Gah, I just saw Seb talking about how some beta testers didn’t know you could get violent up /down drafts in real life so they capped it. In storm clouds they will easily destroy aircraft.
So, it sounds like he was saying, “we simulated it but instead of telling people this is what really can happen we decided to break physics”.
I seriously dislike that. I don’t like the idea of a simulation being intentionally broken because some might not understand reality. Teach, don’t give a gold star saying “yeah, your right, physics is broken”. That’s a politicians job. At last he says they might up the cap someday but if it is simulated accurately then there must be no cap. The sim could just say, “Updrafts due to being in a storm cell was too strong and ripped your wings off”.
I’m hoping the real answer was “we had bugs applying the up/down drafts inappropriately so the quick fix was to cap it”. That would be a lot more understandable reason.
As for thermals based turbulence. I think what the sim is missing is that it does not simulate air mixing as the air rises. As a programmer I could see how that might not be done well or at all. It’s a guess though. Maybe they think people expect aircraft to always bounce around based on wind speed…
Im not a pilot, im not too sure about the physics of what you are talking about work but i do know there is weather in real life that you simply would not fly through, as weather can bring planes down.
My experience is however that there is no weather in MSFS2020 that any plane cannot simply fly through. If i see clouds or a storm in game i just fly through it because i know i might shake around a bit but i’ll be fine; even doing perma death onair runs. Would be nice if you needed to factor in certain weather/elements that would simply be too risky to fly through.
There is. I had my CJ4 destroyed by turbulence over Greenland on a transatlantic flight. Rather spoiled the evening and I fly with the ‘stress causes damage’ setting off now!
On the rant about the peeve … I completely agree. Since ‘damage’ can be turned off, there’s no reason to disable these effects or cap them because some players don’t understand/like the result.
I would imagine that modeling these kind of thermal effects right up to the vertical air movements in storm cells, microbursts etc. is difficult. I hope we get there someday.
Flying into an extremely active jet stream (headwinds of 120kt plus … live weather). At about FL300 and getting bounced around a lot … actually, I had just been considering that it was a pretty good representation of some of the rougher transatlantic flights I’ve been on when this happened :
I guess one issue is that flying through that kind of storm with lots of TCUs looks fantastic in sim. So if it cause severe turbulence then few people get to see it because they will either destroy their aircraft or crash. But that is where turning off crashes comes in
I love the sim and this isn’t a deal breaker. It is just for me, the sim is close to perfect and I want it to hit perfect
I do lots of VFR navs in the sim and it would be nice to get the rest of the way. I even got out my real WACs, VTCs and VNCs and use my old flight computer to plan navs in central Australia and could fly it VFR and no autopilot with no issues. It blows my mind.
Hehe, yes some damage modelling is in. Have you noticed that you can land with a Cessna at 10,000 fpm and as long as you hit gear first your ok? Hit the nose or the wing as it is a crash but landing gear is indestructible. At least one patch ago.
But with storms, will you get thrown upside down battling to keep in the air while alternating between stalling and climbing at 5000fps? Not so much just light turbulence. Not even moderate.
My friend and instructor had it happen once in Africa. They were trapped in a thunderstorm and could do nothing but go through it, Short Skyvan. Both engines idle, nose down, speed closing the red stripe, variometer exceeding the scale upwards. They entered it at 6000ft and left it way above 20000‘. These things are freaking real and really merciless. It didn‘t shake at all, they were just in the middle of a huge elevator.
Scary as hell is think! I only had it in xplane and it was the most amazing experience and such a fight. That isn’t to say xplane was simulating it perfectly but it was very believable.
I am pretty sure I had active sky running but not 100%
I would like the true simulation of this as well. They could however put the currently implemented cap behind an option in the realism settings, so people who like to fly into bad weather without consequences can still do so.
I also lost the TBM in a storm cloud due to overstressing from the turbulence. I was marveling at how atmospheric and turbulent it was, passing in and out of stormy clouds, when the screen went black. I think it was with the storm preset and it was with the release version back in August.
Seb also mentioned how they scale the crosswind to nothing when stationary on the ground at low speeds, to avoid trouble for the player. That’s similar to restricting the updraughts - I think they have to introduce some artificial constraints to avoid too frequent ‘weird’ behaviour that comes from the current flight model. As it improves they can likely relax the restrictions.
Similar (but not quite as dangerous) experience over North Carolina - T-34C between several closely packed thunderstorms. Just went for the ride with rain coming in through the cockpit seals and my helmet bouncing against the canopy. It would have been terrifying if I was not just working to keep the plane on heading and wings level. I am generally a proponent of keeping the sim’s physics correct - we can always turn real weather off if it’s too much. For those planning long-distance flights that they (justifiably) do not want ruined after hours of work, maybe an option to limit weather would be a good addition.
It’s really not a matter of one or the other. I’m confident that eventually there will be general difficulty modes, so you can can choose “Realistic” or “Arcade” and everything between.
I believe that most, if not all, racing simulators have that and wouldn’t survive without it.
There‘s always huge demand for the most realistic flight model, the perfect system behaviour, there are actually people making a drama because of N1 in the 747 rising slightly during take off run or because of slightly different-to-reality fuel consumption during reverse thrust in a 20 second deployment. Or VNAV slows down 3 knots too much occasionally. Everything must be perfect, if not they will for sure tell everyone that they paid 130$ for such a bad simulation. But when it comes to something actually challenging like a thunderstorm or simply the implementation of real effects of weather, in comparision to what they were used to in FSX/P3D/XPL then there should suddenly be a light-switch, so the plane won‘t get disturbed following the magenta or green line down to the runway without the need to adjust the plans. Or to use some rules of thumbs and do some maths.
Of course, not everyone is totally fanatic about realism, a weekend-sim-user who simply want to do a nice flight here and there should definitely be able to do that. But my personal maximum would be a plain on-off-switch with a correct implementation. Nothing exaggerated, nothing negligible. Off or correct, so addon developers can properly work with this environment. Those questions like „I’ve set my Active Sky sliders to 120 because I want my wings to bounce up and down 2 meters but now my autopilot disconnects all the time, developer do something against it“ get a bit annoying ^^
A similar experience in an even more benign environment … Flying with my uncle in his airplane (Beech Bonanza) with some fairly active summer CB activity (this was in northern Europe, so not the massive formations that are seen further south, and for sure no TS activity). We’d been flying at about 2k beneath the clouds but the space between terrain and cloud base was getting tight so we decided to climb on top.
Shortly after entering the clouds, the VSI hit the stop and in a blink of an eye we cleared the tops at just under 10k. Not a terribly dramatic event in the retelling, but there was definitely an ‘EEEEeeeeek’ moment if you were there!
That was a very long time ago. I was a mere lad of 12 or 13 … but I learned respect for those fluffy white summer clouds on that day!
So yes, let’s have the weather dynamics in all its majestic glory; and those that want something milder can turn off the potential worst effects
If convective updrafts were anything like the simulator’s icing or lightning, as in overdone and erratic to the point of breaking the realism, then that’s probably it.
Lots of these features seem to get a relatively quick, simplified treatment before they have to move on to the next thing. If the initial attempt doesn’t work out, then it gets thrown on the backlog. Realistic models of convection might be out of the scope of this simulator, and that’s understandable. You can see this visually in the clouds, which appear to be blobs with a 3D noise function that’s translated vertically to give a cumulus like appearance, but it’s not the blossoming, cauliflower like growth of actual cumulus. And that’s fine for this game, but when it comes to actually affecting aircraft in flight, more simplistic models of this process might have been way more noticeable and distracting to the user.
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