2 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

why not enjoy what works well, and give the missing pieces some time to sort themselves out..  

I think that's the main issue that stirred the debate in this thread: Asobo formally mentioning they have no plans of granting access to third parties to the weather system. That would be like you failing to obtain the Garmin experience you're hoping from Asobo, and then finding out RealityXP is barred from developing their products for MSFS using "the right way" (aka the official SDK) instead of recurring to reverse engineering and playing with memory hacks as HiFi will have to do to bring their products to MSFS.    

Edited December 6, 20205 yr by evaamo

40 minutes ago, evaamo said:

I think that's the main issue that stirred the debate in this thread: Asobo formally mentioning they have no plans of granting access to third parties to the weather system. That would be like you failing to obtain the Garmin experience you're hoping from Asobo, and then finding out RealityXP is barred from developing their products for MSFS using "the right way" (aka the official SDK) instead of recurring to reverse engineering and playing with memory hacks as HiFi will have to do to bring their products to MSFS.    

Well, that is actually happening with the Garmin simulation as well... As best I know, Asobo is not opening any doors for RXP either..  Early days... I hope 😉

8 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

Well, that is actually happening with the Garmin simulation as well... As best I know, Asobo is not opening any doors for RXP either...

Ouch, didn't know that. Was that somewhere in the development notes they have been sharing weekly? 

 

10 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

 Early days... I hope 😉

 I hope so too, Bert.

I can't believe some of the posts criticizing HiFi in this thread. REX has already gone this route and the weather at least matches METAR data, unlike the default "live" weather which is sometimes spot on and sometime crazy. I was somewhat surprised that HiFi initially didn't follow REX's lead, but I think that most of the 3PDs were hoping that Asobo would expand the SDK to at least match what was available in FSX and P3d. It's becoming obvious that Asobo has way too many tasks on its MSFS plate and isn't going to get to some features soon, like ATC, AI Traffic and weather, probably ever. I personally don't blame Asobo because the vast majority of MSFS users are happy with the sim the way it is. Other than those three items, my only complaint is the autopilot, which is still a work in progress. I'd rather Asobo fix that and add VR than spend time on weather, ATC and AI Traffic, which is better handled by 3PDs, even without an SDK.

I don’t see any need for active sky. The default weather is perfect and I don’t care if it’s accurate. I could nee historic weather options though but buying a whole addon for that? No there will be a mod for it I bet

5 hours ago, duckbilled said:

We are not the customer. Asobo/MS really don't care what we want. This sim/game is not for us. As I said earlier, it is a demo for technology that has far greater applications (municipal, military, commercial, autonomous vehicles...).

I think you need to step away from the Kool Aid with some of your conspiracy theory there chief. If you really think the above is true, then the bit you followed it  with, by definition, cannot also be true:

5 hours ago, duckbilled said:

In short MS/AS wanted our approval, because our enthusiasm made the sim more credible. They needed buy-in from the community.

Your two contentions are diametrically opposed to one another. You are suggesting they don't really want to make a popular flight sim, then in the next breath you are suggesting they want to make a popular flight sim.

Is that what is commonly known as a 'Gotcha'?

51 minutes ago, DaWu said:

I don’t see any need for active sky. The default weather is perfect and I don’t care if it’s accurate. I could nee historic weather options though but buying a whole addon for that? No there will be a mod for it I bet

I understand your decision to accept default weather, but isn't it an oxymoron to say "default weather is perfect even though it's not accurate"  ??  There are  thousands of online (VATSIM / IVAO, etc)  pilots who want and need ACCURATE weather data to realistically simulate their flights.  You may not need active sky so you will not have to purchase it. If HiFi Sim releases a weather add on for MSFS, I will purchase it  as I have for the past 15+ years, whether ASOBO eventually resolves their issues or not. God speed Damian and we shall wait with baited breath for your weather package add on !  

Edited December 7, 20205 yr by vcarlo

26 minutes ago, Ron Attwood said:

Is that what is commonly known as a 'Gotcha'?

Not really intended to be a gotcha, I just think Occam's Razor would suggest that the notion MS must automatically be some kind of real-world version of Weyland Yutani or Cyberdyne Systems is a bit less likely than the notion that they wanted to make an updated version of their popular sim franchise now that they are more heavily into games. After all, their purchase of Bethesda (makers of the Elder Scrolls, Skyrim etc) doesn't mean they are planning to facilitate CIA drone strikes on Dragons which are menacing the ancient province of Tamriel, does it? Actually, that would be a good game - somebody write that down.

This doesn't mean I don't imagine they are not ever going to consider leveraging the MSFS technology for other purposes, including possibly military stuff; frankly they'd be daft if they didn't have that intention, but not everything has to be some big evil conspiracy theory plot. I daresay MS would be completely up front about perhaps doing that. They don't really have any need to hide such an intent. Making good stuff for your military is an entirely legitimate enterprise and if it was born as a spin off of a flight sim, then great, more power to them doing that and it spinning off back in terms of accuracy for us flight sim fans.

I for one am looking forward to the Notam warning me that Dragons are not fitted with TCAS when I'm flying my Mooney M20 into the Skyrim terrain expansion. I used to fly Dragon, but then I took a Piper Arrow to the knee. 🤣

Edited December 7, 20205 yr by Chock

On 12/5/2020 at 6:14 PM, ryanbatcund said:

xactly!  This just blows my mind why Asobo didn't NAIL this feature.  Live weather needs to mean live...current...real world etc.  I get Meteoblue is a forecast-based entity....but so are sites like Windy and their GRIB winds aloft are always like spot on for me (or were when I was flying) in P3D / ASP4 and XP11 / ASXP

edit:  I just read this to myself and what I meant to say was Windy uses GRIB forecasts for their graphical site and in turn, I use these for my flight planning (because who doesn't love tailwinds lol)...and they are almost always spot on.  Windy isn't a forecast company from what I understand.

