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CFIJose

Live Weather After SP3

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Weather also got talked about in the Q&A.

At this point they are not thinking of opening the weather injection for 3rd party.

Which makes sense, because they think weather is a really integral part of their world and they still are working on it. It is not finished. More cloud types are in the works, the visibilty will be fine tuned, new variables added, the lighting variables reprogrammed to make high aerosol density not look orange any longer.

So it is very much an unfinished product that is still evolving.

So I can only advise to be a little picky with your wallet and not prematurely purchase weather add-ons for at least another 12 months. You might find that the default weather will have improved so much by that time that you will have spend money for nothing.

Edited by Farlis
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21 hours ago, jbdbow1970 said:

Gaming laptop. LOL Xbox series X will be superior by then.

LOL. I use a gaming laptop and FS runs perfect on it. I can even take it wherever I want and play FS.

Funny that despite all the complaining about performance around here with powerful PCs, my gaming laptop runs it smoothly on ultra without a single performance issue.

Edited by NightOfDreams

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1 hour ago, Farlis said:

Weather also got talked about in the Q&A.

At this point they are not thinking of opening the weather injection for 3rd party.

Which makes sense, because they think weather is a really integral part of their world and they still are working on it. It is not finished. More cloud types are in the works, the visibilty will be fine tuned, new variables added, the lighting variables reprogrammed to make high aerosol density not look orange any longer.

On the one hand, I like this approach because 3rd parties will be much more limited if Asobo just builds something basic and leaves it up to them to flesh it out. 

On the other hand, I have some major gripes about injected weather that mainly have to do with the very basic UI that lacks any user adjustments. In the areas I like to fly in, I need to cap the maximum windspeed at certain times of year in order to fly at all in light GA aircraft. That kind of user adjustment on injected weather is available in ActiveSky and other weather add-ons in other sims.

It doesn't seem like a major programming effort to allow user adjustment of injected weather data, so I hope Asobo is thinking along those lines for future development.

Edited by Paraffin

X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator on Windows 10 
i7 6700 4.0 GHz, 32 GB RAM, GTX 1660 ti, 1920x1200 monitor

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The default live weather is better but still doesn't match RL. I am presently flying RJOO to RJOB and I'm totally in the soup and a thunderstorm. Those storms are actually well off to the east in RL and both airports are presently VFR.

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57 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

It doesn't seem like a major programming effort to allow user adjustment of injected weather data, so I hope Asobo is thinking along those lines for future development.

If that is important to you, then make a suggestion through Zendesk. This way they can see it and evaluate whether they think it is worthy of implementing in the future.

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25 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

The default live weather is better but still doesn't match RL. I am presently flying RJOO to RJOB and I'm totally in the soup and a thunderstorm. Those storms are actually well off to the east in RL and both airports are presently VFR.

Same here. I'm flying at Stowe, Vermont and it's raining moderately.  Current conditions per weather.com are "Mostly Cloudy" and nothing at all on doppler radar.

Edited by NightOfDreams

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Never understood why people bought that REX product. I switched from P3D to not have to install any addons besides Airports and AC and I won’t. The default weather was already mind blowing and if there are any kind of issues Asobo will fix them sooner or later. 
 

not hating on REX as I am a former customer back in the fsx days and it did it’s job fine but I don’t see a place for you in this new economy...you need to come up with more than selling the same in a different color 

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Lukas Dalton

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7 minutes ago, NightOfDreams said:

Same here. I'm flying at Stowe, Vermont and it's raining moderately.  Current conditions per weather.com are "Mostly Cloudy" and nothing at all on doppler radar.

There is still a time lag between the Live Weather and RL weather. It's not a big issue, but  I still hope that someone can fix it.

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On 9/29/2020 at 4:52 PM, hjsmuc said:

Having compared a few scenarios I can't say that I share your observations. REX so far was more accurate. I will continue comparing both options and their results. 

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: “You go to fly with the weather you have, not the weather you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

I can certainly understand the desire to use “real” weather, which is to say the exact weather being reported at a given airport at a given time. It can be important when flying online with a network like Vatsim. But outside of network flying, I am not really concerned if the airport weather is exactly the same as the most current METAR, or somewhere in the general ballpark.

After all, real pilots have to deal with the “weather they have”... with whatever weather conditions nature gives them at a particular time and place.

