REX WEATHER FORCE For MSFS

[JoeFackel 760]

2 hours ago, carlito777 said:

Microsoft uses much more precise data than METARS. Can‘t see how this would be an improvement once the built-in weather engine is fixed. In the past, REX has basically just sold bitmaps with all their products. Don‘t see what they can bring to the table in MSFS. 

There is no more precise data then METARS. Weather based only on models (read: simulated in advance by computers) is way to simplified.

I've visited some weather classes. Weather only on models is drastically simplified because it would need HUGE mainframes to calculate in time.

For example Europe: if they would included exact height models (alps etc.) the computation would last around three weeks, so they have to simplify the height data that the mainframes are ready after 6 hrs.

Unfortunatly GFS is the badest weather model to rely on, ECMWF is way more advanced.

[CFIJose 5,485]

SkyForce 3D is one of the best add-ons I've ever purchased. I'm looking forward any this release.

Thanks Reed!

[TuomasV 36]

I don't doubt that METAR is the most accurate weather source for aerodome conditions - better than any model. However, most of my flying doesn't take place on top of an airport and the distance between two high-frequency stations can be considerable. Aren't models the only way to go between these stations?

 

[Nyxx 6,993]

1 hour ago, Bottle said:

Perhaps I didn't understand the Meteoblue Partnership Series video. It was clear from that, that Meteoblue uses observation data. Period. It starts with observation data (which is relatively sparse and will be no better or worse than what REX can get their hands on) but then realistically models the weather in locations where there isn't data, including upper atmosphere conditions. They also make forecasts for days ahead (which I expect has nothing to do with MFS).

Unless REX has access to proprietary source weather data, I can't see them having anything more accurate than Meteoblue, and absolutely nothing to rival the granularity and accuracy of the predictions where there isn't actual data (unless REX has a big data supercomputer cluster it's not telling us about).

What's not known is just how frequently the Meteoblue data is updated and how well it smooths from one set of data to another. That's possibly something that REX might have an advantage with. But so far it's been hard to evaluate because the system is obviously partly broken. My suspicion is that it's the data feeding aspect that's broken (hence 255/3), not the actual weather system itself. That might be down to the MS cloud system that the data most likely has to pass through and so nothing to do with Meteoblue. Hopefully we'll see it in full action once the next patch comes out.

 

1 hour ago, Bottle said:

Are you saying Meteoblue doesn't have access to METAR data? If so, can you evidence that? It would seem very odd if they didn't have access to it considering what their business is.

 

1 hour ago, rstough said:

I am NOT saying that at all. I am going off of what I have tested numerous times and compared to models that I have access to.

 

1 hour ago, SAS443 said:

METAR can indicate alot of things, but also do not paint the big picture. Let me try to explain

ESSA 071450z 24007KT 1500 +SHRA BKN015 15/9 Q1014

What does the METAR indicate, but doesnt warn you of,  in clear text?

METAR weather engines is not something I will buy, too spotty and have difficulties depicting ceilings enroute and how airmasses are modified in areas where metars are sparse. Can you simulate warmtfronts and the associated phenomenas? While not as dramatic as the cold front clouds, they are actually more problematic for GA flyers and very difficult to penetrate due to the low vis, drizzle/detoriating ceilings and frontal fog if you are extra unlucky.

This is why I am an advocate for weather models,

METARs do not tell you the full story

I normally buy REX releases on day one I think I will wait for feedback this time and also after MSFS update. I use live weather and never had a problem so far but always start the sim again for another flight. But for sure live weather needs a fix but hey we are only 6 weeks in. I don't want to be buying something that MS fix.

Also even If I am/was a big fan of REX the way they never fixed the adaptive lighting in EF, there amazing at promotion, but listening and fixed things reported countless times and a update 1 year later still no simple option to turn off adaptive lighting and suddenly no reiles to the question, when asked why was it not fixed. But a flood now to promote the new product, guys we have memories.

This time i will need a good reason to buy not like before when I bought on faith. I will stay open minded and read feedback and reports first.

Edited September 16, 2020 by Nyxx

[LHookins 3,103]

Thank you, Reed! 😄 

If I am going out to do a flight in real world weather, I want to be able to use the same METARs that real world pilots use.  I absolutely do not expect these to be 100% accurate up to the minute.  I expect to have to do some interpretation on my own.

I've been using Active Sky since the beginning, when the built-in FSX real world weather had a number of problems.  There was no smoothing and no sanity checking, so you'd get instantaneous changes of barometric pressure (often an inch at a time) and instantaneous wind changes.  There was no smoothing if you were climbing through various wind layers, for example.  Active Sky eventually fixed all this.  They also gave us a weather map which was the main reason I bought the first version.

I've seen oddities in MSFS weather, not just the wind.  I've had sudden changes of barometric pressure and on my last flight the temperature suddenly dropped from 38C to 18C.  Asobo and Meteoblue might fix this at some point, but if not I'll be needing a third party weather program.

Active Sky was really good about injecting interpolated weather far away from any weather stations, at weather stations where METARs were out of date, and between weather stations, and if it wasn't perfectly accurate, it was always reasonable.  It looks like REX will do something similar.  Perhaps a mixture of METARs and other weather reporting methods will yield good results.  Windy.com might be a good source, as I'm already using them for weather flight planning. 😄 

I've always used Active Sky, never tried REX, but I'm willing to give it a try if you release it.  Thanks.

