According to MSFS development roadmap on their site, opening up live weather to 3rd party devs is not currently planned. It may come in the future, who knows. Some features are planned for this year and some for next year, as many of you already know. Not 3rd party weather though, even though it's highly ranked in simmers' "Top Wishes" list.

Those who bought REX WF and those who tried Unreal Weather... this is one of the reasons these addons aren't good enough.

I mean, what made FSX the great sim is was, were the 3rd party addons. And the current state of the weather in the sim is not up to standard. I hate simming without good live weather so much that I just stopped simming.

Can I please have your thoughts on the current state of live weather, and what you hope to see? Thanks

There have been lots of posts on this. MS is wholly committed to MetoBlue. They are a reputable aviation and maritime provider, and can certainly deliver the goods.

MS’ current implementation of Wx remains abysmal. Hopefully that will change SOON as they do not seem whatsoever interested in a third party solution.

The issue is firmly in MS’ court for solution. You may replace MS with Asobo at your discretion when reading this.

C

Edited July 22, 20214 yr by cavaricooper

17 minutes ago, cavaricooper said:

There have been lots of posts on this. MS is wholly committed to MetoBlue. They are a reputable aviation and maritime provider, and can certainly deliver the goods.

MS’ current implementation of Wx remains abysmal. Hopefully that will change SOON as they do not seem whatsoever interested in a third party solution.

The issue is firmly in MS’ court for solution. You may replace MS with Asobo at your discretion when reading this.

C

I didn't know that. I've recently started simming again, only to find the weather system was too bad for me to continue.

Thanks for the information.

I think once MS/Asobo starts to correctly and reliably TRANSLATE and RENDER the information that meteoblue is giving to them then i personally wont have an issue. I'm not looking for super accurate to the tenths of feet weather. I just think that the above two parameters need to be worked on better and they promised to work on it so ill live with what is provided for now.

What I'm not interested in is injectable weather (unless the movement from one weather effect to the next is 100% seamless as it is presently).

I'm only speaking for myself because you have some seriously anal people on the forums where this is a super touchy subject.

I am really happy that weather add-ons will not be supported. The weather in MSFS is fine for me, and it will only get better. I also hope they get traffic right too, since that would just be another thing to deal with on updates (compatibility) and I do not want that BS. 

3 minutes ago, RobJC said:

I am really happy that weather add-ons will not be supported. The weather in MSFS is fine for me, and it will only get better. I also hope they get traffic right too, since that would just be another thing to deal with on updates (compatibility) and I do not want that BS. 

Not to derail the topic but in regards to traffic what im hoping for is for Asobo to provide the schedule and a third party to provide the models and liveries to match. I think MS would take waay too long to try to get license for the liveries. So im good with them providing the schedule framework and someone else steps in with the rest.

Okies back to topic 🙂

14 minutes ago, Maxis said:

I think once MS/Asobo starts to correctly and reliably TRANSLATE and RENDER the information that meteoblue is giving to them then i personally wont have an issue

+1 here!

Here’s what I understood from the recent Dev’s Q&A:
ASOBO is aware of discrepancies resulting from mixing METAR data with the weather system and are now delving deeper into this mixing process. One major change will be that the METAR data will be delivered to Meteoblue to get integrated into the weather model. Then there’s need for better integration of the Meteoblue data with the rendering engine, and that seems to be a tricky one they are still working on and should solve the visibility descrepancies by better taking clouds, fog and aerosols into account. The timeline for those seems to be the end of this year, and then there seems to be a far better resolution of the weather model in the works with a timeline of roughly end of 2022.

1 hour ago, ar_0 said:

I mean, what made FSX the great sim is was, were the 3rd party addons. And the current state of the weather in the sim is not up to standard. I hate simming without good live weather so much that I just stopped simming.

 

+1¹⁰

3 minutes ago, Tom_L said:

+1 here!

Here’s what I understood from the recent Dev’s Q&A:
ASOBO is aware of discrepancies resulting from mixing METAR data with the weather system and are now delving deeper into this mixing process. One major change will be that the METAR data will be delivered to Meteoblue to get integrated into the weather model. Then there’s need for better integration of the Meteoblue data with the rendering engine, and that seems to be a tricky one they are still working on and should solve the visibility descrepancies by better taking clouds, fog and aerosols into account. The timeline for those seems to be the end of this year, and then there seems to be a far better resolution of the weather model in the works with a timeline of roughly end of 2022.

Another verification that we are beta testers, if not alpha.  And we paid for the privilege.

