I absolutely agree with everything you have said. I think Asobo are on a hiding to nothing as the vast majority of sim users will never let go of their number comparing obsessions.
I like to put it this way.
Hong Kong airport is situated right next to a 3000ft mountain, which sits to its immediate south. Often the regional weather will be quite benign, with scattered cloud and fairly steady 10-15kts southerly, onshore wind. MSFS will probably model this very well from the Meteoblue data.
But the problem is the effect of the terrain on the conditions at the airport in HKG is huge. This setup will easily create gusty, turbulent wind with wind sheer, that can vary from 090-270 and exceed 20-25kts. The cloud also condenses as it rises over the terrain, and can produce heavy localised showers at the airport.
If you compared the HKG METAR to MSFS weather, they’d be completely different. The important takes away is that though it’s not matching real life in that one specific location, MSFS weather is still working correctly, and as designed. The difference is just the limitation of the system Asobo have chosen.
So, the weather engine is so advanced that we can’t use real-world resources to see if it’s working. You seem to be ignoring the fact that Asobo said in the last Q&A that airport weather in-game is supposed to use METAR data ONLY and Meteoblue away from airports. If the game only uses model data updated twice a day, that is apparently never correct, that is not what is considering “live” or “real-time” weather.
I don’t know what altitude you got that wind data for, but 16-20km/h does not equal 17kts. 17kts is not considering calm winds anywhere in the world. Meteoblue wind data shows winds of 4km/h on the surface.
Also, I live nearby the airport I referenced, please don’t try and tell me I don’t know what the actual weather is.
So, how exactly do we know it’s working if there is NO way to use real world data to compare with it.
Not ignoring this at all. This is literally the first time I’ve heard that statement. I genuinely hope this is correct, as I have always thought a hybrid system, combing both real time observations with computer generated weather model would be the best solution.
That’s strange, I could have sworn I used surface winds too in that image, maybe I made a mistake. Yes 16-20km/h is not 17 kts, I know that. I did say weather was similar, not the same. Again, given the limitations of the MeteoBlue system, it’s in the ballpark.
No need to get defensive, at no stage did I ever make such a suggestion.
I’m trying to show people where the data comes from for MSFS weather, so that apples can be compared to apples, that’s all. At the moment too many people are comparing different data sets, assuming they should will be the same. (I may be wrong here, if the METAR implementation that you allude to above is correct.)
I’ve been one of the top posters on this subject. I’m a weather nerd, and it is the most important feature for me when it comes to a flight sim, I am well aware of how weather modeling works. If the game just used the 12-hour models in the sim I would be happy with that for the most part. Why? Because the models from Meteoblue and others are almost spot on, otherwise they wouldn’t be in business.
I always compare the weather I’m getting in-game with what has been modeled and it almost never matches the data. Sometimes one aspect might match reality but many others will align with some time in the future or often the past.
If using model data temp and pressure should be the EASIEST parts of the weather to be correct but they are often not. If you scroll up to my post from Sunday, while the wind was mostly correct, the pressure in the game was 30.04 while in the real world, and model data, it was 29.57. The pressure and temp aligned with model data 12 hours in the future. Much like the wind data, I posted tonight that wasn’t accurate to any model.
In the last Q&A, they said they found a server-side caching issue with the weather and supposedly fixed it. It was apparently causing delayed weather. Since that fix I seem to be getting weather far in the future. During the Q&A they also went in-depth discussing how all airport weather was supposed to use METAR data etc.
If we’re going to continue having “live” “real-time” weather that doesn’t correlate with the real world weather then we’re going to need a way to pull in-game weather data. Right now trying to plan a flight is a miserable experience.
Sorry to be defensive but I’ve been passionate about this subject for over 2 months and have seen zero changes and I’m sick of being told that the weather engine is so advanced that humanity has yet to discover a way to accurately observe the real-world weather so we can actually compare it to what is produced in-game.
I agree with everything you just said. If MSFS weather is nothing like the MeteoBlue model then there most definitely is an issue. It’s just so inconsistent, seemingly working for some, and not for others. Then through in the fact everyone has a different expectation of what ‘working’ means, and it becomes quite messy to figure out where the real issues lie.
I guess Asobo still have a lot of kinks to iron out of the system. If they keep saying ‘it should do this’, and ‘it should do that’, it would seems they’re not 100% convinced themselves that the systems works correctly. No wonder we’re all confused too.
