19 hours ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

Greetings, testers and people not under NDA! I was wondering if you could do us a favor and do a video or a forum post comparing the live sim weather with real life. I'm very interested to see how the sim weather compares to real life.

and while you're at it, please throw in some screenshots of actual cirrus clouds at FL300 or above, haven't seen those yet anywhere...

2 hours ago, Chock said:

Christ, I hope not, the XPlane GUI is awful

How long have you been using XP11? I think it's about the best UI I've ever had the pleasure of using in a flightsim to date. Well...you must understand that I say this having never used P3D, so I have no idea what that's like.

I really think it's a fantastic menu system as it is so powerful and easy to use...it allows you to make so many different types of adjustments that you cannot make in other sims and it is dead simple as far as finding control bindings in a list of hundreds...just type what your wanting to bind and it pops up (which is exactly what MSFS is now doing aka the win10 start menu search feature). Also the weather menu with all its adjustable parameters and airport selection screens where you can choose gates...MSFS has taken notice and using all of it from the XP menu system.

Lets put it this way....if you don't like the XP11 menu system then you won't like the MSFS one either as MS has pretty much copied it from what I have seen on all the YT vids so far. I was really happy to see this, but perhaps I like it because I'm so used to it.

The Microsoft Weather Episode covers the weather modelling in quite some detail

 

4 hours ago, jcomm said:

It may look ingenious from the graphics pov, but it's totally useless from a flight simulation / imc simulation pov...

There is going to have to be a little bit of a paradigm shift here I believe. Historically the way that sims represent reduced visibility is just to throw out a generic view restricting fog or haze or some other trick to simulate low visibility. Flying in the Southeastern United States, haze is definitely a real thing that is not dependent on clouds to produce restrictions to visibility. But when simmers are looking for low visibility for hard IMC practice, what causes that in the real world? It is generally fog, be it radiation, advection, or precipitation induced. A true volumetric approach to clouds in the sim gets you the desired effect without having to resort to a contrived global visibility setting. Does it allow you to set RVR to 1600 ft specifically? It doesn't look like it, but maybe with cloud layer (videos have shown setting cloud layer on the ground) and aerosol depth settings, you can get what you are looking for.

2 hours ago, ErichB said:

The Microsoft Weather Episode covers the weather modelling in quite some detail

 

I think we have all seen the feature discovery series several times by now 🙂  I am asking people who are able to TEST the theory presented in those videos and see if it is similar to real life weather. 

Edited August 10, 20205 yr by Andreas Stangenes

2 minutes ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

I think we have all seen the feature discovery series several times by now 🙂  I am asking people who are able to TEST the theory presented in those videos and see if it is similar to real life weather. 

I understand, but  that question is better posed to those who are actual pilots with the beta

 

Edited August 10, 20205 yr by ErichB

Just now, ErichB said:

I understand, but but that question is better posed to those who are actual pilots with the beta

 

Indeed, and since I do believe some of them are around here, I was hoping they would notice my topic. I've also posted the question in youtube commentaries In hope for someone to pick up the question and answer it. 

15 minutes ago, snglecoil said:

There is going to have to be a little bit of a paradigm shift here I believe. Historically the way that sims represent reduced visibility is just to throw out a generic view restricting fog or haze or some other trick to simulate low visibility. Flying in the Southeastern United States, haze is definitely a real thing that is not dependent on clouds to produce restrictions to visibility. But when simmers are looking for low visibility for hard IMC practice, what causes that in the real world? It is generally fog, be it radiation, advection, or precipitation induced. A true volumetric approach to clouds in the sim gets you the desired effect without having to resort to a contrived global visibility setting. Does it allow you to set RVR to 1600 ft specifically? It doesn't look like it, but maybe with cloud layer (videos have shown setting cloud layer on the ground) and aerosol depth settings, you can get what you are looking for.

In the end, if the point of departure is a METAR, what a METAR gives you is very factual information, among other things, about horizontal visibility, sometimes referring to specific rw, cloud ceiling and coverage.

So, either the sim internally makes it's own composition of whatever features it choses to model this kind of stuff and ends up with an outcome that matches the METAR data, or the user must have an alternative way of simply stating what the values are, without having to experiment with clouds down to the ground, and that interesting for sure but otherwise useless concept of "aerosol density" ( which I am familiar with, since I actually wor at the MetOffice :-) )

4 minutes ago, jcomm said:

In the end, if the point of departure is a METAR, what a METAR gives you is very factual information, among other things, about horizontal visibility, sometimes referring to specific rw, cloud ceiling and coverage.

 

I do belive that the feature discovery video for weather hints at satelite imagery of cloud layers being used to actually SHAPE the cloud layer in sim. A metar is fine for a very tiny box on the planet, but weather doesn't come in boxes. So if they simply decode metars then there would be a whole lot of interpolation between all these boxes to make them look realistic. However, that artistic translation could also mean a departure from realism, meaning that unless you live on the airport, what you see out your livingroom window is not what you see in the sim. 

Edited August 10, 20205 yr by Andreas Stangenes

23 hours ago, snglecoil said:

For most of us who will continue on as testers after the initial release, It will not be lifted for any alpha/beta/preview builds. We can talk about the release version to our heart’s content, of course. So I’ll give my opinion on the real-time weather system then for sure. 

Same here, but I will add that even if we talk about what we CURRENTLY HAVE or SEE, the functionality may or may not be different, better or worse.

1 minute ago, carmined said:

Same here, but I will add that even if we talk about what we CURRENTLY HAVE or SEE, the functionality may or may not be different, better or worse.

Does your info come with some sort of decoding device?

Just now, Andreas Stangenes said:

Does your info come with some sort of decoding device?

It does but you'll have to get a Code Talker for that! 🙂  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw_Code_Talkers

7 minutes ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

Does your info come with some sort of decoding device?

Ha, I'll give my take on decoding. NDAs are in place for many reasons, but one is that what the tester sees may not be representative of what will be released... and not because the capability doesn't exist, but because the tester is not privy to what is currently enabled to the fullest extent be it client or server side.

To put it another way, testers may be just as surprised on release day as everyone else 🙂

Edited August 10, 20205 yr by snglecoil

7 minutes ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

Does your info come with some sort of decoding device?

I would say this: As long as things go as we hope on release day and if you wear underwear, I would invest in some new pairs!  

Just now, carmined said:

I would say this: As long as things go as we hope on release day and if you wear underwear, I would invest in some new pairs!  

Good boy! There we go. That's what I like to hear ❤️