Just in case you didn't receive it in an email...

Austin's Update: The Future Of X-Plane Real-Weather, Hidden in Plain Sight.
" While the rest of the team is working on Vulkan, MMO, new scenery and fresh aircraft, and I’ve just wrapped up some new flight model improvements to be shown when the time is right, I'm neck-deep in Xavion, getting it perfected for use in an eVTOL I'm helping with at Beta. (www.Beta.team). Our craft is the largest eVTOL ever to fly (by a wide margin) and I’m privileged to design the next-gen avionics concept that will be used on an iPad in this craft, and may someday be installed as the primary avionics.

Of critical importance is delivering accurate WEATHER to the pilot in flight, and to that end I'm building a weather download, acquisition, gridding and display system in Xavion that is turning out to be second to none: The weather is not just DOWNLOADED for a MAP, but is instead loaded into a global, three-dimensional matrix of real weather to be ready for next-gen weather rendering and help with risk-assessment during flight.

And now here is where it gets interesting: With this global, current, 3-D weather matrix, we are now primed with the ultimate real-weather system for the next generation of X-Plane. Clearly, this system will be dropped into X-Plane, forming the foundation of our next generation of real-weather simulation.

You’ll have to wait a bit for the next generation of X-Plane, but you can start previewing this weather system in Xavion with USA weather in version 2.61 right now, and with full GLOBAL weather in version 2.62 later this week. Find it on the App Store here."

– Austin

https://www.x-plane.com/2020/07/new-xavion-weather-maps/

 

 

Edited August 3, 20205 yr by jcomm

yeah x-plane 12 is coming

 

ohh well, Austin seems to finally understand WEATHER is critical for the sim. nice to hear this is taking priority.

Ive been saying this for years, Weather refresh will be XP12! 

Should have been standard in xp11....  The guy is so hyped about mobile and this little app thing.  XP11 is basically amazing except weather generation.

I just can’t for the life of me get used to XPlane. I want to like it. I’ve tried but it just is too mechanical. 

8 hours ago, jcomm said:

I'm neck-deep in Xavion, getting it perfected for use in an eVTOL I'm helping with at Beta. (www.Beta.team). Our craft is the largest eVTOL ever to fly (by a wide margin) and I’m privileged to design the next-gen avionics concept that will be used on an iPad in this craft, and may someday be installed as the primary avionics.

I wish Austin wasn't spending so much time on this eVTOL stuff. There are too many major players in that space as it is, like Airbus, and it's not going to work the way the industry things it will anyway.

Nobody will tolerate the noise of eVTOL as an "urban taxi." It's going to be Concorde all over again. A cool aviation tech demo that won't be acceptable to the general public due to noise pollution. 

Austin, if you're FINALLY interested in better weather modeling, please build that into XP12 and amaze all of us enough to fork up the money to upgrade. That's all I want, because the rest of the sim is fine -- I'm even okay with the terrain modeling. But your weather modeling sucks.

 

1 hour ago, Paraffin said:

But your weather modeling sucks.

I look forward to better representation of the real weather as well. But the current weather system in X-Plane does everything that you need if you want to practce IFR or VFR flight. Is it pretty (as in MSFS)? Maybe not. But if you understand where X-Plane is coming from, it is understandable why it is the way it is.

X-Plane was not designed to be a weather app that you can use to figure out if it is raining outside (and you are too lazy to open the shutters) - but if you say: "hey, I want to do some NDB approaches to minimums today, lets set that up!" it does the job.

Cheers, Jan

 

The weather implementation I have most fond memories off is still the Unlimited Flight series, you could draw fronts and high and low pressure areas on the map, and see how that developed into realistic weather. CBs were implemented (but ugly as hell 😉 ).

 

(FU III, be it outdated today in the graphics department, is still one of my best simulators in my drawer, RIP).

5 hours ago, Alcides Segovia said:

I just can’t for the life of me get used to XPlane. I want to like it. I’ve tried but it just is too mechanical. 

Mechanical???

13 minutes ago, mjrhealth said:

Mechanical???

I think he was probably meaning "technical" - as in too complex to set up?

The perfect weather system in a flight simulator in my opinion would be:

• Visually pleasing with realistic looking weather in all of it´s beauty
• Offering a perfect rendition of "current real weather" everywhere
• Allows setting up exact weather for training purpose
• Offers a large-scale weather sandbox where you can move jetstreams, set pressure systems, time and season (for sun angle) and temperature gradients...and then see the effects (=weather) of that in real time.

 

Sticking a new weather and atmospheric engine to X-Plane would completely transform how it looks, and I hope it will be higher priority than say bringing multiplayer across, which I think is somewhat of limited interested to the desktop users.

After using MFS for some time, I really notice now how lifeless everything looks without proper atmospheric scattering, lighting and clouds. You can place the most stunning scenery ever made in to X-Plane, but if the atmosphere is absent it'll still lacking and lifeless. In short, I think if there is one thing that XP needs to stay relevant, it's this, as the rest of the sim is great IMO.

30 minutes ago, Janov said:

Allows setting up exact weather for training purpose

This is what puts me off about xEnviro. It can make some pretty skies, but it's always real-world weather, with no ability to customise or do much at all. If it's cloudy and overcast in the area you want to do some helicopter flying in, tough luck, you have to fly somewhere else.

4 hours ago, tonywob said:

After using MFS for some time, I really notice now how lifeless everything looks without proper atmospheric scattering, lighting and clouds. You can place the most stunning scenery ever made in to X-Plane, but if the atmosphere is absent it'll still lacking and lifeless. In short, I think if there is one thing that XP needs to stay relevant, it's this, as the rest of the sim is great IMO.

This.

For a few years, XP has been at the forefront of atmosphere and lighting (being the only sim to model sky scattering and realistic night lighting).

Unfortunately it always lagged in the rest of environmental effects, i.e. clouds, rain, snow, water bodies, and it's currently lagging even compared to FS9 (17 years!!!) in all of those.

When people complained that no flight sim had a modern graphic engine, the implied thing was usually performance or scenery, but in reality what they were maybe unknowingly thinking of, is mostly ambient lighting and environmental effects.

MFS developers have done the right thing in improving those aspects: think how less enthusiastic would have the reactions been if it looked as dull as P3D v3 instead. Just compare Google Earth pics to MFS pics of the same places (and usually GE has better source images than Bing!).

Hopefully competition will have a positive effect.

 

seeing what MFS is releasing , i wouldn't want XP anymore to look the way it is , its time that these things are brought into whichever version of XP is coming , the lighting effect just changes a lot of things, i want to see a CB too. 

honestly speaking i have no hopes of it coming to XP well that's my thought.  But one never knows , if Austin feels that he needs XP at the top than it is very much achievable but will he do it ?