Very correct. It’s one of those issues that seems impossible to reproduce. No one knows what causes it. For me, it was an update. For others, it just randomly stops working.
Once you have it though, that bug is like herpes. You’re stuck with it forever and there’s no getting rid of it. Weather may randomly start working for a session, a day, or a couple of days, but then it starts not working again just out of the blue.
I had no issue for a day or 2 after the update, there was epic weather in Sydney which was matching in the sim and it was fantastic. But recently, while clouds and winds are live, the (very) plentiful rain is not. It seems precipitation data is not happening for me anywhere now. It would be very strange if it is different experiences for others, as the data (or lack of) should be uniform.
Edit - Lol, spawned at RJTT, its blue skies and calm IRL but live weather is giving overcast and rain. Data might be few days old or something or other.
Live weather is slated to be fixed in Sim Update 4 that will be released in early April. In the Feedback Snapshot (link below), the weather is high on the list. Also in the Q&A’s, I don’t remember them saying it was fixed, only that it was a work in progress.
I fly with REX Weatherforce now… not only METAR correct weather… but the fake 3 levels of clouds reporting in ATIS is gone too
Live Weather only work at the first game load for me, then I have to use the workaround, it have been like this since the UK World update.
PLease go to this thread and place your vote if you haven’t already. The more votes we get, the higher this is on Asobo’s radar for a fix. If you can post a video demonstrating it, even better. They’ve been assuming this is just user error (people using the Live Time button instead of Live Weather). We need to demonstrate this is an actual issue affecting many of us.
How do we mark this as solution?
This isn’t a solution. That’s workaround to get live weather on subsequent flights, but it also introduces other issues.
The biggest is the wind. If you start with clear weather, your wind will be 225/3. Once you switch to Live weather, ATC will never take the new winds into consideration. The duration of your flight, you can have “live” wind, but ATC will assign you departure and approaches based on the 225/3 you loaded in with. It WILL take the actual wind conditions into consideration for AI / Live Traffic aircraft, but not you.
So as a result, you can get really bad runway assignments where you ahve to deal with terrible cross or tail winds when there’s another runway that would be better suited. And to make it worse, AI planes are all using that other runway.
I had one interesting case recently while using the workaround where I was assigned an approach at 9R at KOPF where AI planes were being landed and taken off on 27L - the same runway in opposite directions. I kept getting go around calls as a result. After 4 or 5 times, I just cancelled IFR and landed without authorizations.
To me, that’s an even bigger immersion killer.
This is an issue Asobo has to fix. Workarounds in MSFS always come with unintended side effects. But first, we need to get them to acknowledge that this is an actual real issue. At last call, Seb blamed this as being user error due to a confusing interface design. I honestly don’t think he believes it’s an actual issue at all.
To solve this we’re gonna have to take your PC to France and camp out outside the Asobo offices until they either call the Police or give us a plug socket and network port to use…
Ahhh!
I was wondering why ATC wouldn’t use the right runways. I just used them anyway, and they didn’t yell at me.
My biggest problem with live weather, is alot of places they just use too many reporting stations, along lake erie from Cleveland to Eire there are like 4 or 5 weather boxes, so you’ll be flying along and there will be chop on the lake, you get to around lost nation, you’ll get a what feels like wind shear and all of a sudden the lake will be flat as glass, fly another 10 min, another burst of ‘turbulence’ and now theres chop on the lake again,hit another farther down and the same thing will happen. It appears that there are 2 or more stations that are either reporting no data or erroneous or incomplete data that is causing this.
IMHO if they just took that data from ‘major’ weather reporting station and blended the weather between those 2 points, weather would at least to appear to be more realistic, instead of so many changes.
The sim was released 6 months to a year before it should have been.
Now they are off in other “branches” of code “refactoring” (re-writing) large sections of the sim. Because these branches are tied to things like XBox and DX12, we don’t actually benefit from these (alleged) optimizations and improvements yet, because they have not yet been merged into a shipped version of the sim.
In the last Q&A they said they had great discussions with the weather vendor about ways to improve the weather…but again that will be months away in another branch.
I would not personally expect any major fixes for the weather until after the XBox/DX12 release, when the branches can merge back together.
We are all acting as unpaid Beta testers for the XBox release at this point, playing a sim that they know wasn’t ready - which is why they are off rewriting giant portions of it based on our feedback (and the feedback of the original Alpha/Beta testers which was not implemented before Microsoft chose to “Ship It!”)
Give this man a cookie!
Seriously, I think you hit the nail right on the head. I have no doubt the bulk of their assets atm are doing exactly that - adding visuals, refactoring code and optimizing for DX12, but with XBOX being the primary diver, not PC. Weather and other fixes are likely being geared towards that as well. That launch is less than 6 months away now, so they need to get their ducks in a row to make a good impression on the XBOX crowd. XBOX has a ‘soft’ standard of 60 fps. So it’s reasonable to think this is what they’re aiming for, or at least as close a possible. And they need their other systems to work as well.
Eventually we’ll benefit from all that work and optimization. But until the XBOX version launches and the DX12 code is brought to PC, I wouldn’t expect anything but performance degradation patch after patch.
Couldn’t agree more.
Exactly this! They let the horse out of the barn too early and now we’re paying the price. Normally I don’t like speculating, but this is just too obvious to dismiss.
I remember last year’s August release caught many off guard…we weren’t expecting it! It’s pretty apparent through comments made in interviews and Q&As that a decision was made to cash in on the pandemic. Well, here we are.
I’m not a betting man, but I would be willing to wager my entire month’s income that the financial / marketing suits at Microsoft saw the huge influx of gaming dollars due to people trapped at home with COVID lockdowns and wanted to cash in as much as possible, so they pushed for the release, regardless of what state the sim was in.
Of course, we’ll never know for sure.
I have the exact same behavior as of yesterday. I’ve been doing many short flights where I will take off from where I just landed, but in a new flight and it will only give me live weather for the first one.
Please go vote for this issue here if you haven’t already.
This is why I’m not too hard on Asobo. I’ve been in corporate America long enough to know how the suits interfere at the expense of the workers. I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again.
They’re in a situation now of being stretched too thin by having to release a product before it was ready. So early in fact they’re still tinkering with core optimizations.
Agreed. I’ve been a dev for close to 30 years now. In a way I’m lucky it’s working for government, but it typically has its issues as well. Typically, it’s upper management that pushes for stuff to be released before it’s ready because their yearly performance bonuses depend on it. Unfortunately, us numpties at the bottom of the totem pole don’t get performance bonuses. We just get performance reprimands when stuff doesn’t work, even if it’s the fault of the suits at the top.
I’ve got enough programmer friends that work in the corporate world though, and we talk. What I described above is very typical for software releases. Marketing / financial suits see an opportunity, or decide they want to recoup dev costs before the end of the quarter (typically tied to their bonuses - gotta get that new boat money ASAP) and push for stuff to be released early. It’s not the dev’s fault.