REX Weather Force 2020 for Microsoft's Flight Simulator

[Ricardo41 5,936]

1 hour ago, DJJose said:

What's your final analysis of the utility?

 

1. The depiction of weather at airports is - provided there is metar coverage - superior to what the live weather function in MSFA does.That alone to me is worth the cost of the addon. Nothing kills immersion for me faster than inaccurate weather at my starting airport.

2. I haven't seen any jarring weather pop-in.

I would like to see how real weather "pops in". I mean, I'm not staring out the windows every minute to see how the weather is. Suddenly, I look up from my desk, and it's cloudy. I don't worry about how it "popped in".The term seems to be one of those avsim armchair aviator obsessions.

3. The interface is buggy: favoriting airports doesn't really work, search by icao code also still wonky.

I've opened up a support ticket about the issue of me having to register each time I open the program.

4. Weather injection doesn't always work.

Edited September 28, 2020 by Ricardo41

[travelabroad 177]

4 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

1. The depiction of weather at airports is - provided there is metar coverage - superior to what the live weather function in MSFA does.That alone to me is worth the cost of the addon. Nothing kills immersion for me faster than inaccurate weather at my starting airport.

That does sound nice, however the big kill-off for me personally, is that they project/inject the local METAR data, everywhere in all directions. That's kind of a huge immersion kill for me, as I'd love to see fronts and weather systems moving and developing. 

[Gulfstream 416]

36 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

I would like to see how real weather "pops in". I mean, I'm not staring out the windows every minute to see how the weather is. Suddenly, I look up from my desk, and it's cloudy. I don't worry about how it "popped in".The term seems to be one of those avsim armchair aviator obsessions.

That's at best a bit of a stretch, and at worst a pointless jab at AVSIM users.

If you were staring out the window, you'd see it "pop in", at your desk you aren't staring out your window watching it.  In flight you often are.

[Tuskin38 6,455]

1 hour ago, fs1 said:

This a a normal cloud formation in my opinion. It looks natural and may be one case of a weather depiction. There is no grid as FSX had in the past. 

That’s an actual photo.

[Moria15 950]

So today, I was sitting in my front room planning a flight (In MSFS) from Bristol airport in the UK...  I can see Bristol airport from my computer desk and was intrigued to see that there was obviously a front directly over the airport...  if I took off on 27 then I would take off into low cloud..  If I took off on 09 I would take off into clear blue skies.

So I setup my sim and went into the flight and sure enough, the reality applied and I took off on 27 into low cloud, then turned 180 and came out of the cloud over the runway.  Even the winds were correct  with about 5knots from the west at ground, rising to about 16 knots at 10,000.

Now..  if I was projecting the metar of Bristol into the skies above me, would I see the same?  The actual Metar was actually more like the low clouds variant, but I don't know how a metar would handle this situation.

Not trying to cause an argument, and I don't have REX but asking because I want to know so I can evaluate things properly and work out if this product would give me better weather than I get, on the basis that I seem to be one of the lucky ones that is getting pretty good weather so far from the sim that is constantly changing during my flight..

PS  lovely clear day today over Spain once you got past some not so nice stuff over France according to the sim and a little bit of high level cloud over Malaga when landing.

Graham

Edited September 28, 2020 by Moria15

[CJ1045 469]

Graham,

An excellent post which gives a lot of confidence that MSFS is doing something right for weather. I live halfway to the South coast from you and the MSFS weather always seems to be spot one for here too. I think the key thing is to look out of your own window to try and verify weather rather than rely on a Metar report to compare with what MSFS comes up with. In all the weather discussion I have seen precious little of people making their own observations.

 

CJ

[kerosene31 349]

I'm thinking I'll check this out, mostly because I seem to have more and more random issues with the default weather.  At one point in a clear, sunny day in the northeast, I suddenly had monster wind gusts come out of nowhere on final and I almost crashed.  I'm in FSEconomy so I actually had to repair my plane, so these bugs are costing me virtual money.  

I also had the "autopilot bug" again where the plane keeps trying to climb and pull up, but I don't think it is an AP problem at all.  It is like the plane just loses power and the AP can't figure it out so it puts you in a stall.  I was flying a 172 and at 6000 feet my RPMs started dropping and the plane would not climb anymore.  The weather was mild but nothing that I would think would be hot enough to prevent a plane from climbing (80 f on the ground, not exactly sweltering).  Did I hit a random pocket of bugged weather?  There's no icing visible (and shouldn't be in temps that warm, and there's no clouds).  

Anyway, the price on this seems reasonable (it doesn't charge what more in depth weather addons would cost), so I may give it a go.  I've noticed how using real world weather, things seem pretty spotty.  Where I fly, the real life weather has been pretty boring so I haven't noticed it as much but I never really hit any kind of weather elsewhere.  

[Thomasso 224]

Ok, so after some hours of testing, I have to say that this software is unusable, got released prematurely and is taking advantage of the MSFS marketing hype, as many other add-ons.

The software is extremely buggy. For example now, I've been trying to inject the weather for like 15 minutes. It doesn't display the airport that I'm at, it says "injecting", then it says "complete" but the weather is not there. I did everything following the manual, the folder has an exception from the antivirus. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes when I start the software, the loading screen appears and then disappears, software doesn't start. It also crashes very often.

The fact that it's missing a feature to set up custom weather by each element separately is also alarming.

Graphics and sound effects are great but that's about it. For me, at the moment, this is money down the toilet, reverting back to the default weather engine.

Those guys have some nerve, releasing this... thing... as payware. I can understand that new software is missing features, but this doesn't even do its core thing properly.

Hopefully I will save somebody some money with this post.

[CFIJose 5,485]

Keep in mind that some of us are simply desperate for  a properly working "live weather" feature that for "me" is currently INOP in MSFS.

After a new add-on release, is spend time reading & posting at AVSIM because IMHO is the best flightsim community, watch video reviews,  and then after some careful consideration, I buy what I feel will help improve my sim experience. I've done this for FSX/P3D/XP11 and now MSFS.

MSFS in reality is still a beta release. There are so many airplane bugs, scenery glitches, live weather inaccuracies, but it's so darn beautiful that we blindly accept all that is wrong with the sim. We justify it by saying that it's still a work in progress and we are optimistic that it will get better.

Or at least that's how I feel.

[fs1 295]

4 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I have already asked people to be objective when posting reports on this utility. There aren't dozens of moderators watching every post. We are unpaid volunteers. We censure where we consider it necessary.

As someone else said if REX had its own forum much of this discussion could take place there.

Thanks Ray. Regards

[deepfield 19]

4 minutes ago, fs1 said:

Thanks Ray. Regards

Do you happen to have a link to the forum? I am only directed to the Discord when searching on the official site.

[airlinejets 709]

14 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Rex doesn't draw clouds, it just injects weather data as I so far understand it.

Apparently, you're correct. So I'll blame the ugly clouds to low user settings. FS2020 clouds look fantastic when set to ultra. Can anybody show screen captures of REX using ultra clouds?

[Ricardo41 5,936]

11 minutes ago, deepfield said:

Do you happen to have a link to the forum? I am only directed to the Discord when searching on the official site.

I don't think they have a forum. Join their discord channel. Basically the same thing. 

[deepfield 19]

2 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

I don't think they have a forum. Join their discord channel. Basically the same thing. 

Ah. I've been in there for a while. It's just people asking for help with no answers.

[Thomasso 224]

Just now, deepfield said:

Ah. I've been in there for a while. It's just people asking for help with no answers.

Sounds great.