1 hour ago, Maxis said:

what im hoping for is for Asobo to provide the schedule and a third party to provide the models and liveries to match. I think MS would take waay too long to try to get license for the liveries.

I thought the reason MSFT said they don't want to open liveries and models to 3rd parties is because they are in contact with every (most) airlines and "they prefer handling the negotiations themselves because it is better". This makes sense otherwise they won't be able to sell licensed liveries packs (DLC) on their Market Place (they sell a lot of such car packs / liveries with Forza for example).

As for weather, it might be too much coupled for now to open it up to 3rd parties, in the sense MeteoBlue is probably feeding their data formatted in a certain way and FS2020 is digesting this more or less directly for performance purposes. Opening it up would imply they document publicly a proprietary and 3rd party IP (the MeteoBlue API). If this is the case, this doesn't mean they couldn't also implement a "bridge" API which would give 3rd party the means to defining the weather in a different form (symbolic/abstracted) and would internally convert this into the proprietary MeteoBlue internal format still.

Mind you, these features (AI traffic and Weather) can't be of any use to the core target this game is designed for (Xbox) because they are not providing the means to connect external 3rd party programs to Xbox anyhow (yet).

NB: All the above is pure speculation only.

Edited July 22, 20214 yr by RXP

1 hour ago, Tom_L said:

+1 here!

Here’s what I understood from the recent Dev’s Q&A:
ASOBO is aware of discrepancies resulting from mixing METAR data with the weather system and are now delving deeper into this mixing process. One major change will be that the METAR data will be delivered to Meteoblue to get integrated into the weather model. Then there’s need for better integration of the Meteoblue data with the rendering engine, and that seems to be a tricky one they are still working on and should solve the visibility descrepancies by better taking clouds, fog and aerosols into account. The timeline for those seems to be the end of this year, and then there seems to be a far better resolution of the weather model in the works with a timeline of roughly end of 2022.

Just a note, Meteoblue currently fully utilizes Metar data both on their pay ware products and within their modeling.  This has always been the case I believe, at least since I have purchased their subscription for real world aviation information.  I suspect that the MS/Meteo discusson probably centers around the 'mix' of this info as delivered to MS.

2 hours ago, Maxis said:

I think once MS/Asobo starts to correctly and reliably TRANSLATE and RENDER the information that meteoblue is giving to them then i personally wont have an issue. I'm not looking for super accurate to the tenths of feet weather.

I haven't seen anyone here want that.  

What I (mainly) want is this:  when I plan a flight from say KSLC to KDEN, and the weather sites show a nice 80 knot jetstream of 310 deg at 35,000 feet, I want that in the sim.   All too often, I'll plan a flight, and when I get to 35,000 feet, the winds are completely opposite.   I get that it is a predictive model and I get that nothing will be exact, but a close ballpark approximation would be nice.

I am happy with the MSFS weather after years of Active Sky with P3D. .I won't be buying any weather add on 

I find MSFS weather depiction way way better than anything we had before. I'm not talking accuracy, I'm talking how the whole weather system looks and feels. Now I have a feeling the weather is real and alive. In P3D weather was similar to landclass textures and now it's more like photo-real, if you know what I mean. Don't get me wrong, I was a huge fan of ActiveSky, I used it for many years and was happy with it but I can't imagine weather injected solely by stations can ever look as real as it does in MSFS - it is more accurate right now but MSFS weather accuracy is also not that bad as some think. Yes, sometimes winds do not match perfectly or at all but many times do. In general I always had pretty much the same weather in the sim as it was in RL - at least where I live. I don't do much trans Atlantic flights though.

1 hour ago, Bobsk8 said:

I am happy with the MSFS weather after years of Active Sky with P3D. .I won't be buying any weather add on 

 

52 minutes ago, Tomaz Drnovsek said:

I find MSFS weather depiction way way better than anything we had before. I'm not talking accuracy, I'm talking how the whole weather system looks and feels. Now I have a feeling the weather is real and alive. In P3D weather was similar to landclass textures and now it's more like photo-real, if you know what I mean. Don't get me wrong, I was a huge fan of ActiveSky, I used it for many years and was happy with it but I can't imagine weather injected solely by stations can ever look as real as it does in MSFS - it is more accurate right now but MSFS weather accuracy is also not that bad as some think. Yes, sometimes winds do not match perfectly or at all but many times do. In general I always had pretty much the same weather in the sim as it was in RL - at least where I live. I don't do much trans Atlantic flights though.

Leads me to believe I must find a way to start totally over with MSFS because I am not even close to sharing your experiences.