2 hours ago, w6kd said:

How, exactly, does one do legitimate flight planning without the ability to forecast enroute/destination/alternate weather?  How do you determine a proper fuel load without enroute winds and temps?  We still can't set visibility even locally in MSFS--is not visibility an important factor in any IFR takeoff/approach? 

Currently I am using the meteoblue weather maps in conjunction with Simbrief for route planning and fuel calculation and don’t have much complaints. The risk of icing and the lack of weather/terrain radar makes my flights with the Dc6 much more exciting than any tubeliner in P3D.

I also have the REX suite that provides Metar weather, but end up using the native weather engine from MSFS most of the time. 

Edited July 10, 20214 yr by GCBraun

1 hour ago, mwilk said:

If you go back earlier in the thread that was the point I was making to another poster. I never thought we were ever really the target market for P3D. Would that make us useful idiots?

Sorry, I had not caught that. My apologies!

2 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

That link says real-time weather engine. No mention of historical weather.

But how does that stack up against a development plan I saw today that clearly states 3rd party weather support “Not planned”?

Scroll to the bottom where it says in development...  I don't think 3rd party access to the weather SDK is supported which is different than 3rd party weather not being supported, after all, the link I directed you to was an REX 3rd party weather offering for MSFS no?  

Quote

Continued and Consistent Development

The following is a list of updates coming

HISTORIC/ARCHIVED

Support for historic/archive weather data

 

3 hours ago, cobalt said:

 h bare-bones scenery like that used in professional flight-training simulators? At the same time, fight training does not require highly detailed scenery like that in MSFS.  

The market is not static, tomorrow equipment will be probably different from the professional simulators of today. New products create new demands. Detailed sceneries might be useful in some training scenarios. 

***

Top Gun  and supersonic flight modeling : If we have learned something in a year with MFS it is not to sell the chickens before the eggs are hatched. This also applies to the July 27th patch, BTW.

***

I do not agree with the word "arcade novelty"- I know what arcade is, as I play other games and MFS is no arcade - but Bob Scott is founded to say that MFS still lacks some basic features of a simulator. 

Weather is indeed the most blatant of them.  Asobo seems conscious of it as they have announced a rehab of the weather engine for the end of year, without further details though (see last para about chickens and eggs) .

As seen from an  user/layman point of view, the weather environment seems good enough. When I fly MFS I see a sky  that I have never seen in a sim before, only in real life. But it is also badly connected to the data :  METAR for the airports and the Meteo Blue  predictive tool for the rest of the world. And I am afraid that their obvious and incomprehensible reluctance to  bring historical weather comes from their contract with MB which cannot do it. You cannot  have a serious simulator without historical weather, at least for 24 hours.

Besides that, there are still obvious enormous bugs, after a year...  Atis and windsocks being not synchronized with the weather and between each others. And the briefings when there is one, are bad enough to make you cry.

 What do we do ? Shoot the messenger (yet again an old grumbling elitist male) or do we exert pressure on the MFS team to get a proper weather engine worthy of the sim  ?  

Edited July 10, 20214 yr by Dominique_K

8 hours ago, Chock said:

So yeah, it is a professional tool, but it's not really professional in the sense of getting you up to speed on flying the real things; you can use it for that of course and it is sometimes useful for that purpose with things such as cockpit familiarisation, but it's no more 'pro' than FS2004 in the flight training sense.

Chock, the USAF, Navy and Marine Corps are currently using P3D as an ab initio flight trainer, among the other things you've mentioned.

In fact, the Navy was using FS9 in the distant past for pilot ab initio training for many, many years. Back when I owned South Texas Radio & Telecommunications in Kingsville, TX, I had many opportunities to visit their training facility where they had 20 stations set up running FS9. They even had two "instructor" stations set up so that they could inject 'problems' into any of the student's simulations and track their responses to the challenge presented. When I asked about the legality of using FS9, the instructors appeared unconcerned... 😏

41 minutes ago, psolk said:

Scroll to the bottom where it says in development...  I don't think 3rd party access to the weather SDK is supported which is different than 3rd party weather not being supported, after all, the link I directed you to was an REX 3rd party weather offering for MSFS no?  

I may have got my wording wrong on “3rd party weather support “Not planned”

I wouldn’t expect Asobo to support an external program. I can only think Rex have hacked into something to get access to the weather variables. Asobo seem to have made it clear for a long time 3rd parties won’t be given access to the weather SDK.

As I don’t have MSFS and Rex I can’t speak with any authority on this.

1 hour ago, cobalt said:

Sorry, I had not caught that. My apologies!

Not a problem. I bounce between all of the simulators. P3D has the best airplanes right now but sometimes I feel that the sim looks cartoonish when compared to the Microsoft offering. 

4 hours ago, mwilk said:

Not a problem. I bounce between all of the simulators. P3D has the best airplanes right now but sometimes I feel that the sim looks cartoonish when compared to the Microsoft offering. 

It's the difference between real-world and fabricated scenery.

Edited July 11, 20214 yr by cobalt

On 7/9/2021 at 3:13 PM, Ray Proudfoot said:

I can. Concorde. There’ll never be a quality version for MSFS.

