I’m more than happy with a Meteoblue weather model implementation if it works. Currently, at least in my case, I have not had a single flight where I could use real-world data for flight planning or figure out weather en route.
The errors I constantly see are not with Meteoblue, it’s clearly something on Asobo’s side of things. If the weather engine worked correctly, and I could pull weather info from the game I’d be happy as a clam with a model based system.
And again with this anti-METAR talk, the devs themselves stated airport weather should be using METAR data when available making that whole point moot. What we’ve been told to believe is that both model and METAR data will be combined to make a “live” and “real-time” dynamic weather engine. And that is just not something I’ve seen so far.
You’re absolutely right!
Many people said: don’t look out the window if you want to compare real weather with MSFS live weather, but look at Meteoblue.
Well, during my last flight, Meteoblue showed this (the blue cross was my departure airport):
I am one of the people who said don’t look outside, look at MeteoBlue. And I still think it makes sense. Not because I want you to think the weather system works or is always accurate, but because it more directly illustrates the problems in the weather system.
Asobo can’t ignore the issue if we present the input data against the MSFS output. Especially when they are completely different as in the case above.
We’re comparing apples with apples now, and their’s is starting to look a little rotten.
I believe they’re using this (forecast) data in the sim (or at least they’re supposed doing so) to depict different cloud layers and their respective thickness.
We have no idea what the specific source data is going into Flight Simulator, so doing any kind of robust testing or verification is futile as far as I’m concerned. Meanwhile, the devs are actually aware of the shortcomings of what they’ve created. They know Live Weather is full of holes and implementation errors. They just don’t have the staff and time to address it all yet. I just hope folks realize this before they potentially waste a lot of time trying to track down these issues.
How do you know that? Last feedback I remember hearing on the issue of live weather injection problems was that they said they identified and fixed a server side issue. I haven’t seen anything from Asobo about which aspects of the live weather problems they already understand and just haven’t gotten around to fix, and which aspects they do not have a handle on and can still benefit from the community helping them spot what goes wrong and how.
Also, Microsoft certainly make it appear that MSFS operates on the “whoever screams the loudest gets the attention” principle. The whole voting system, feedback snapshots and so on show it. It is unfortunate.
I was finally able to find time today to do some flying. And of course, live weather caused frustrations. While wind speeds were mostly correct the entire time they were 180 degrees off. Should have had winds from the northwest all day and had winds from the southeast. Clouds looked realistic, the pressure was off by .10, and the temp was a bit cold if I remember. This made all planning I had done completely irrelevant, once again.
REX worked better but has so many of its own issues.
For now, I guess if I plan to use live weather I’ll just stop worrying about trying to do any sort of flight planning and just fly and be slightly annoyed the entire flight. I don’t see these issues being fixed anytime soon.
I’ve been using the software under the premise that it’s alpha-level, and we’re clamoring for which major features we want to see implemented. It’s not that this is release ready software and we’re finding “bugs” of which the developers are largely unaware.
A number of times that weather issues have been brought up in Q&A sessions, they were acknowledged as either being actively worked or already on the list, including the 225/3 wind, hyper-active lightning, even missing clouds types and IFR visibility were put on the backlog. The server cache bug is just one of probably many underscoring that Live Weather is not release ready. The impression I get is that they simply don’t have the staff and time to implement all of these features. So we have to beg for the ones we most want to see. I wish they weren’t heavily advertised as being included in the base game because it gets your hopes up. Maybe Live Weather should have been saved for a major sim update in 2021.
I just don’t want to see folks spending hours and hours reverse engineering this proprietary mystery box of a weather system only to have the devs finally come back and say, “yeah, we simply haven’t implemented that feature yet beyond this rudimentary placeholder”. It’s pretty clear they’re just running roughshod through a features list with almost no testing. Lightning was the best example of that. Hundreds of players had an immersion breaking bug immediately apparent, probably because a programmer pushed their code changes, and they went through zero QA beyond whatever minimal testing that programmer did.
The whole “entitled” attitude of so many users is so annoying. They’ve obviously never been involved in a development environment, none of which are ever perfect. They clearly have a plan, it’s clearly going to take at least a couple of years to implement everything they’ve got planned, and, I, for one, am super happy with this tool I’ve got to use. Yep, farrrrr from perfect, but, if I let little things like this annoy me, I’d be a pretty depressed individual.