Actually, some of the data used by the Windy app comes from MeteoBlue’s NEMS model - the same one used in MSFS.

I have always found the upper winds in LiveWeather compare favorably with the GFS forecasted winds aloft in the Foreflight app. Since they come from two different numerical models, they will rarely be exactly the same at a given location, but they are usually quite close. Both are “predictions” since (unlike METARS), there are no real time observations of actual winds aloft.

My only issue with Live Weather upper winds and temps are the unrealistically high air temperatures found over mountainous terrain, even at high altitudes. That is not due to an error in the MeteoBlue model, but is being caused by some kind of unnecessary terrain-based temperature correction that is being applied to the original MeteoBlue data when it gets injected into the sim.

On 12/6/2020 at 6:46 PM, Damian Clark said:

I struggle with this logic.  I agree it's important and integral, very much so.  So are many other areas of the sim.  But why can't it be important and integral and also allow third parties to use SDK functions to read weather, for example?  Does PMDG for example ever want to be able to get the winds/temps aloft in the FMC in MSFS?  Without SDK functions, they can't do it as they should be able to.  They'll need something else, not official and not part of SDK (with all the downsides of that), or this type of realism won't ever be available.

This is all moot though, they have already decided.  I'm sure PMDG, just like us, will be forced to do creative things and they will make it work, somehow.  It's just too bad simple weather SDK functions, available in all other sims, and previous in all MSFS revisions, are for the first time ever no longer part of the plan.  We had such high hopes and dreams for MSFS in this department.  But regardless we will work hard to bring out our take on advanced realism-based weather simulation features in MSFS with the unofficial techniques clearly accepted and encouraged by MS/Asobo, and our own tricks coupled with our 20 years of experience on the MSFS platform to make the experience the best we can.

I'd like to clarify again however that we do not plan on fixing any issues or bugs in MSFS weather.  We are working on our own thing.  MSFS bugs will be resolved, and this is all independent of that.  We are not trying to replace MSFS weather and not trying to compete with it.  They've done an amazing incredible job.  We are just trying to expand on unique advanced aspects of weather simulation that a certain percentage of simmers want, like we always have.

Hi,

Just wondering, how does non-SDK weather injection work? Given that code for MSFS GUIs, including the weather GUI, are stored in plain text (as they are just HTML/JS/CSS files) and can be read freely, are you reverse engineering and replicating what the weather GUI is doing? This probably would be update-proof, unless the way weather GUI "communicates" with the simulator changes. Even if that happens, the changes to the weather GUI would be replicated again.

If this is not the case, are you using some undocumented SimConnect features or maybe something entirely different? If so, how do you make sure that these SimConnect functions won't stop working in future?

Thanks in advance.

Edited December 10, 20205 yr by BiologicalNanobot

Will /could /they add, modify the clouds as well? I mean visual, graphics. 

Or just the Live Weather? 

Thank you in advance 

5 hours ago, Sphynnx said:

Will /could /they add, modify the clouds as well? I mean visual, graphics. 

Or just the Live Weather? 

Thank you in advance 

You've actually hit on an interesting area of discussion. This whole thread has mixed up two concepts. The data that drive the weather engine are separate from the modeled response of the atmosphere. The latter includes items like sky color, tubulence modeling, cloud type and light scattering among others. Asobo has done a real good job with the  atmospherics. The problem is that MSFS is primarily using forecast weather data and for the vast majority of the temperate zone, this approach is fraught with inconsistencies. REX and Unreal Weather both get much closer to RL conditions as they use METAR data.

But to get back to atmospherics, the clouds in MSFS are certainly beautiful. They look like the painted skies in the works of famous landscape artists. But are the MSFS cloud types realistic? There seem to be 4 types, cumulus, stratus, cirrus and cumulonimbus. The layering doesn't seem to match METAR data and there are no intermediate cloud types like cirricumulus. Cloud type is dictated by weather data like dewpoint, wind speed and air temperature. Is that all built in to the MSFS atmospherics model? Again it's hard to tell. But certainly both REX and HiFi have included these calculations in their add-ons for other sims.

Is all this important to most MSFS users? Probably not. But then they don't have to use a weather add-on.
 

 

The MSFS clouds are very good looking but there is still a lot of room for improvement

On 12/6/2020 at 6:38 PM, Bert Pieke said:

Well, that is actually happening with the Garmin simulation as well... As best I know, Asobo is not opening any doors for RXP either..  Early days... I hope 😉

Bert as is usual spot on with his salient points.  This week finds me in total enjoyment of perfect cloud renditions, spot on weather along the entire route, and fully mastered GPS avionics.  The highest compliments to REX (textures), HiFI (AS16 weather), and RXP (GTN 750s).  A very enjoyable flight today from Tallahassee, Florida, to Indianapolis, Indiana.  Oh, the Orbx freeware instance of KUMP in Indianapolis was top drawer as well, and in harmony with the RXP GTNs included all of the published approaches.  And I am sure I should not bother to point out the RealAir fully modeled TDv2 with the most complete operational flight deck in existence for a simulator GA aircraft.

And I had plenty of live GA and commercial traffic with no traffic addons.

Edited December 12, 20205 yr by fppilot