Sure. You’re preaching to the converted here. I’m just reasoning as to why there’s seemingly no interest in improving the situation from Microsoft.
Providing an official SDK-based way for third parties to replace the live weather system is essentially accepting that some people want to do that because they don’t think the sim’s weather is good enough. I don’t think MS wants to accept that. We’re far more likely to get more promises to address and improve live weather in the sim over time, which will or won’t happen in some undefined period of time, depending on what the business priorities are. Which is pretty much the fate of all the big-ticket wishlist items now.
Yeah, this is kinda where I land on it too. I dont really care if MS wants to keep Live Weather completely native or finally open enough of it up for 3rd parties, but one of those two things needs to happen in a serious way. If they want to keep it locked down, then fine, make the native weather system dramatically better and actually give it the attention theyve been promising for years. If they dont want to put that level of work into it, then give developers enough access to build something better around their own data. What doesnt make much sense is keeping the system mostly closed while also asking everyone to just keep waiting for improvements at some undefined point later. At this point we dont need another promise about weather, we need either much better weather or much better access to it.
Better access to writing weather. That is the main issue at hand. Give access to multiple layers horizontally, so that developers can once a for all have smooth weather transitions. Give us the ability to create different weather 3d models. So developers can create new cloud types currently never depicted in the sim.
It’s no different than what occurred back in the ESP code days.
Unfortunately, after today’s Developer Livestream, I still don’t feel that we received the clear answer many of us were hoping for regarding the future of Live Weather.
You’re right, they did say they’re working on things behind the scenes. But I still don’t think that answer really meets the community’s expectations. We’ve been raising these concerns about weather for years, so simply hearing “we’re working on things, but we can’t show anything yet” is difficult to accept at this point. I think many of us were hoping for at least some clarity about their priorities, what areas of weather they are actually focusing on, and their long-term vision. Not necessarily dates or promises — just clearer communication.
Yeah, the old ‘we’re working on it’ doesn’t really cut it after 6 years and constant WX regression. If weather had stayed pretty good the entire time, I could understand. In this case, it has gotten progressively worse and not what we were sold or even had early-on. I think we deserve an explanation on why that is happening. Maybe they are in fact working behind the scenes on this but it will be a selling point of the next version of the sim in 2-4 years…
I also think there is a real issue with the way the question was selected/formulated. I honestly don’t know where that particular question came from, but I don’t think it reflected the main concerns that have been raised by the weather community for years.
The fundamental questions are about the future of Live Weather itself: realistic thunderstorms and CBs, convection, hazardous turbulence, windshear, realistic cloud types and layers, weather radar, and more generally weather that actually affects flight planning and in-flight decision-making.
Instead, the selected question started by saying that “Live Weather is working well” and mainly focused on opening cloud depiction to third-party developers. That framing completely missed the core of the issue.
If we finally get an opportunity to ask the developers about weather, the question needs to accurately represent what the community has been discussing and asking for all these years.
The real problem lies in the fact that if everyone sends in their opinions, whoever is presenting the questions to Jorg and Seb can choose the least-detailed one and then dry it out. But on the other hand, if only one person sends in a supremely-detailed question, they can just ignore it because its one of a million.
My solution would be, for the next stream, to have someone knowledgeable draw up one question, and everyone should copy-paste it and submit it. This way, we get both elaborate and eloquent questions AND volume.
Work smarter, not harder. I just don’t get why we have to drag them to the well, and then bring the pail to their mouths, just to have them spit out the water at us…
I think its absolutely appalling that we have to wait for the next stream. They see the forums right? They should know what we have been asking for. Enough of this “wait for next Q&A dev stream” just to be dissapointed again..
They chose the question that began with ‘Live weather is working really well…’ Unbelievable
I asked this one, but seeing how they answered the question presented, I guess I understand why it wasn’t asked…
“Live weather has been visually regressing going back to MSFS 2020. There are still many issues including transparent clouds, cumulus clouds in the flight levels, strange wavy high level clouds, lack of any cloud diversity (mostly cumulus, no stratus) and still no visible (plausible) thunderstorms/CB’s. What are the plans going forward and can we expect improvement in this area? The atmosphere is an important part of flight simulation but there has been no improvement in that area. If there are no plans, can the Live Wx APi be opened up more in order for 3rd party Devs to improve some of these things?”
