Had enough of live weather, any options?

[kapitan 90]

2 hours ago, Ricardo41 said:

I live fairly close to my home airport. My, admittedly unsophisticated, approach is to look out the window, load up the default live weather and see how they match. MSFS is usually quite close. 

I checked your message footer, what am I supposed to be seeing?

I bought REX Weather Force when it came out, but lately REX is at best hit and miss. It seems they have server issues. Not sure whether those have been resolved, haven't checked their discord lately, as I got tired of having to switch off REX and revert back to MSFS live weather. As I said, live weather works for me. 

agree, external programs..hate them. Whats the fun of a decent sim if you have to take an aditional step in preparing? be it weather, atc chatter, flightplans, ...these must be addons you access WITHIN the sim...

[jarmstro 2,402]

The trouble with any METAR based system is that there's is no data in the METAR file on things like cirrus cloud and low velocity wind. They have to be guessed at if injected at all. Active Sky has an option to inject some cirrus. REX does not.

[scotchegg 4,156]

8 hours ago, fppilot said:

Might have baited you.  Is that a pick from the real sky?  or from a simulator?  Watch out....

Erm...not likely to be fooled with this one...

[tepiksi 34]

There's a problem with REX Weather Force because it injects the wrong QNH always by -1 unit. I mean, if the QNH in METAR says for example 1020, REX sends it to the sim as 1019. They say it's the MSFS fault but I don't believe them, I have requested several times to fix this, but they don't seem to care.

The free Unreal Weather - Live METAR sends the QNH correctly just like the METAR says but it's missing the winds aloft. Well, there's a workaround to live with it.

https://www.flightsimulator.blog/2021/01/09/using-live-metar-with-live-weather/

Edited March 18, 2021 by tmpnmk

[fppilot 4,335]

58 minutes ago, tmpnmk said:

I mean, if the QNH in METAR says for example 1020, REX sends it to the sim as 1019.

Good grief. QNH could change in the time it takes to write this, or less.

[fppilot 4,335]

4 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Erm...not likely to be fooled with this one...

Ok.  I give.  It's Memorex...

[fppilot 4,335]

5 hours ago, kapitan said:

What's the fun of a decent sim if you have to take an additional step in preparing? be it weather, atc chatter, flight _plans,

You should try flying in real life....  Just saying....   Your coming very very close to that old argument of "is this a _ _ _ _?  Or is it a _ _ _?"

Takes me about 30 minutes to fully prepare for a flight, and another 15 or so in the cockpit to prepare the aircraft for a flight.  Now I am talking about a robustly modeled aircraft.  Those prep times are very consistent with actual flight preparation.

 

[RXP 2,336]

5 hours ago, jarmstro said:

The trouble with any METAR based system is that there's is no data in the METAR file on things like cirrus cloud and low velocity wind.

In my opinion this is not the sole problem with METAR based system.

The METAR is a human observation translated to text, which is prone to expected errors due to observation but more importantly from the lack of "resolution". Its purpose is to give an overall and general representation of the conditions in "macro blocks" of layers and values, whereas in order to reproduce visually in fine details what the real conditions are, you have to divide up the measures in much finer steps and blocks.

And this is where MeteoBlue is supposed to be better, with their model which is dividing the sky in a grid aligned series of small boxes sampling/representing the conditions in a finer level of details (think Minecraft where each block is a piece of the sky). The promise is to be offering finer predictions because they can simulate finer inter-block interactions and changes over finer time/space quantum of data.

Cloud and weather depiction in game is a different problem though. The actual FS2020 clouds are volumetric. This is a pixel shader code which is basically telling for each pixel on the screen, whether the ray from the eye to the pixel extending to infinity beyond the screen is actually hitting a cloud or not. You have to understand there is no 3D cloud there, unlike FSX and P3D, where the clouds where actual 3D models in a 3D box and painted with billboard sprites. In FS2020, the "hit a cloud" part is just tested against a noise-generated 3D hit-map effectively dividing the space in voxels (the Minecraft boxes).

And here lies the problem and the difficulty: displaying clouds with this technique is only considering a cloud voxel as the smallest entity. Each cloud is only built and displayed as a series of blocks of more or less "cloudy" pixels. There is no provision for Cirrus, Ice, or other specific cloud feature but a square box of cloud pixels from transparent to fully opaque. And the other problem lies in the way they are proceduraly generated (noise based) because this is just a "random" pattern (most likely perlin-noise at the base). In order to make the visuals matching the conditions, you have to cookie-cut the voxels and/or tune the noise-generator to make the visuals matching the conditions, and this must be done with different adjustment over a the entire sky so that you could represent large areas of clouds, separated by large areas of empty sky, with a "front" between the two for example. This is this process of dividing the sky in macro regions which is causing divergence from actual conditions if not done properly or at a finer level and this is really not easy to find the balance between visuals, accuracy and performance there.

Which approach is better between 3D volumetric and Billboard Sprites? Both can give exceptional results when capitalizing on their strengths, and both can give poor results as well at the edge cases where they are not good for. I'm not sure mixing both approaches would give any advantage either except for depicting some types of clouds where bill-boarding would be better suited (cirrus, CB core) with volumetric rendering the rest (cumulus, CB base and around core, etc..).

Just my 2 cents from a dev perspective.

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

On 3/17/2021 at 3:17 PM, Nigge said:

Hi! Since Aerosoft finally has made msfs fun to fly again I have started once again reacting over how incredibly bad the live weather is, not even close to the real metar. Have anybody got any suggestions how you use this to make it as realistic as possible? 

I don't believe a vote is necessary.  Asobo is not only aware of how important weather simulation is, they have already planned to implement some rather incredible features (this has been included in several of their announcemnts starting back a couple of years ago). 

In the meantime, the following link has some really good information on the subject.

https://www.flightsimulator.blog/2021/08/07/live-weather/

My very best wishes to you.

 

[Ricardo41 5,935]

On 3/17/2021 at 10:47 PM, fppilot said:

Or FSX/FSX SE/P3D with Active Sky and REX textures.  None of the elements in MSFS come close.  And please do not even mention ATIS/AWOS.  Check my message footer....

Lol. Really.No thank you. 

[JBDB-MD80 1,466]

42 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

Lol. Really.No thank you. 

That was nice 10 years ago. OMG not real at all just a painted picture. I know I have used that same programs for 6 years now and its nothing close (depiction) to the real world or what I see outside every day. MSFS weather is not accurate all the time but at least its more believable on a desktop platform.

Edited August 16, 2021 by jbdbow1970

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

On 3/19/2021 at 12:27 AM, fppilot said:

You should try flying in real life....  Just saying....   Your coming very very close to that old argument of "is this a _ _ _ _?  Or is it a _ _ _?"

Takes me about 30 minutes to fully prepare for a flight, and another 15 or so in the cockpit to prepare the aircraft for a flight.  Now I am talking about a robustly modeled aircraft.  Those prep times are very consistent with actual flight preparation.

 

 

Apparently if your in PNG the weather will have changed by the time you finish the flight plan 😄

 

[quantumpion 39]

I think the cloud cover seems pretty accurate most of the time and looks good. The problem is the winds and pressure are always off. Also random lightning constantly blasting out of every tiny cumulous puff is really annoying.