Hook

 

[Bottle 663]

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for 3PDs providing new things for MFS. Not trying to rain on anyone's parade. I'm just having a hard time seeing how this could be a significant improvement and concerned that some are getting hung up on the word "model" and wrongly think ALL of the MFS weather is just modeled. In fact, I think the concept is being used disingenuously by some.

 

Meteoblue divides up the globe into small boxes on the surface and then more stacked above. The Weather Feature Discovery video stated 60 layers of cloud data and 20 layers of weather data. The ceiling is 60,000 feet. I can't remember the number of surface boxes (lost somewhere in the mists of time in one of the interviews) but I'm pretty sure it was hundreds of thousands of surface boxes, if not many more.

There are people on the ground reporting METAR data for SOME of those boxes. Yes, that data will be accurate and a lot of that data, not all, will be regularly updated. But there are nowhere near as many observations as there are boxes. For the majority of the boxes the ONLY way to get an estimate of weather is for a model to be used. There's simply no other way but to rely on a model. It's either that or literally no idea. The model is based off of the current real world observations and like all models, its inference can be wrong. The Meteoblue video explains how they try to get it as accurate as it can be. But no-one would ever argue that the predictions will be 100% accurate (though they should be in the boxes that have observations). The famous quote by George Box is appropriate,“Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.”  I don't know, but would expect Meteoblue to have a pretty robust source of observations and would be updating them as often as they can (for instance their cloud satellite data is refreshed every 10 minutes).

It therefore seems to me that a system that just uses METAR data would be a vastly inferior one because it would have a fraction of the data that's possible with parametric modelling. Basing an assessment of the MFS weather on what's been available to date seems to be ill advised since it appears to have not been fully implemented (or bugged). Was it ever fully functional during the alpha?

If Asobo fix the weather system and say, "Yep, that's all of it and it's working as we intend it", and then it proves to be either consistently inaccurate or significantly out of date, then I'll look for an alternative. But the only thing I can see that's likely to be an improvement would be the refresh frequency. The weather scenarios is a nice feature though but since it's a canned scenario seems to be at odds with the people complaining that the weather isn't accurate.

[FAZZ3 815]

Copying my comment from the forum.

---

I don't know. The clouds look extremely similar to the ones we have in MSFS. The only differences I see are 

1. More accurate representation of real world weather (which Asobo can fix themselves)

2. Smoother transition of different weather phenomena (which I think Asobo can themselves do, but I'm not sure if they would) 

3. Their source is NOAA weather (Idk if their data sources are more accurate than Meteoblu's, I'd wager it isn't)

4. A more Comprehensive UI

We'll have to watch this closely. We shouldn't accept an addon that offers default MSFS clouds in a more prettier packaging

[UAL4life 239]

I have yet to see a thunderstorm in sim with lightning without generating it myself, not to mention you can’t even generate fog your self if inclined so there’s a lot missing from MSFS. I’m looking forward to REX bringing features that should have been in the default sim. 

[Nyxx 6,993]

Coming soon could mean anything from next week to a PMDG version of coming soon....a year away. Is there any rough timeline we can expect it?

[ErichB 3,643]

5 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

Coming soon could mean anything from next week to a PMDG version of coming soon....a year away. Is there any rough timeline we can expect it?

I guess they will wait for the Patch 2 and see how the wind fixes work before launching

[dikkeduif 56]

I think I heard MS/Asobo mention something about blending METAR with real time weather in one of the videos and they said they were going to look into it. To me this sounds like this addon eventually will be deprecated. Personally never really used historical weather data, maybe once or twice... doesn't sound like it's worth the additional cost.

Edited September 16, 2020 by dikkeduif

[Nyxx 6,993]

WF in P3D was a no go, back to FSX days of a weather redraw with every update. I've never seen anything of a break in the immersion of the weather so far in MSFS (36 hours), so there "smooth transitions better be just that...smooth this time.

Edited September 16, 2020 by Nyxx

[Der Zeitgeist 1,575]

There are a lot of misconceptions here about how the default MSFS weather really works (it doesn't rely only on models, but also on observations), combined with interpreting current bugs in the MSFS weather as features.

If this new REX product relies on METAR observations exclusively, there's one problem I see.

For my country, this is the number of METAR stations on Skyvector:

And these are the actual official weather stations that are available for observations, that Meteoblue also uses. In this chart, they're showing the current temperature. You can see how many more weather stations there are compared to the METAR stations, which would automatically decrease the resolution of the weather that is available to REX for injecting into the sim.

 

[suncoastflyer 685]

After reading all this I know the solution.

Asobo, can we get photogrammetry skies please?

[Sticky 267]

3 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

There are a lot of misconceptions here about how the default MSFS weather really works (it doesn't rely only on models, but also on observations), combined with interpreting current bugs in the MSFS weather as features.

That’s great and all, but why is the weather over the airport so wrong all the time? Their fancy AI can crunch all the data it wants, but if doesn’t create 200 foot ceilings and 1/2 mile visibility at the airport, what good is it?