Maybe it is time to  stop talking "evolution vs revolution" in general terms  to get into what we exactly mean when we ask for something new. I did a first post on water. My feeling is that MS could easily do something to improve water rendering and physics.

Now another deficiency of today's sims  which  I suspect is much more complicated to reprogram.

Interaction between relief mesh and air dynamics has been very much neglected until now. Turbulences over relief and convection on slopes (moutain/valley breeze, anabatic/katabatic winds) are poorly implemented (understatement of the year). More than more eye candy which I do not despise,  I wish the MS team could factor into the new sim how the air moves over the relief. Not only for some chosen spots but everywhere. That would make moutain flying in light aircraft and gliding a new ball game, wouldn't it ?

 

 

Edited July 31, 20196 yr by domkle

The first flightsim I used that did it, and in a very interesting way, was FLIGHT UNLIMITED. Specially in it's final version - FU3 - it did an amazing job in this area, for it's time.

X-Plane has been doing since before v7 if I'm not wrong, soaring simulators naturally do it, Flight Gear also does a very good job in reproducing this sort of effect, Aerofly FS 1 and now 2 also do it, although I don't find it modeled that good... and there was at least one add-on which did it for fsx, meant to create soaring weather for that sim.

Yes, it would be a nice feature!

You never know they give us everything for the small price of 10FPS.😫

It is one of those features which you can only find (by default) if the person(s) coding the flight model/weather are _really_ passionate and maniacal about it. As was the case with Flight Unlimited, X-Plane, FlightGear, Aerofly. I'm not holding my breath, but I will be glad to be proven wrong.

 

 

That's on the proviso that aircraft react realistically to those airflows

3 hours ago, ErichB said:

That's on the proviso that aircraft react realistically to those airflows

You make en excellent point. A better way of saying the same thing could be improve the aircraft behaviour according to the relief below and around (and the time of the day). We don't care about updrafts or downdrafts as such, what we want if to see the aircraft react as if there was an updraft or a downdraft.

5 minutes ago, domkle said:

You make en excellent point. A better way of saying the same thing could be improve the aircraft behaviour according to the relief below and around (and the time of the day). We don't care about updrafts or downdrafts as such, what we want if to see the aircraft react as if there was an updraft or a downdraft.

Exaclty

The ActiveSky addon for FSX/P3D and XP claims to include "terrain based wind effects" although I think it's more of a turbulence trigger than actually altering the direction or speed of the wind flows. From the knowledge base:

"If you are flying within or near to a Severe Turbulence Sigmet zone (within the altitudes specified) or near significantly-sloped terrain with higher wind speeds, turbulence is likely."

I use ActiveSkyXP as my weather injector, but I can't say I've ever experienced this. I have the wind speed settings ramped down a bit for the light GA planes and helicopters I usually fly, so maybe the wind speeds aren't ever high enough to trigger it. And it should ideally be local altering of the actual injected METAR (or whatever) data for wind speed and direction, not just increased turbulence.

It would be neat to see things as fine-grained as wind flows around buildings near the ground for helicopter operations, but that's probably asking too much. I'd settle for realistic wind effects from terrain in narrow canyons, mountain ridge line "saddles," etc. 

I get the feeling that this is one of those areas that will gradually improve over time.  MS has said that Azure AI will control the weather so it may take time for it to learn how to intelligently create these weather related things.

I don't know what yall's experiences were but when i first put Win X on my machine it did not work well at all but over about two weeks it started working much better.  I dont know for sure but I think its the AI fixing things along the way.  If it can 'fix' windows, it can fix flight sim. (I hope )