Member back in FS2020 pre-SU5 when we had better turbulence, clouds, weather, and even thunderstorms before the mega nerf? I member
Your statement is very interesting. Please elaborate. If Active Sky adds realistic (or much better) cloud turbulence, that in itself would be worth paying for. Also, what is “passive mode”?
(sorry, it may be in this thread but it’s almost 700 posts!)
So it can’t be that complicated; it worked in MSFS2020 before SU5 too (with a few glitches, but a world of difference from how it is now) – I’m using MSFS more now thanks to StrataWx and RexAtmos Core, and judging by the tools available, it could certainly look better.
I’d also like to draw a comparison with XP12 now, but I’m constantly making comparisons (I use both sims) – yet MSFS’s LiveWeather, without support from the tools, is simply useless (at least in Europe) – that’s it. If it’s perceived as ‘complicated’ – why not develop a WeatherAPI and at least let the tools set the weather on a station-by-station basis? That would solve the problems. I know – the contract with Meteoblue etc. – but what does that have to do with the weather interface?
Above all – the ‘density’ of the weather has been deliberately reduced; that was a calculated move.
The career mode seems to be more important; I mean, users do use it, and of course it’s important too – I love MSFS, I’m not saying it isn’t a simulator – it is – but statements like that just reinforce the feeling that it’s more of a ‘game’.
IMO default MSFS has no cloud turbulence, AS breathes life into the weather model. If I forget to start AS, it’s very obvious once I’m in flight. The default flight model just feels repetitive and lifeless.
Passive mode allows msfs to handle the weather itself while the effects like turbulence are handled by AS. It’s basically a hybrid. It helps avoid bad weather transitions that is sometimes caused by AS. Honestly it never really bothered me either way.
Sounds like a very necessary addon until Asobo can figure it out. Thanks.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare 2020’s abilities with 2024 since the new engine is doing far more tasks than its predecessor and coding functions so that the performance is acceptable has to be far more tricky. Believe me, I would love for every feature to robust in 2024. Flying in dangerous real time weather in perfectly rendered clouds would be wonderful but would I sacrifice any of the other amazing improvements we have now to get it? I’m not so sure. I see statement after statement implying that, since some other program does one function better, then it should be easy to attain that same level of functionality in 2024. Programming doesn’t work that way. There is always a cost.
I don’t buy that they had to sacrifice weather quality for other features, and I don’t see any features that were introduced post 2020 SU5 that warrant reducing the quality of weather (surely one of THE most important aspects of simming) to achieve.
Jorg’s recent brush off that ‘it’s complicated’ is, frankly, somewhere between disappointing and patronizing. I don’t doubt that it is complicated, but given that 1) it was once pretty good (pre2020SU5) 2) it can still look great in presets 3) XP has achieved great things with their weather with (basically) ONE guy driving it, it must be perfectly doable.
What makes it more complicated is not devoting ANY of your resources to it while instead putting priority on things like movie tie-ins and niche interest ‘local legends’.
I used to have a lot of respect for Jorg, but batting off this vital topic with a throwaway ‘it’s complicated’, after all these years, really has me disappointed.
I feel like I’m flying a different sim when it comes to dangerous weather vs. what has been recently described in this thread. Twice in the past week I’ve flown the Phenom in career mode with live weather into storms I should not have flown into. Both times I got severe wind shear. The second time I almost ended up as a lawn dart.
Those saying the weather isn’t severe enough should try with the “realistic” turbulence setting in an aircraft with an updated CFD flight model. The turbulence/wind shear is often exaggerated, particularly in clear weather where there shouldn’t be any wind shear in the first place. I am guessing those who don’t experience it are flying an aircraft that is doing its own thing with the turbulence, which just makes it harder to pinpoint whether this is an Asobo issue or an issue with the aircraft.
I just want to point out that third-party developers had already created amazing weather systems in P3D and FSX, featuring wing fade, localized thunderstorms, and even tornadoes. Just check out Active Sky Next and Rex SkyForce. The problem is that the developers haven’t made a serious effort to advance the weather engine beyond its original capabilities. Their focus has been on growing the user base and enhancing the “static world.” If they simply developed an SDK and allowed weather experts to build a system alongside the default one, I’m confident the community would have shown strong support for it.
It’s ridiculous. Weather MUST be a priority, regardless of how complicated it is. Else, open up the API so that third party developers can make better weather solutions that will trump the default implementation by a million times.
I urge all the outraged people here to submit a respectful question to the next developer’s forum instead of another post in here. Maybe you’ll get an answer if enough people can create a simple way of asking similar questions.
Thanks for not losing steam on these streams (Q&A)…really appreciate everyone who still has any stamina left.
I honestly gave up on asking respectful questions in order to avoid getting disrespectful answers.
Would be really surprised to get answers that don’t fit one of these:
- It’s in the backlog
- It’s planned for the next SU
- We couldn’t reproduce
- Is there a problem? we were not aware
- We are still dealing with other bugs
- We recently had a meeting about this, we are aware, we’ll get back to you on this
- It needs more votes
- There are currently no storms in Europe
- “Not sure about this, but hold on…what’s up there? is it a bird? is that a plane?”
