideways when using initial live weather is unclear - possibly that’s just the default position for it before it gets fed wind data.
That’s great, and yet, there are multiple sources selling proprietary weather data, and neither you nor I have any idea whether meteoblue is paying for it or getting it for free.
I don’t need to have any direct knowledge of MeteoBlue’s business practices to know that they would have absolutely no reason to purchase pre-packaged, second-hand aviation weather observation data from a proprietary provider, when they can link it directly in real time from the government agency that actually generated the data in the first place.
Especially not in the United States of all places. The US NOAA has one of the most extensive weather data collection, analysis and redistribution networks of any country in the world.
First off, this is NOT a problem with MSFS per se. It’s a connectivity issue, either between MSFS and MeteoBlue, or between MSFS and you own computer, or both. Live Weather works fine sometimes, maybe even more often than not (at least in my case), including the winds aloft (which is just part of the whole Live Weather package), so the underlying system actually works. But it doesn’t always work in whole or in part, and this varies both with MSFS server and geographic location regardless of server.
Is this a problem? Certainly. It annoys everybody. For instance, today I started a flight from Brunswick to Halifax, Canada, in interesting IMC with actual winds aloft, to practice IFR and ILS stuff. About half-way through the trip, I lost ALL parts of Live Weather. Clouds, precip, winds, etc. Instantly, the sky cleared and the winds went to 225/03. Which basically made the rest of the flight useless for my purpose. But my point is, prior to this loss of data, it was all working just fine.
So, there’s a failure to communicate somewhere along the line. Given that many folks with WAY better internet than I have also see this sort of thing happening, the primary suspect is the connection between MSFS and MeteoBlue. And that’s not something Asobo has any real control over. That’s between MS itself and MeteoBlue. As such, it makes exactly zero sense to complain here about it, because 1) bug reports need to go to Zendesk, and 2) Zendesk only goes to Asobo, who has nearly zero control over this problem.
And second, why would you think that issues with Live Weather would make Asobo’s list of main issues? Like I said, Asobo has no control over this particular issue, so OF COURSE it’s not on the list of things they CAN fix.
That said, Asobo has been WELL aware of this problem from long before release, so I’m sure is yelling upstairs as loud as it can about it. But Asobo’s power to fix this problem is barely measurable and then only as an indirect influence. So. just lump it in silence until the higher-ups sort things out. It does no good to whine about it, and it’s wrong to blame Asobo for it.
While it’s possible Meteoblue is licensing wind data over North America, and there’s a dispute over its usage, this is very unlikely for reasons already given by HalberQuacky and others. The weather data Flight Simulator is using is apparently from Meteoblue’s numerical forecast models:
Wind speed and direction at all levels would certainly be a part of any of these models, and there wouldn’t be a need to pull from another third party proprietary source for this data alone.
However, you can see that they offer high resolution model data over Europe, but areas like North America are covered by a lower resolution global model. That might be a clue to the issues we’re seeing here. It’s possible that the Flight Simulator team implemented the high resolution grid over Europe, but the implementation of the lower resolution global grid remains a work in progress.
I disagree, MSFS advertises “live weather” . If for whatever reason it is not working properly it is indeed Asobo’s duty to solve the problem wether it is METEOBLUE’s issue or not. They can of course say it was a misunderstanding and they didn’t mean “live” but “forecast based on live weather” (which for some people would be a big step back).
They are such cool people. I also contacted them two days ago and are willing to assist, they even had me cc them in the email i sent to the support team. I can confirm what they told you as they told me, its all managed by Microsoft.