X-Plane Developer Q&A

[Glenn_C 135]

I'm not bothered about seasons. mostly fly in area's that have good weather and I use Ortho so seasons would not give me much. Weather for me is most important so I am pinning all my hopes on Active SKy for XP 😉  I think a lot of people don't really realize that it is in essence a small Dev team and there is only so much you can do. It is better not to promise too much and hand out surprises than promise a lot and not deliver. I mean if it was so easy everyone would be building their own flight sim right.

[Paraffin 2,197]

5 hours ago, Murmur said:

If v12 will have all of that I will be pleasantly surprised. We'll see if that is the case. Many users were expecting seasons and new weather in v10.

Yes, this is something newcomers to the sim from FSX/P3D may not realize. There has been a steady drumbeat of users asking for seasons and better weather for a very long time now. 

 

5 hours ago, Colonel X said:

Personally I don't care about seasons (hate snow in real life, too), but very much about the weather. I think it's a bit unfair to blame Laminar here though - didn't you all notice the improvements to weather in 11? I mean it was a silent upgrade (no headline feature for 11), but it has become a lot better. The cloud art and especially the performance. Fire up XP10 and compare - they are worlds apart. Actually, I think the performance is so good at this point that Laminar could easily allow 3D clouds to be drawn further out ("enlarging the disc") - combine that with better cloud art (X-Vision goes a long way here even though I still despise the 2D clouds on the horizon, namely ring 4 and 5 of the disc) and that's all you need I suppose (well, soft real weather transitions would be cool, too). My point, a few minor tweaks to the current weather engine and it would be super good - all that without the weather engine being an official X-Plane 11 feature at all. 

Everything you're talking about here is basically a visual effect.

What's missing and is desperately needed to simulate the real aviation environment is better dynamic weather effects. Fully modeled 3D weather fronts. Chains of separately modeled CBs that are actually scary to fly into, and need to be avoided. Updrafts and downdrafts, not just horizontal wind layers. We have icing, but let's see it visually as well as just some changed numbers in the flight model.

Real, dynamic weather is an essential part of flight planning and hazard avoidance, especially for GA aircraft that can't just zoom out of the bad weather like an airliner. It needs to be more than just pretty clouds and sunsets, and that's basically the only thing that X-Plane excels at, right now. It's not enough.