This is a (german) interview from Jörg Neumann from january 2023:
Topic related points from the interview:
they are in the process of installing turbulence at high altitudes
currently the virtual clouds are just graphic structures that have nothing to do with the ground or with rising air masses. Thermals are randomly distributed across the landscape.
“We took a very close look at the feedback from the glider pilots. We will definitely go back to the thermals and adjust them.”
one day the flight simulator will become the reference simulation for gliding
“We took a very close look at Condor. We’ll gonna do better”
‘‘When’’ is a good question. Next Simupdate is in September and it looks more like a bug fix update.
Given their Simupdate frequency there wont be any more this year and there you go with MSFS 2024
They could at least try to improve the thermal positions and strengths according to a lot of suggestions in the forum, you don’t need a new weather engine for that.
To be honest i dont think anything will happen till msfs24 now. We might get snippets for us to test but the full deal wont come.
No saying that if 24 is a ■■■■ implimention for gliders and gliding because the bar is set high , with the community devs now , with little support and a lot of work arounds. There should be questions of who is testing glider dev and cost of development from official ms side for sure.
We have given them all the requests and info of what we need and want.
Will be interesting if a team with resorces can do better that 2 people developing another popular gliding sim.
I will say I will be a little bit more skeptical about what FS2024 promises to delivers and not get my hopes up till I see it in action. I think the way that FS2020 was marketed it made it seem to me that the environmental effects like turbulence +clouds was going to be resolved.
I understand it’s a lot of data and processing, it was just maybe a misunderstanding on my part of how far our technology had come.
This “weather” is very disappointing. Diamond40NG with the flight model adjusted by us flies 105-108 knots at a load of 60-65% (as in reality) And with the “real” weather turned on at 50% it goes 120-125 knots. Because he constantly flies “thermal”. What kind of realism are we talking about? We are forced to recommend that our students turn off the weather, because this categorically does not correspond to real experience.
The kind of realism we are talking about is where the standard is: if it shakes the aircraft about violently, it is realistic, and that is what the current model - profuse and distorted “thermals” - accomplishes. It’s either that or that when soaring a glider, one doesn’t need to even think about seeking lift, because it is in abundance everywhere.
Yes, I think the same too. I am waiting further communications about MSFS 2024 weather enhancements. I hope it will not be just tornadoes/storms implementation (that represent a low percentage of the daily flying condition), but the actual Live Weather engine in general will be fixed/improved/tweaked based on the existing weather bugs and wishlist reported in this MSFS 2020 forum.
Adding rising air into clouds across the whole sim is clearly something Asobo finds really difficult, but putting a programmer onto building a ‘new’ implementation of something completely independent is obviously a lot easier. So the important thing to distinguish is between “look we’ve implemented this new awesome tornado implentation” or even "look at this awesome storm-grade CuNim you can add one of to any weather setting. Ultimately more important is rising air into Cu’s working as it should or ridge lift having a better algorithm than a simple lift formula based on a tiny point far below the user aircraft.
I’m experiencing updrafts that spontaneously lift my Diamond DA40 a thousand feet in the air without losing any air speed. I’m experiencing updrafts that literally keep me from descending unless I completely cut power to my engine and nose down at 15 degrees. It’s been this way for a month and a half, every flight. I know not everyone is experiencing this but what I’m getting right now, every single flight with Live Weather, is not realistic at all.
I’m flying the DA40 NX and I’m experiencing the same thing. The thermals right now are insane. I’m having to pitch nose down 15 degrees just to maintain altitude and cut power to 15-20% to keep from hitting 140KT.
It’s probably the ground lift, but couple things to consider before concluding that:
Does the same thing happen if you put the sun down (i.e. dawn, dusk, or nighttime)?
What is your turbulence setting at?
Does it happen on a weather preset instead of live weather? If so, how about when wind is set to zero?
I have been alternating between a turbulence setting of medium and low depending on the situation because the profound lift and sink like what you describe will still happen with turbulence set to medium. And the fact that it is supposed to be heat-only ground lift and is directly proportional to wind speed is beyond me.
I understand it is difficult to recreate the vast and dynamic variables which culminate to form weather IRL, but at the very least they could reduce this aspect of the sim experience significantly (or remove it entirely for the time being). Right now, the trade off with the turbulence setting is that you can eliminate this “elevator” effect by reducing the turbulence setting, but you no longer get the jolts and shaking of the airplane that add to the realism. Perhaps, rather than a general “turbulence” setting, they could separate some of these factors to give the user more control over the sim experience.
Not a single word about thermals in the Dev Q&A,
only that they maybe gonna adjust the cloud density in live weather (which is too low),
this gonna have an effect on up & down drafts as well I think.
Looks like this topic is on ice in the near future.
