It is a simulator - supposed to simulate real world…
If you never been in a cockpit and encounter lightning close by you will be in for a surprise - you will be blind for a few seconds. Especially at night - when we have it close by we fly with one eye closed to have one that isn’t blinded.
It’s a long time since I flew planes without weather radar, but flew ad-hoc charter with Piper Chieftain (PA31) many many years ago.
Flying IMC with embedded CBs and not knowing what is in front of you - that is scary 
…and yes got blinded many times.
Didn’t happen that often over the 15 years I flew A320, but sure did happen on a few occasions.
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I’ve been in flights in and around thunderstorms with lightning many times, and while I agree it can be bright, it was way over done in MSFS initially. Every bolt no matter how close or far was a strobe light going off that would take a few seconds to recover from. I don’t know how they couldn’t leave the lightning but just tone it down a little bit. It’s just gone now.
I tried - I really tried to find a thunderstorm.
Windy says (and this is just one of many examples):
And now let’s have a look at Marrakech Airport:
Perfect blue sky (yea you can’t see well due to HDR - but trust me)
So - how comes that I can’t find any thunderstorm in MSFS 2020 (still?)
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Btw - you can take a screenshot via Win+Alt+Prtscrn that will produce a .jxr and a .prn file and the .prn is already adjusted by Windows for HDR and will look great 
. Files will be under Pictures\Captures.
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Thanks!!
Btw - I got myself now Active Sky - it is actually really good! They made a lot of improvements - not regretting the purchase 
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it’s amazing, but only in passive mode.
the active mode is the same as xenviro rex etc.
I like to have a dynamic sky, i don’t like to go back to FSX or XP11.
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The lightning has always been there and I have flown through them multiple times. Why some never see it, I don’t know. They are nice and intense both up in the clouds and to the ground, both as visible zigzags and as bright blobs.
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Yes i really miss the system we had before su7 released. We will never be able to buy that. It were a unique system that got voted to be removed/changed. Now we are stuck with those METAR-based systems that feels unnatural/generic in my opinion. Why move backwards in innovation when the new innovation could have been improved instead? Why does the complain of bad accuracy of weather mean that it needs to have weather that is based of generic METAR data that not always are accurate either because it doesn’t tell the whole picture of the weather. I know many including me look on a METAR to plan their flights but that could have been fixed by converting the data that is injected into the sim into a METAR report that also could have been exported to planning-tools like simbrief.
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As I’ve said countless times, there is a LOT of sim weather that happens in between METAR reporting stations. METAR only seem to be used to augment weather in the vicinity of an airport. Go fly in the western US, where it is often 50-100 miles or more to the nearest METAR and you will see all sorts of weather that is corresponding sort of closely with real-world weather, likely based on other kinds of observations and modeling.
We don’t use METAR solely to plan flights in the real-world - there are a lot of other tools at our disposal and the sim is nowhere close to any of that. METAR only tell you current conditions at precise locations to about one-hour granularity (or less if it’s large changes). So where it’s nice to have that somewhat correspond with AWOS/ATIS as you’re getting close to the terminal area, it’s only a small part of flight planning.
I can tell you that neither the old system nor the current system have the fidelity of weather behavior that makes it work well enough in conjunction with real-world observational or forecasting tools (or simple understanding of atmospheric physics), so it ends up being deterministic. That said it’s better than it used to be, outside of the cloud type rendering.
Either way, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this all works and the claims aren’t matching reality.
It’s amusing that we are cheering Asobo for fixing things like lightning, ATC dropout, and stuttering that were not a problem before SU 5 over a year ago. And here we are at the final version SU15 in 2024 essentially getting back back what we already had when we first bought the sim in 2020……just in time for MSFS2024. Am I missing something here???
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Yes, there were many things that were there. Everyone was also spending just about everyday tweaking things to get the sim running over 20 fps. YouTube was littered with videos on what to tweak in Windows, in your graphics card, in the sim, etc and people were still only going from 21 fps to 24 fps. Frankly, the number of videos just showing everyone struggling so hard almost made me not buy the sim. I didn’t want to get into something that seemed more work than fun. So people want to wax on about the nostaglia of how utterly perfect things were before SU5, but thats looking at the past with rose colored glasses. For the majority of users, they were struggling to get hardly any performance out the sim. VR had been added, but it wasn’t something most users could achieve with the performance levels of headsets even back then. It surely wouldn’t have been able to handle todays high end headsets with their resolutions today.
And yes, I’ve been told that people with top of the line systems had no problems. But the people with top of the line systems were like only 2% of the population at that time. But I do get that if you did have a top of the line system, it was disamusing. However, you wouldn’t have all the things you have now. You wouldn’t have the wealth of high fidelity addons. If the majority of people were only getting 24 fps, they weren’t going to invest in higher priced, high fidelity addons. PMDG was going to have to cut back on things to make it performant enough for a wider audience. You wouldn’t have had Varjo decide to give the consumer side a try. You wouldn’t probably have an A2A. Back in 2021, the population using MSFS had just recently broken 1 million users. The last figures of active users I heard last year, it was over 14 million. That 13 million increase, it came from those optimizations. Otherwise, where we are now wouldn’t have been possible.
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During 2020 and 2021 I was running a i5 2500k with a GTX 1060 and getting 30fps just fine with some settings on high and clouds on ultra. The graphics and weather were outstanding. It’s absolutely not looking through rose colored glasses because we have screenshots and videos as proof.
