Is it time to Outsource Weather Integration?

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

No. Just no. 

Edited November 21, 2021 by fogboundturtle

[Tony P 160]

REX works well for me.

[Ricardo41 5,955]

Yeah, sure, Asobo is in over their heads. Lol. 

[Gilandred 690]

5 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

No. Just no. 

No, because Asobo has a good track record already?  Or for some other reason?  Just curious…..

To be clear I wasn’t advocating for an ActiveSky or REX model of METAR interpolation.  That too would be a regression in my opinion.

Edited November 21, 2021 by Gilandred

[Bobsk8 12,753]

1 minute ago, Sethos said:

I will say, this update has left me questioning what lies ahead for the platform. Is that really what it's gonna be like, do we have to start at absolute zero and once again claw our way up through the most basic problematics in order to shape the simulator? Are we really at a point, a year and 3 months post release that they have to rush out these laughably bad updates that completely screw up the very fundamentals with novice tier mistakes, only to spit out a manure bucket of content for people to buy, only to proudly label it "the Game of the Year patch" and we're left with collapsed building of problems that we have no idea how long are going to go on for, especially knowing they cut testing short only to get it out the door?

Maybe it's just the bitterness of age that is slowly descending on me in a quiet evening hour but you really don't feel a lot of respect for the craft with updates like this. And yes, I absolutely think they should outsource as much as possible, to developers who spent years or even decades building up the knowledge about these things. Use it, stop trying to learn it all from the ground up again. 

I think we all like MSFS, otherwise we wouldn't be flying it and on this forum, but at the same time, I think many of us are sick and tired of this monthly fiasco. You get the sim running OK, like after Su6, and then a new SU, and 10 minutes after people start using it, the complaints and bugs with the latest version are posted on this forum. It doesn't take a team of 300 beta testers to find much of these problems anyone with a knowledge of aviation and experience of flying simulators can see in one or two flights most of these problems. I saw that Track IR was broken within 10 minutes, I saw the haze problem on the first takeoff. Clouds that are 500 feet AGL, are easily noticed on one flight.

The need a couple of their people in their QC department, than are experienced in flight sims, to look at these updates, before they are released. If there are problems, fix the problems, and then release them. Most of us don't gives a rat's behind about things like Game of the Year. 

[sightseer 895]

It seems to me Asobo were doing just fine before they started listening to people who complained that the taxiway signs were too small, it was too dark under the clouds, the clouds were too defined, and the sim weather isn't an exact match for the weather at my local airport.

They had a sim which needed certain improvements.  It was NOT FSX but people keep trying to turn it into FSX and then they complain when Asobo does it.

I liked the sim with its 'realistic' weather.  I didnt need real world METAR matches.  I wonder where we'd be if they had just ignored the community and fixed the avionics and improved the flight planner and then set out to improve every aspect of what they'd written.

[bean_sprout 1,201]

Been there done that.  Weather is hard no matter who does it.

Regards

bs

[Bobsk8 12,753]

5 minutes ago, sightseer said:

It seems to me Asobo were doing just fine before they started listening to people who complained that the taxiway signs were too small, it was too dark under the clouds, the clouds were too defined, and the sim weather isn't an exact match for the weather at my local airport.

They had a sim which needed certain improvements.  It was NOT FSX but people keep trying to turn it into FSX and then they complain when Asobo does it.

I liked the sim with its 'realistic' weather.  I didnt need real world METAR matches.  I wonder where we'd be if they had just ignored the community and fixed the avionics and improved the flight planner and then set out to improve every aspect of what they'd written.

And don't forget the screaming and yelling about the trees>>>>>>😉

[threexgreen 3,142]

If they want to lock the weather system to third party devs in order to develop it on their own it's their right and I'm not inherently against it. But if they go this route they need to deliver and better so than SU7. The step back in the weather system compared to its previous state is concerning. Not because there are some bugs or because the METAR implementation just isn't ready yet, but because it was released in a very work in progress state that seriously downgrades the whole weather system. If you're going to have forced updates you can't constantly break things for customers. This update is another one which should have never been released in this state, so it seems that someone else is pressing to make deadlines which makes the quality of the product suffer greatly.

The second thing I find concerning is that it seems to me that the people working on the weather system, while certainly skilled, are not aviation-savvy enough or maybe not at all. I find this rather obvious from the nature of the bugs like ASL vs. MSL, magnetic vs. true heading, locking 10SM to always mean exactly 10SM, etc. If just one person with some aviation knowledge would have looked over this it would have gone a lot better than it did.

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

21 minutes ago, Gilandred said:

No, because Asobo has a good track record already?  Or for some other reason?  Just curious…..

To be clear I wasn’t advocating for an ActiveSky or REX model of METAR interpolation.  That too would be a regression in my opinion.

Because weather should be an integral part of the sim. I know it's not perfect but the prediction model is the proper way to go. It does need tweaking but I surely don't want to go back to ActiveSky days.

[Gilandred 690]

1 minute ago, fogboundturtle said:

Because weather should be an integral part of the sim. I know it's not perfect but the prediction model is the proper way to go. It does need tweaking but I surely don't want to go back to ActiveSky days.

I agree with you, and I wasn’t suggesting that even if others were.  I’m thinking in terms of MS hiring WT to improve the core aspects of the base sim.  Instead this would be weather focused.

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

Just now, Gilandred said:

I agree with you, and I wasn’t suggesting that even if others were.  I’m thinking in terms of MS hiring WT to improve the core aspects of the base sim.  Instead this would be weather focused.

What MSFS is doing has never been done before. They have a great partner in  MeteoBlue. We just need to be patient.

[threexgreen 3,142]

24 minutes ago, sightseer said:

They had a sim which needed certain improvements.  It was NOT FSX but people keep trying to turn it into FSX and then they complain when Asobo does it.

I'm not sure why people keep blaming the ones who wanted METARs to be included in the system. I don't think anyone wanted what we got now because this clearly doesn't work right. I don't think including METARS means what it is right now and we know that it can be done better because Hifi have done that for years. I'm sure this is going to be ironed out and the final METAR inclusion method of the weather will work a lot better than it does now. I'm no expert but I wholeheartedly doubt that there is no way to smoothly transition METAR reports into the predictive model, especially when a third party developer has pulled this off years ago in a simulator with a lot more limitations, even if that wasn't predictive like the one in MSFS.

Edited November 21, 2021 by threegreen

[flyinpilot212121 724]

I say bring in the Hifi team, they have been providing awesome weather software for the last X amount of years.. I’m hopeful that at some point the updates will level off and they will be much further apart which should ease the workload, and the consumers headache.

[KERNEL32 500]

"Weather is to a pilot, as water is to a fish"