I think it’s reasonable at this point to wonder whether we’ll ever see one for 64-bit P3D either…

I told FSL back in 2017 that I’d buy one. Four years later and here we are — I’ve moved on to MSFS and you’re still waiting. (I genuinely hope not in vain!)

Edited July 11, 20214 yr by honanhal

14 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I may have got my wording wrong on “3rd party weather support “Not planned”

I wouldn’t expect Asobo to support an external program. I can only think Rex have hacked into something to get access to the weather variables. Asobo seem to have made it clear for a long time 3rd parties won’t be given access to the weather SDK.

As I don’t have MSFS and Rex I can’t speak with any authority on this.

Whether they hacked it or not is really irrelevant to me at this point.  I'm concerned with outcome, not process to achieve outcome.  If they can make weather work I really don't care what they do.   Developers have been doing things "outside" the sim for as long as I can remember to work around sim limitations or dependencies.  

With all due respect and a great appreciation of the time you devote to moderating there are a number of comments/assumptions you are making that are just flat out false, already addressed or already being addressed.  Until you own the products in question and have some factual basis for conversation, not just things you've heard or read perhaps you are not the best person to comment on MSFS capabilities...   I wouldn't comment on X-Plane capabilities not owning X-Plane and I wouldn't expect someone who doesn't own a product to be vocally commenting on it's capabilities or assumed lack thereof...  

Oh, and Go England!  

39 minutes ago, psolk said:

  there are a number of comments/assumptions you are making that are just flat out false, already addressed or already being addressed.  Until you own the products in question and have some factual basis for conversation, not just things you've heard or read perhaps you are not the best person to comment on MSFS capabilities...   

I agree with  the diagnosis but not your conclusion, Paul 😉. I take Ray anytime in a discussion about MFS rather than one of the Asobo's Faithfuls.  It is interesting to understand what a knowledgeable and moderate simmer believes true which isn't. That allows to debunk false ideas. And everything he wrote is not untrue.  

That MFS would benefit from opening to a third party is, I think, a typical false "good idea". Its weather engine suffers from a bugged and bad implementation but as they described it over the year and considering what I see in the sim it shows a lot of promises.  

 

Edited July 11, 20214 yr by Dominique_K

1 hour ago, psolk said:

With all due respect and a great appreciation of the time you devote to moderating there are a number of comments/assumptions you are making that are just flat out false, already addressed or already being addressed.  Until you own the products in question and have some factual basis for conversation, not just things you've heard or read perhaps you are not the best person to comment on MSFS capabilities..

I'm not making anything up, honest. I can remember seeing a statement from Asobo / MS on their development plan that supersonic flight was not yet available and that 3rd party weather support had no plans. I did ask whether supersonic flight is now supported but instead of a simple yes / no you asked me why it wouldn't be and gave details of an F14 that is capable of > Mach 1. But is that a genuine MSFS model or a hacked FSX one? I've been pointed in the past to a video of a military aircraft flying supersonic over New York. Clearly ridiculous at a time when supersonic flight wasn't supported in MSFS. Hence why I just asked the question now.

As for external weather support. It depends on how REX have got their info but if unsupported the program risks breaking just as the Wx Radar by Milviz has in P3Dv5 simply with a hotfix update.

I don't speculate and I don't make things up about any flight sim program. I have simply asked questions. I see nothing wrong in doing that.

1 hour ago, honanhal said:

I think it’s reasonable at this point to wonder whether we’ll ever see one for 64-bit P3D either…

I told FSL back in 2017 that I’d buy one. Four years later and here we are — I’ve moved on to MSFS and you’re still waiting. (I genuinely hope not in vain!)

The Airbus fleet is clearly their bread-winner - hence why it gets priority. But they have promised a 64-bit Concorde and until such time as they say anything to the contrary we have to trust they will deliver one. I know it's frustrating but we just have to accept they don't post anything about development until they're ready to do so irrespective of how much flack they get as a result.

1 hour ago, psolk said:

Oh, and Go England! 

Thanks! Fingers crossed.

With regard to a supersonic airliner for MSFS, I strongly suspect there will be a BOOM airliner in MSFS at some point.

And given it has more modern avionics and systems than Concorde with far less complex flight engineering action required than was the case with Concorde, I should think it would be feasible to make a comparatively 'study' version of it for a simulator. In fact, I should think the makers of the real thing would positively welcome cooperating on making a pretty realistic one, given the favourable publicity it would engender in getting people to accept the idea of such an aeroplane in 2029 when the real thing is due to start carrying passengers with United Airlines.

Can't think of a more go-ahead flagship aeroplane for the sim than that one, as it really is the cutting edge of modern commercial aviation. If I was one of the head honchos at one of the more 'study' developers, I'd be making overtures (pun intended) to the manufacturer for a collaboration on it for MSFS, if one isn't already doing that (wouldn't surprise me). I'm pretty sure everyone would want it for their new sim, and at - say - fifty quid a pop, that'd be a fair chunk of profit.

Oh, and GO ENGLAND! 🥅

Edited July 11, 20214 yr by Chock