By the time I upgraded SU5 was just about to come out and with it took the amazing graphics and made my upgrade wasted money because no matter how far I pushed the sliders the same graphics fidelity was not coming back and still haven’t 3 years later. The performance is worse too.
I would rather take a hit to FPS than reduced fidelity in a flight simulator. At any rate, that should always remain a choice. Not forced across the board on everyone.
Staying on topic, I still don’t see lightning in live weather even when the world map page says so in the thumbnail.
I would say that is incorrect.
In SU4 I had a beautiful sim with decent performance. Running on i5 8600k, 16 GB RAM, RTX 2080 I had 27-28 FPS as a minimum in VR (HP Reverb G2) and not many bugs.
Now I run i7 9700k, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3080TI, still going down to 27 FPS in busy areas and it looks way worse…
Because a very loud 5 percent of simmers fly on VATSIM and needed METAR weather to matcherate. Now the other 95 percent of simmers have to endure the weather engine downgrade so they are happy.
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Why does the conversation always end up focusing on METAR? METAR should be viewed as a check and balance - if the sim weather is wildly different from that, we should be asking why the sim weather engine isn’t producing weather that’s close to real-world in the first place, not why the sim is injecting a correction.
And I’m not talking about being off by a few hundred feet of cloud base, a few miles visibility, or a few knots of wind. I’m talking about the difference between clear skies and overcast, or a line of thunderstorms that has recently initiated that’s completely missing in the sim.
The sim isn’t doing weather by METAR only, but it does seem to augment the weather in circles around airports, as a stopgap. Outside of that, the weather is still off a little, but much better, spatiotemporally, than it was at the beginning. But yes, lightning is majorly missing, for reasons unknown.
But why come back every time and blame it on METAR? It’s such a small piece of the puzzle. Shouldn’t we be analyzing the large-scale discrepancies between sim and real-world (through other observations than METAR) and asking much bigger questions as to why?
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Because that’s what always ruins the overall picture of the weather engine. I couldn’t care less if the weather in the sim depicts the exact situation that exists in real life a the same time. What I DO care about is when clear weather suddenly morphs into overcast in front of my eyes in a matter of seconds. Something that NEVER happened before that METAR nonsense was implemented.
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That’s the crux of the issue. There are obviously vocal minorities on both ends of the argument. So how inaccurate are you willing to let it be? I never expect 100% accuracy, but there are flight-critical weather situations in which the weather should be pretty close - things like thunderstorms, fog, frontal passage, etc, that change rapidly.
If you’re simulating in regions where this type of rapidly-changing weather is happening, lack of accuracy makes the sim unusable for “safely” completing a simulated flight because it’s impossible to tell, in-sim, what’s behind the weather you can see. Or impossible to know if the airport you’re arriving at in 30 minutes will be experiencing a ground stop, going IFR, switching runways, etc. With the current (lack of) accuracy, the weather is hitting the wrong airport(s) at the wrong time and there’s no way to know how it’s affecting your airport until you get within range of the AWOS. That is not how it’s done in the real world as there are far more tools available with which to gain situational awareness and make decisions. The folks asking for more accuracy have a valid point that shouldn’t be
Further, if the in-sim weather isn’t close to real-world, then it hasn’t behaved correctly - something was missed - it did this when it should have done that and the downstream effects compound (chaos theory, really). We discovered that the sim can’t do cloud motion in multiple directions at a time. That’s a fundamental problem. If it’s not producing lightning in the correct place, that’s a big problem. Because weather actually develops - it’s not like a cloud just moves from one place to another.
We talk about reality in simming - what I just described is a big deal and is just as important as how clouds and their morphology are graphically depicted.
The sim injects weather into the sim. That data could have been exported to those tools you are mentioning and those tools would have been useful even when this sim got released and we would have always have accurate weather. Not to the real world 100% but what we see on those tools would have been accurate to the weather we see in the sim.
The 225 @ 3KTS at release were a bug. Meteoblue don’t predict 225@3KTS all over the world at the same time. That was the massive issue at release most of us experienced that caused the massive thread about live weather doesn’t match that also made those changes in su7. I bet there were many other bugs with the injected data at release. Thats how it is with new softwares that are released. And those should have been fixed. Not completely changed into something completely different. For me su7 weather is something completely different than what i had before su7.
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That’s a totally different issue. Obviously a bug.
Huh? Exported to what tools? Aviationweather.gov? And how do you expect the incredibly limited scope of in-sim weather to behave like real world weather?
I’m shooting for much higher fidelity than we’re talking here. Folks keep talking like everything was great pre su-7, but it wasn’t. At all. It just looked realistic enough to placate some folks into believing it was realistic. There are fundamental issues with the way it’s applied that can’t be overcome without a major overhaul, which requires a lot of insight into how weather actually behaves. This also requires a lot of rapid-refresh data and some creativity in how to get it from point a to b. But if you’re going to tell me to be okay with some watered-down version, it’s not going to fly. I’m always going to aim higher.
But the partner Asobo has Meteoblue as partner and should have the most insight of weather? Because thats what they are working with.
I think we talking about different things when we are talking about weather behavior. Realistic weather behavior for me is when the weather has realistic physics. And for you it means when it’s accurate. And to have it 100% accurate it needs to have static snapshots of weather until the next snapshot is reported because nobody knows how the weather will be in the future and thats not realistic behavior for me.