- “There is no spoon”
A couple of issues I see here - it’s widely assumed that MS’s contract with their weather data providers doesn’t allow them to open up the system in any way that would allow 3rd parties to potentially access that data. For a complete replacement with its own data source, this shouldn’t be an issue, but we don’t know what the contracts say and MS has never been particularly forthcoming (nor would I expect them to be).
It’s likely that the way the internal live weather engine works is to basically reproduce a view onto a model generated in the cloud based on that weather data, so to allow an add-on to control the weather ‘live’ - that is, have it so it’s raining under a front here but not raining 30 miles away where it’s clear, and have this visible from the cockpit - would require them to expose that internal interface or make it robustly public, and to have an add on able to build such a model in real time on your PC, which is a non-trivial compute task that some peoples’ PCs might not be able to do while also running the sim acceptably fast.
Current replacement weather engines work, as I understand it, by dynamically modifying the static weather theme in the sim, and fake it being live using clever effects and transitions. None are as good at this specific task as the live weather implementation in the sim, whether or not you think the overall weather rendering is better, because the live weather in the sim is designed to render weather geographically, rather than globally.
So what you’d need is an SDK that exposes all of those sim internals in a safe way, which I guess is a lot of work, and since you’d need an external program to replace the weather engine, this could never work on Xbox or PS5, which I think is what will ultimately doom this idea. Doing work that only benefits PC users does not seem to be particularly popular with Xbox leadership. Not that they’ve never done so - the multi-monitor support is PC-only, for example - but that it’ll be lower priority than things that will benefit the wider community on all platforms.
Remember to post your questions for tomorrow’s Livestream!
It feels like a catch-22 at our expense. We saw endless marketing and advertising showcasing complex weather systems, even tornadoes, and were told in several developer updates leading up to 2024, including the Expo right before launch, that there was an upgraded, more realistic weather system. If they have a contract with Meteoblue we’re stuck in this gray area where they can’t upgrade or open the system for third-party access, yet Meteoblue isn’t making any meaningful improvements. For all I know, they’re blaming each other while trying to figure out how to get the system to work as it should, but in the end, nothing changes because of contractual debates over Meteoblue being the only that has to more accurate weather.
Agreed, the question is why isn’t it happening.
Not quite, it could be something that’s ran on a provider’s server, and downloaded from them in the same fashion the Live Weather is only downloaded as necessary. The economics of this aside, this would require MS to sign off on allowing such an option - if it even is possible in the first place without upending the whole engine - and there’s quite a lot of possible consideration in terms of risks involved
Honestly I think were giving this mystery Meteoblue contract way more power than anyone has actually proven it has. None of us have seen it, and the public stuff mainly shows MS cant just hand Meteoblues data out to everybody, not that Asobo is somehow banned from improving the weather physics or letting another engine use its own data. Same with the Xbox/PS5 argument, sure a full external injector might be harder there, but that doesnt explain why the native system itself cant get better. At this point “maybe its the contract, maybe its the SDK, maybe its console limitations” is starting to sound like three different ways of saying nobody actually knows why a weather system they marketed heavily before launch is still this limited…Unless the actual contract is between Microsoft and Meteoblue where Asobo is only authorized to use certain datasets for MSFS under that agreement, then sure, there could be data they legally cant expose or pass through to 3rd parties (such as Asobo) which affects the sim. Thats completely possible. But without seeing the contract, we dont know if thats actually the restriction here or if everyone is just assuming the contract explains everything, and i highly doubt the developers will ever let us know due to possible NDA restrictions or backlash.
We saw the issues with the tornadoes right away. Even called out that it was going to be a canned, on-rails thing. It was clear that it was going to be a gimmick from the get-go.
Every single thing we debate is dependent on how precise the data are and what the developers are able to do with them within limitations of their knowledge, processing power targets, and development resources.
That conversation was the straw that broke my back. I had given a lot more benefit of the doubt prior to that.
This is kinda where it gets weird though. Everyone keeps assuming the SDK would have to expose the entire live weather engine, or that console parity somehow kills the idea before it even starts, when neither of those things are really proven. A controlled write interface using a 3rd party’s own data could be way narrower than exposing Meteoblues stuff or handing over the whole internal engine. And on the console side, MSFS already has platform specific features, so I dont really see why weather suddenly has to be the sacred one where PC can’t have something extra because Xbox/PS might not. Keep improving native weather for everyone, and if PC can support something deeper on top of it, let it. Otherwise, we start getting into the whole “cross platform vs lowest common denominator” argument, which gets ugly fast and isnt even the point im making here. Im not saying hold consoles back, im saying dont automatically hold PC back just because every feature might not translate 1:1 to every platform. Same goes console to console if PS can handle something XBOX can’t then dont restrict, let it, and vice versa with XBOX if it can handle something PS cant, let it.