IIRC, clear skies, 29.92 barometer and wind at 227/3 means you are not receiving the weather at all. This is the major problem most users report and used to stem from starting a second flight in a session without a sim restart in between. Asobo were meant to have fixed that one but it still occurs to me every now and again. Only solution I have found it to restart the sim if it happens - nothing I do can get LW to come back once I have hit the “clear skies” issue in a session.
There is a work around which works 100% of the time for me
With any setting change to other than live Live Multiplayer, Live AI traffic, Live weather & Time will mean that on return to the map menu screen, after completion of you first flight, the weather will default to ‘pre set’ with ‘clear skies’ selected in the weather tab. (This could even be the use of time acceleration in flight, as the time is no longer ‘live’.)
To re-enable live weather without restarting the sim, you must open the flight conditions and reselect live weather & time, BEFORE (vitally important) selecting any departure/arrival location or adjusting the time with the slider on the map page. You can then select a location or adjust the time as needed.
If you do this correctly, live weather will again be active for you subsequent flight. You can do this indefinitely, returning to the map screen and starting a new flight, with live weather, indefinitely.
If you forget the order, or get it wrong by mistake, it will not work, and live weather will be deactivated.
No worries. It’s definitely a pain and needs to get fixed, as I forget regularly too. I’m just so pre-programmed to go from left to right, I sometimes select my departure & arrival airports, before moving to flight conditions. Buy then it’s too late, selecting live weather will not work. For some reason it has to be done first.
It matters because even if live weather was working for you, it wouldn’t show the correct values for temperature and pressure for high-elevation airports (see here). Their corrections for higher altitudes are just wrong and it wouldn’t be a live-weather issue per se.
But anyway, for me, live weather has turned from okay-ish to simply bad since v1.10.x.y…
This has done absolutely nothing unfortunately, same weather. I went back to the main menu, selected live weather BEFORE selecting departure / arrival.
This is where I am again. Weather seemed to “work” for quite some time. Its accuracy was questionable at times, but it would at least work in the sense that I had dynamic weather conditions.
Since last week’s patch, I’m back to that condition. I get “live” weather for my first flight, and subsequent flights give me clear, 20C, 29.92, 225/5. The only way I can get live weather to work again is to restart the sim.
And I ensure that “Live Weather” is manually selected before each flight. They still haven’t fixed it “remembering” your setting after they broke it 2 patches ago, so I do go in manually before each new flight and select Live Weather. Even selecting Live Weather while in flight does nothing. It just gives me the default clear skies.
And of course there’s the useless ATIS reports we get as well. Always the same cloud and visibility conditions reported, regardless of the actual conditions. The only thing ATIS is good for is barometric pressure and knowing what runways are in use. Wind data will sometimes be correct, but it’s so badly wrong so often that it’s best to not rely on it and just fly over the field before landing and check the wind socks.
If they are releasing every two weeks, my bet is the only testing that is being done is the developer tests the change he or she made in a couple of scenarios and that’s about it. Given the size of the team working, they are all working on both developing new features and fixing bugs that get pushed into their workstream, they can’t be doing a whole lot of testing at all. If they were, the only changes we’d see would have left development 1 to 2 months ago. That’s clearly not happening.
I’m not complaining, just stating facts. I see plenty of discourse and effort on their part every week, so I’m happy to live with a few bugs here and there. I do hope they get their act together for real eventually though. Which would require a major slow down of new feature development for a period of 6 months. Which would you rather have?
And then there is people screaming for more eye-candy and topics regarding graphics being voted up while the real problems and bugs won’t get enough votes. It’s ashame really, they should first and foremost fix everything first before introducing more problems.
I think there is too much on their plate for planned new development over the next 6 to 8 months for them to properly do that at the current time. They don’t have the staff required. I think they’ll get there.
The program is clearly not finished yet. But I’m happy they released it as is. It’s just so much fun to use, and it really helped motivate me to get back into flying again (I was supposed to get legal again today with a BFR after 19 years of not flying, but it was too windy out).
I suspect this is the case as well. The dev gets a problem / bug assigned. Makes some code changes, tests in a limited way to see the code fixed the problem reported (but not enough to see if it added new problems, has side-effects), marks it as complete, and moves on to the next.
I say this because that’s pretty much the way our programming shop operates. We have no testers. Only 2 devs that answer to a supervisor who isn’t a programmer or IT / tech savvy who assigns us our work and (unrealistically short) timelines. Most of the time it works, but not always. It’s not how I’d like it to work, but it is what it is.
