June 11th, 2020 - Development Update

[RudyB24 296]

Now I know why we have two shadows ... we have two suns!

Or is there another explanation why we have these highlights on the edge of the engine, with the sun being where it is, behind the plane? A studio light? See ... they never landed on the moon! 🙂

 

Edited June 13, 2020 by RudyB24

[JRBarrett 3,080]

On 6/12/2020 at 2:47 AM, JohnH90 said:

I’m a little confused by this update. Are they saying FS2020 will have forecasted weather as well as real time? 

One thing I’d say is that the lightning looks like slow motion.  

Surface observations of aviation weather (METARS) are taken every hour at most airports, or more often if conditions are rapidly changing, but winds aloft in all weather engines (and in real world aviation) are based on forecasts generated by computer models, not on real-time observations.

Upper air observations of winds, temperatures, humidities and pressures at multiple levels are taken using weather balloons, and they are launched simultaneously worldwide twice each day at 0000Z and 1200Z.

A balloon flight typically takes about an hour, and the data retrieved is one ingredient used by forecast models. This is supplemented by satellite data, weather data from aircraft (often sent via ACARS), surface wind profilers which use radar to detect high altitude winds etc. All this is used to initialize the forecast models, which run on supercomputers operated by national weather agencies like NOAA, UKMET, ECCC (Canada) etc. The computer models take 3 or 4 hours to run, and the output is used to generate forecasts of upper air conditions at 6-hour intervals.

Terminal (TAF) forecasts of future weather at airports also come from the forecast model runs. With the resources that Meteoblue has, I would assume that TAFS will be available in the sim as well as current METARS. To be fair, Active Sky also offers TAFS. If the forecast graphics and weather maps that Meteoblue will provide in MSFS are similar to what they offer in their various smartphone apps, it will be a massive improvement over anything now available in P3D.

[CFIJose 5,485]

15 hours ago, hjsmuc said:

I hope you are not only flying in Gibraltar 🙂

Just kidding. The new MSFS is great but as we all by now only where the data for the scenery from Bing and the derived data is also great. Areas of the world that were often left out from a good representation seem to be left out again. Which is not too bad because it allows room for the 3rd party devs to produce even better sceneries for the new sim. We should manage our expectations based on where our preferences for flying are. Just my five cents.

The things that I love about P3D v4.5 are the crisp display of photo scenery with AG, amazing airplanes that feel realistic, default ATC that interacts with AI traffic, and with ASP4 & REX Skyforce I have a sim that is hard to beat. MSFS 2020 might offer me a similar experience without the need to constantly buy scenery add-ons & airports.

Edited June 13, 2020 by DJJose

[hjsmuc 393]

35 minutes ago, DJJose said:

without the need to constantly buy scenery add-ons & airports

It might if the places you like to fly are nicely represented. A top quality scenery of MSFS beats everything we have today. But a great addon-scenery with Prepar3D beats an average scenery of MSFS. That's the way it looks now but obviously it can change until release. Who had thought of ORBX True Earth come alive a while ago? 

[speedwoblz 2]

9 hours ago, RudyB24 said:

Now I know why we have two shadows ... we have two suns!

Or is there another explanation why we have these highlights on the edge of the engine, with the sun being where it is, behind the plane? A studio light? See ... they never landed on the moon! 🙂

 

From the looks of it, he probably snapped the shot just as a lightning flash was lighting up the foreground.

[ryanbatc 12,868]

On 6/12/2020 at 8:23 AM, KenG said:

Yeah they let me in too for some reason. Maybe to see how the Mbps bounded can handle the download. 

I am waiting until my wife tries to watch Netflix and the modem just explodes. 

I feel like Oliver Twist, "Please sir, may I have some more [Mbps]..."

Excellent we need more pilots!

[KenG 492]

15 minutes ago, ryanbatcund said:

Excellent we need more pilots!

About 40 hours of downloading.... I am not in the alpha forums yet, I guess I am not holding my mouth right. 

 

[Poppapete 13]

Bridges:

At 7:02 in the video my hometown, Brisbane, Australia is depicted.  This has been shown on more than one occasion in the development update series.  It was noted that the bridges on the river do not appear but we all assumed that would be fixed in updates.  Well not yet, unless they are still using the images from 5 months ago.  By my count at least 7 bridges should appear.  There are some very faint white lines where some should be.  By the way I am totally in awe of what MS and Asobo Studios have achieved in alpha.

[Superdelphinus 718]

23 hours ago, n4gix said:

Sad to say I live alone, having outlived the rest of my family. But, yesterday I finally got updated to a 1Gbs fiber optic connection. That's quite an increase from my previous 200Mbs copper wire (cable) connection...

Now if I can just get the darn TV boxes to allow me to active my AT&T TV service! 😞

Not to word not allowed on your cornflake, but I had a similar upgrade earlier in the week and it barely makes any difference in real world experience - aside from a smug grin when you do a speed test 🙂. 
 

im sure at some point in the future it will all make sense, but with 200mbps we were still able to watch 3 instances of 4K Netflix and download games quickly at the same time. You just notice the ‘donating’ server limits more now. 

[rjetster 39]

7 hours ago, speedwoblz said:

From the looks of it, he probably snapped the shot just as a lightning flash was lighting up the foreground.

Correct!

[mp15 138]

21 hours ago, RudyB24 said:

Now I know why we have two shadows ... we have two suns!

Or is there another explanation why we have these highlights on the edge of the engine, with the sun being where it is, behind the plane? A studio light? See ... they never landed on the moon! 🙂

 

Lighting Is the best feature of MFS in my opinion, highlights at the edge of the engine Is due to the shiny material and you can even see inside of the enginez this Is because even if the light source Is on the back of the plane, the light Is direct and bounces all around the fuselage giving some rays inside the engine and you can still see It.

[tweekz 2,165]

34 minutes ago, mp15 said:

Lighting Is the best feature of MFS in my opinion, highlights at the edge of the engine Is due to the shiny material and you can even see inside of the enginez this Is because even if the light source Is on the back of the plane, the light Is direct and bounces all around the fuselage giving some rays inside the engine and you can still see It.

That's what I thought as well, but I am no expert. Thanks for clarifying!

 

On topic:

Do you guys know how the weather simulation works in X-Plane and P3D and how it compares to what seems to be the case in MSFS?

[mp15 138]

Weather should be decrypted into a numerical form on each data, regarding wind force, the direction, pressure etc and manifests in the Sky  visually as clear, cloudy, broken, foggy, storm etc

[mp15 138]

1 hour ago, tweekz said:

you guys know how the weather simulation works in X-Plane and P3D and how it compares to what seems to be the case in MSFS?

The procedure should be similar but as MFS partners with Meteoblue, that means tons of data, and MFS said in the weather episodi that they have many Sky layers, so thereshall be a lot of weather data in many stories up.

[tweekz 2,165]

2 hours ago, mp15 said:

The procedure should be similar but as MFS partners with Meteoblue, that means tons of data, and MFS said in the weather episodi that they have many Sky layers, so thereshall be a lot of weather data in many stories up.

 

Do you know how much data current sims utilize with real world weather? Also in the weather episode it's amazing to see their airflow approach on winds. In XP turbulences seem a bit "random" to me. In cruise you can see the plane shake on outside view like the Enterprise encountering difficulties in a classic Star Trek episode. 😄

As far as I understood the weather in MSFS might be dynamic, by following certain models extracted out of the data to interpolate states between updates.

Edited June 14, 2020 by tweekz