A number of times that weather issues have been brought up in Q&A sessions, they were acknowledged as either being actively worked or already on the list, including the 225/3 wind, hyper-active lightning, even missing clouds types and IFR visibility were put on the backlog. The server cache bug is just one of probably many underscoring that Live Weather is not release ready. The impression I get is that they simply don’t have the staff and time to implement all of these features
So you don’t know. You think that is how it is – and you may very well be right. Or you may be wrong. Who knows? Not you, and not me.
An alternative explanation: There are so many layers of community managers, executives, program mangers, and testers between the users and the developers that they do not know what is broken and what is just user error. One ZenDesk I filed about the weather injection issue got a canned response back about ensuring I had live weather selected in the world map.
And we don’t know that either. All we know is it got shipped – we don’t know if that is because QA did not find the problem, or if QA did find it but Engineering could not fix it, or if QA found it and PM decided not to fix it until a later release.
Sure, the best any of us can do is guess. But it’s difficult to believe that with holes so large in the implementation that end-users can’t help but trip on them, that the development is not aware of them and why they’re there. There’s no way they’re that incompetent.
We need more information and transparency if we want to get closer to what’s going on with Live Weather. How about we ask for the specific model and run, or METAR station and time being injected into Flight Simulator? That info could be displayed as text when you select Live Weather or in Dev Mode somewhere. Otherwise this is all just speculation as to why stuff isn’t working.
You are not the person I was complaining about. Your response was very reasonable.
As you noted, their design process is obvious. The size of their team is known. The complexity of what they’re developing is obvious. The pressures of their business and they’re getting to release are obvious. At this point, they don’t have a lot of choice in their testing methodology. That needed to be addressed a year ago to have an impact now. Now the pressures to release are wayyy to high to stop releasing fixes and do proper testing. It will take a few months to get that in place.
IOW, the expectation of fixes for everything today is ridiculous. They clearly have a plan for what they wanted to develop, and are transparent as to how their priorities are changing based on feedback. I’ve NEVER seen a company be as transparent about what they’re doing to move forward as they are.
We just need to continue to play, report the bugs, provide input and let them do their work.
How does more transparency help? How can they be more transparent than they are? What good does that do? Why isn’t it good enough for us to report our experiences and expectations? It’s not like us knowing what’s going on under the covers is going to do anything but give away trade secrets and, what, give us more to talk about? Let’s just report what we see as being wrong, and give them a chance to fix it.
Up through the release of the lightning patch, my experience with live weather was really good. After that it’s been hit or miss. That’s been, what, 6 weeks maybe. This is a super complex system, and it’s going to take many months to get it right.
I’m ALL FOR reporting bad experiences with live weather and what people are seeing and what their expecations are. Whether those expectations are real, that’s harder to address, but can be. There’s zero possibility of weather actually matching what’s going on at this minute perfectly. What can happen is a sort of good approximation sort of. If it could be perfect, we’d be able to predict the weather.
If I had known features that were advertised as “live” and “real-time” would take many months to get right I wouldn’t have spent 120 bucks to be a beta tester.
If I know what data is (supposed to be) going into the sim, I can actually tell whether or not the sim is working as it’s intended. Right now, I can’t.
You didn’t spend the extra $60 on the weather system. That was for the extra planes and airports. That’s it. So that’s an unfair expectation. If you were expecting a finished product, that’s kind of fair, but a little research would have shown that not to be the case. But, it is what it is. But, I promise live weather will NOT be totally fixed in a few days. I expect it will be better by next summer. That’s just how software development works. There are too many systems that too few developers are addressing with too few tools at the moment. But I fully expect things will get better.
Ok, I get that. It would be good to hear them discuss what we should expect from the live weather system. I totally agree with that. And I agree it would probably assuage people’s feelings, at least those who put the effort into understanding what they might say.
Edit: and yeah, wind being 180 degrees out I think is a problem, and a bug, very similar to the windsock bug where the default orientation of object placement is 180 degrees, and the only way it works is if it’s orented at 0 degrees. I’m totally cool with the windsock having to be oriented in a particular direction to work, but to make the default object placement orientation 180 degrees, when that conflicts with other specifications, is just stupid. I’m sorry, that is an example of stupid development.
