I was taking my Fish bath a minute ago, and this theoretical question came into my small brain:
If you had a choice between a closed-loop world-wide weather system in the game, or a best-they-can-do recreation of “live” weather, which would you choose and why?
I thought that this was an easy one for me, but the more I thought about it, the more I think I would choose for an independent weather system in the game. The reason why is that it is extremely difficult to impossible to perfectly forecast weather in the real world and translate that into the game. Asobo’s bungled attempt to do so aside, even if they get their act together and do the best possible job, it is still super difficult to say at point X and Y altitude, there will be a cirrus cloud with Z dimensions.
If you make your own weather system, you get to know the initial conditions which means that you can always know where stuff will be down the line. It could be a truly all-encompassing and immersive weather experience because you take the guess-work and data-holes out of it. I realize this might break immersion for certain populations, but would it? It isn’t so much that the VATSIM controller and in-game pilot need the real numbers, it is that they need the same numbers.
So yeah, I think you can see where I’m going with this, which would you choose?
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I think a closed-loop weather simulation would be ideal, if there was the option to disable it for single-player environment. (“Live” weather only in single player)
That’s a very good idea, methinks. If the weather was completely contained within the multiplayer simulated world, there wouldn’t be a question of how it was rendered on multiple systems.
PS: that’s the best “shower-thought” I’ve heard of in a long time.
Why would you need to be able to disable it for single player? I would argue that one of the tertiary advantages of such an implementation is that it wouldn’t necessarily be reliant on a WAN connection to be functional. “Live” as in real-world weather is not only absolutely reliant on the WAN, but multiple hops in the WAN (each a potential point of failure). Right now, if meteoblue’s model crunch for a particular run fails, our game fails, if the transmission of the data from meteoblue to Asobo fails, the game fails, etc. An artificial system could be confined to the first server (multi-player), or even the client.
There is no need, what I was implying was that in single-player environment, people could have the option, if they wanted to do “live” weather.
Oh I see. Yes, of course! I think you can do that now if you try to play off-line. It is just a preset or custom weather. What I’m envisioning above would be globalized.
Yes, and the more I think about it, the more I like your idea. I think it’s bloody brilliant.
Imagine, at the world map, showing not only the globally simulated weather, but when you select an airport it displays full weather conditions in the information panel.
There could also be a weather announcement portion for any significant weather events happening in this global weather system.
Yep. I’m really liking this.
I mean it isn’t a perfect solution. If you watched the meteoblue CTO’s video talking about how their model works and what they gave to Asobo data wise, he mentions initial conditions. I’m a weather nerd so I sort of knew this already, but it is grounded in chaos theory. If you’ve seen the movie (giggle) or just know about chaos theory, sensitive dependence on initial conditions otherwise known as the butterfly effect would still be there depending on how realistic you made your simulation experience. For example, the A320 (if it could actually take off with both engines), creates this nice wake and wingtip vortices which would be a tiny perturbation in the model which would in theory lead to a very different outcome further out in time. And obviously, the weather wouldn’t reflect reality as in looking out your window - but the current system is having a hard time with that now anyways.
That said, we’re not anywhere near that level of realism since the aircraft in MSFS don’t interact with the weather model in a way that changes the model, or even causes a visual effect to be rendered like vortices or highly localized turbulence inside a cloud structure (shear, updrafts, etc.).
I think that it would be an elegant solution to solving (or simply removing) at least some of the technical challenges associated with making weather realistic in the game, while still maintaining an immersive experience for those who want that.
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