Guys,
what has happened to the weather over the last 2 years. it seems like the weather engine has been “dumb” down over the last few years. Please Jorg, and Asobo guys at the very least return the CB’s and pulsing Rain bands back to the sim. Every time I fly into one now I’m disappointed. Remember with the weather was like this on original release? Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - Incredible Storms - YouTube
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Topic moved into General Discussion.
The bug reporting category is for confirmed bugs without duplicating an existing bug report using the provided template.
You should take some time to go look at some of the various dedicated weather issue related threads that have been going on since SU7. Consensus is that the change is largely is not solely related to the integration of METAR. Topics tagged live-weather Read away.
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I agree the weather isn’t visually like it was in that video, which is sad. I miss the thunderstorms, and lines of frontal weather depicted with such good visual immersion. Now the weather is so visually “dumbed down” , thunderstorms are literally missing. I really hope they address this sooner than later. There is so much potential it’s crazy.
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what gets me the most is that the community managers here played the game from the start on streams and so on but are not pushing for these degradations to be fixed. their voices carry the most weight around here they have direct access to microsoft. yet they choose not to help. during the q&a they just agree and thank and say awesome then carry on with the next question. some part of them must know this is wrong.
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That is certainly a major factor (Xbox performance and equality) but I would say it’s also to help PC’s that aren’t super-ninja-beasts to cope too, considering they are also adding more computation-heavy elements (such as CFD, Soft Body physics, thermals, prop wash etc) and need headroom to add more real-time simulation in that way — so it can’t be blamed solely on Xbox.
I imagine at some point in the future when hardware has all improved as a baseline, and the developers have a bit more time for improvements, it could be branched off again so that PC’s can benefit from weather as it was before whilst keeping consoles performance acceptable. Even now top end PC’s can struggle to handle everything at max.
But to play devils advocate, I didn’t own the game (PC) until September 2022 so I think I missed out on that previous iteration of weather (didn’t even have a PC back then)… but you have to admit even as it stands now it’s still beautiful and amazing with no competition even close to the effects and visuals MSFS can produce.
It’s a platform designed to grow and change so I bet at some point this will be addressed… when the time is right.
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The most annoying issues for me are two:
- Thunderstorms now completely missing in live weather after they were everywhere some SUs ago.
- Clouds with zero thickness and zero turbulence when flying in it
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I’m actually glad someone has said this as it’s been on my mind also. Additionally, anything released for Series X, must also work on Series S. No shade on console users either.
Then you wont know how we already heard all this before and telling us to wait and bne patience is by now a meme.
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Still haven’t seen it! 
But about the ingame weather, there have been some improvements, there have been some downgrades… must honestly say that i’ve not seen many thunderstorms around here in real life for the last year either.
Well maybe so - actually going to correct myself, it was Sept 2021 I bought the sim whether (<-- see what I did there) that makes a difference 
General SIM degradation in total. Don’t want to be that guy either, and no offense to box users. This was possible before SU5. First video done the day before SU5 hit and has a beautiful overcast. After that… pop ins, clouds sub par, and visuals degraded. Forums were rife with rants about it. SU6 PC performance tanked. Videos show its smooth on ground, and everywhere. TLOD and OLOD at maximum levels. Performance tanked long before any flight dynamics and such were touched.
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I have nothing against console users either, we can’t all afford high end setups that’s a fact.
But still a bit frustrating we are getting limited by the series S this much.
X alone would’ve been fine probably for the most part as it’s quite capable.
It’s not like MS can drop msfs development now on the xbox as they allready are dedicated to it.
But it’s time to truly work on making it next gen and not current gen with optimized downgrades.
MS owns DX12 even, they have nanite like dynamic lod systems called mesh shading.
That alone will get rid of pyramid spikes all over the scenery.
3 years in pretty much, nowhere to be found.
DX12 is neglected, only DLSS3 added to please nvidia… god knows what leather jacket jensen paid ms for that marketing machine.
I’m just a frustrated simmer seeing a very capable team being held back by poor choices of the suits at MS.
This sim can be a true showcase of what next gen is truly capable of.
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Funny tho how lod 900 was doable on my old i7 with the cfg edit back then even tho that was stuttery and heavy as well.
But i struggle with lod400 with a X3D CPU now xd
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Maybe it didn’t work. Maybe if you set a high value in the config it just set it to whatever internal max value it had at the time. Perhaps 900 was nothing more than a placebo. Dunno
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I totally agree with this topic, many threads have been posted in the weather bug reports section and in the SU7 forum to report the weather regression since METAR and XBOX implementation. Unfortunately no communication about that downgrade has been brought in any of the Dev Q&A that occured since November 2021 so we can just make assumptions. Additionally, to the video posted in the 1st post, I am adding that one: Feature Discovery Series Episode 2: Weather - YouTube
Many of those original features are now missing or have been downgraded without any explanation. Of course not everything was perfect but Live weather was much more realistic than it is now: more cloud types, more layers, cold fronts, smooth transitions. Live weather in each flight was different and astonishing. It is sad that Live weather evolved toward an arcade mode rather than a simulator one as it was originally designed and implemented.
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It is obvious to those who joined MSFS before the ‘transition’ to xBox functionality the SU’s have been updates - not upgrades - to the core sim.
I don’t expect MS/ Asobo to ever spell out what they are diminishing to make the program function on the lesser hardware let alone that they have definitely done it.
It seems less than ideal to me that they would have released this sim BEFORE the Xbox aspect was baked in, allowing us to experience something that started out better than it has become…rather than, you know - something that really improves over time.
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You are 100% correct.
I have had the sim since release day. It was so, so obvious as soon as I loaded into the game after SU5 that so many things had been degraded. It was a really sad moment for me. It would seem too much of a coincidence that this happened at the same time as Xbox release.
However, I also think that they tried to dumb down graphical fidelity to improve performance because many people were complaining about performance, but I think a lot of these people were new to flight sims and expecting the same FPS as they got on other games. I also think people with hardware that wasn’t good enough complained about performance instead of either turning down their settings to get acceptable performance, or getting better hardware to get acceptable performance at the settings they wanted. In effect, Asobo then just turned down the settings for everyone whether they wanted them turned down or not. Very sad.
The sim hasn’t been the same since. LOD distance are much, much smaller, remember seeing trees to the horizon? Now the edge of detail is so obvious in a ring around the aircraft even on settings beyond ULTRA. Clouds are much much worse. The lighting is flatter and more dead. The list goes on.
I fear that it has been too long now and we will never see it brought back to how it used to be.
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Read and vote:
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Visually the weather looks great to me. Some really massive cloud formations in bad, ominous, weather. Haven’t seen any thunderstorms I’ll admit, but then I rarely see them IRL either so that hasn’t really bothered me too much. Would be cool to see them though.
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