While the “real” KLAX might have winds at 240 at 15, if the MSFS weather happens to give you 060 at 25 (typical Santa Ana conditions), then you plan for a takeoff on the “sixes or sevens”. You chose a SID appropriate to the simulated wind, and set your altimeter in accordance with the simulated pressure.

That said, I have definitely seen indications since patch 3 released that the Live Weather in MSFS seems to have become noticeably more accurate vs. real-time conditions. I have been to 5 different airports in various parts of the US over the last two days where the surface winds were remarkably close to the current METAR reports. Not 100 percent identical, but well within the slight variance one would see even with a “steady” wind in the real world. 

Adobo’s recent statement that they are using “Metars and MeteoBlue” appears to be accurate, despite their lack of detailed information on how the two sources might be used in combination.

All I can say for certain is that “something” has changed for the better in Live Weather in this latest patch. There is, of course, the addition of lightning and thunder. Unfortunately I think they have gone a bit overboard with that effect, as you wouldn’t expect to see a lightning bolt emerge from a small fair weather cumulus, but I’m sure they will tone it down in future updates. It’s actually a bit amusing the way it is now.

Another new effect appears to be patches of variable density ground fog which are independent of any other cloud layers, and placed in-game when meteorological conditions would make them appropriate. I saw this yesterday on a flight along the east coast where both departure and destination airports were low IFR.

I think they have given a hint of this new effect in the panorama of Mount Fuji that displays when the sim starts. You can see patchy fog rising from the small stream in the foreground.

The flight I did yesterday from central New York to coastal North Carolina was an example of Live Weather at its very best. There was a cold front extending from Quebec to eastern North Carolina, with heavy precipitation, and a second line of storms right along the coast. Live Weather depicted this rather complex scenario in almost exactly the same place that it was in real time. I took off in the middle of the front in central New York (in the TBM) with heavy rain, and quite a bit of turbulence. I remained in heavy cloud all the way up to my cruising altitude of 27,000 feet. With a steadily increasing southerly wind that closely matched the NOAA upper forecast.

I finally broke out of the main frontal band near the Maryland border, and found myself flying over a much lower solid cloud deck probably 10,000 feet below. As I approached Virginia, the lower clouds started to become broken, but looking west I could still see the line of storms along the front extending to the southwest, as well as the second line of storms along the coast farther east.

This is something a simple METAR injector could never duplicate in a million years. It was impressive indeed.

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Jim Barrett

Licensed Airframe & Powerplant Mechanic, Avionics, Electrical & Air Data Systems Specialist. Qualified on: Falcon 900, CRJ-200, Dornier 328-100, Hawker 850XP and 1000, Lear 35, 45, 55 and 60, Gulfstream IV and 550, Embraer 135, Beech Premiere and 400A, MD-80.

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On 9/30/2020 at 6:00 AM, Pastaiolo said:

I found this bit of information interesting, considering we were under the impression that Live Weather was NOT using METARS.

 

Inconsistencies  

We use METAR reports and Meteoblue weather forecasts to represent the live weather experienced in the sim. They are updated at regular intervals, but they can lack precision. Most of the time they will match but sometimes, they will not.

If you observe wildly inaccurate weather, please submit a bug report. 

Interesting. I'm really glad that the weather has been improved so much.

There are still some minor issues, and this comment explains it for me. I was starting out at WMKK and while there was a lot of thunder and lightning, the Terminal Area and departure parth was lacking rain yesterday. There's always a downpour around 4PM that close to the equator every day, so that was a bit off for me. Flying onto Japan RJTT, and the weather was dynamic with rain and thunder which matched the METAR.

Edited by ammark

Windows 10 Home 64-bit; CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K; GPU: GEFORCE RTX 2060 Super 8GB; MB: Gigabyte Z87-HD3; RAM: 32GB@1866 MHz; HD: Samsung 850 Pro 500GB SSD x 2, ; Display: 3840x1080 (Samsung 1080p/60 24" + Samsung 1080p/60 24")

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Not working in Quebec today. The weather in the sim is clear sky while it’s really low cloud and rainy.

I fly in other places that were reasonably close to real weather.

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Pierre

P3D when its freezing in Quebec....well, that's most of the time...
C-GDXL based at CYQB for real flying when its warming up...

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Not working in Sydney too, apparently there's a thunderstorm above Bankstown Airport...

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Rockland, Maine in the sim just now = overcast, thunderstorms, steady 40-mph winds.

Real world = clear with no rain within 100's of miles, winds 7-mph.

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Yep seems like weather is more screwed up since this patch for me.  It used to be actually decently accurate.  

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