The weather...

The developer's answer was a little awkward I suppose but also shows a misunderstanding between them and us. There are several facets to the weather issue that we should sort out in our claim for a better weather.  And saying that the weather is broken is a little short. It is not IMHO.  

Few thoughts on this.

1/ There were a few bugs (temperature, winds) but my experience of the sim (YMMV) is that the weather engine brings about a truer dynamic depiction of the weather, most of the time, than before in other sims. 

2/ There is the recurrent claim that the sim weather is no the exact weather we see through in our windows. It sounds to me a little exaggerated and coming mostly from the Vatsim crowd. I need the weather to be convincing not realist to the minute. An example : when I fly a tropical area by the sea I don't find very convincing to see a clear sky without a fart of cloud. If it does not rain exactly when it does in the real world, I don't care because showers come and go in these regions.  MSFS doesn't do a bad job but not all the time. 

3/ The problems with the clouds are twofold. Lack of variety but mostly the fact that the light rendering can make them transparent or ashen or pixelated. You can have superb cloudscapes or totally ridiculous nuclear doomsday ones.This has been the case since the very beginning and I remember hot discussions before the release on the matter.  It seems that SU5 has  worsened the issue.

4/ The UI is shamefully poor to plan a flight and it is surprising that it is still so 18 months after release. 

5/ The reluctance to give the weather at the time set for the flight, improperly called historical weather, an expression which leads to some confusion, is incomprehensible.  

6/ The effect of the weather on aircraft is another matter. I have observed the toning down of the turbulences to a point where they are almost gone. Is this an issue with the aircraft I fly or the weather ? The opinions differ.  The new video on aerodynamics could shed some light on this.

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by Dominique_K

9 hours ago, scotchegg said:

2) Was XP11 not a simulator for simmers before the Hot Start Challenger was released?

I wish I could have given your post a thousand likes lol. I have a feeling some specifics of what can and cannot be done were lost in the summary and people are running with that. The lead dev specifically mentioned the menu system on the Hot Start. In any case, the Fenix A320 is a thing so I have no idea why anyone would refer to MSFS as a "sim" or question it being a sim for simmers. Just another day at Avsim.

 

Edit: Ok wow, I completely missed @MattNischan's response but it looks like I was spot with my interpretation of what the dev was talking about. I don't know the first thing about how to manipulate the SDK but I do know a little about the English language so that helped me out in this case 😁. Oh and Matt, thanks for taking the time to clear things up once again.

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by Krakin

20 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

The weather...

 

Fully agreed. I wouldn't say it is broken, rather it is lacking features a state of the art weather engine should have.

I don't care too much for the obvious bugs or the downtimes, most of the time it seems to work as intended.

Their struggle to comply with the demands of the Vatsim crowd for weather accurately matching the METARs seems to have made matters worse. For me as well the weather needs to be convincing, not hundred percent accurate. Skies without one cirrus cloud worldwide are not convincing. Nighttime temperatures when flying at noon are not convincing (= lack of "historic" weather). The lack of thermal activity on a sunny day is not convincing. 

For weather phenomenons effecting the aircraft the weather phenomenons must be rendered in the sim at first. Thermals are not. I agree that the effect of turbulence on aircraft needs to be looked at separately as well.

 

 

1 hour ago, MattNischan said:

Hi all, just to clarify Eric's comments regarding the Challenger,

Good, this settles an important point.

33 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Good, this settles an important point.

If you miss Black Mesa you will love the Challenger.🤪

11 hours ago, scotchegg said:

2) Was XP11 not a simulator for simmers before the Hot Start Challenger was released?

Seen this?

 

3 hours ago, MattNischan said:

I do not see any SDK impediment to making an addon in MSFS as deep as the Challenger, except in one or two very narrow areas (such as present limits on the WXR or terrain rendering, if you're not bringing your own GPWS data).

Ok great, but ... proof?

 

3 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

I think there are already blackout effects implemented with SU7.  For some of the other stuff you list, it's up to the 3rd party dev to implement it.  For example, hypoxia.  There is no reason the 3rd party dev cannot implement code to detect altitudes where hypoxia sets in and if that plane is not rated to go up to that altitude, the 3rd party dev can model hypoxia.  Same with flaps getting damaged at overspeed. Again, I believe the 3rd party dev can implement that, if they wanted to.

I know, not soo many are interested in such (again 😄 ) "hardcore" simming, but why should this be implemented only for some chosen and few planes by 3rd party devs, as in reality every plane is affected by it. This should be part of the base sim and no 3rd party dev had to develop all this stuff from scratch on his own (aka "reinventing the wheel").
I haven't seen real planes that are equipped with e.g. damaged flaps, hypoxia, bad friction on ice, etc. afterwards by buying supplemental equipment 😉 .
 

3 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

About the friction with the runway on landing depending on if it's raining or snowing, I think the 3rd party dev may have control over that as well.

Do you think or do you know?

 

2 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

For weather phenomenons effecting the aircraft the weather phenomenons must be rendered in the sim at first. Thermals are not. I agree that the effect of turbulence on aircraft needs to be looked at separately as well.

This ... also e.g. (and not only) up- and downdrafts within clouds. I have seen many videos called "ULTRAREALISTIC ...", "IN HEAVY THUNDERSTORM ...", "MUST SEE ..." (you name it). The clouds indeed are more or less impressive (or let's say dramatic) looking - although some say they are looking like volcano ash - but that's only the viusal aspect.

9 minutes ago, uwespeed said:

Ok great, but ... proof?

Matt is the proof.  He is the lead of the Working Title team, hired by Microsoft/Asobo, and works on MSFS day in and day out.  He probably knows the SDK better than anybody else here at Avsim. Good grief, are you saying you know more about MSFS than Matt?

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by abrams_tank

20 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Matt is the proof.  He is the lead of the Working Title team, hired by Microsoft/Asobo, and works on MSFS day in and day out.  He probably knows the SDK better than anybody else here at Avsim. Good grief, are you saying you know more about MSFS than Matt?

Just goes to show how cluelss he is.

5 hours ago, MattNischan said:

Hi all, just to clarify Eric's comments regarding the Challenger,

Eric was specifically reacting to the deep sim menu system that the Challenger creates in his answer (which he states but the synopsis missed). There is no current plan to allow devs to add a zillion of their own menus.

However, if all that stuff was on an EFB or a top panel popout, then that would be no problem. I do not see any SDK impediment to making an addon in MSFS as deep as the Challenger, except in one or two very narrow areas (such as present limits on the WXR or terrain rendering, if you're not bringing your own GPWS data).

Possibly, but if on one sdk it takes much less time and manpower hence it is better suited. Meanwhile teams that are 4x larger than HS are lagging way behind in that area even when trying to port existing systems. It's not all about "what is possible" more about effciency. 

Edited February 10, 20224 yr by mtaxp

5 hours ago, uwespeed said:

Seasons and weather effects. It was since ever said, XP has no seasons, whereas the competitor has. Wrong. WHAT? Sure, it's true, that XP visually hadn't seasons (at least not by default), but on the other hand it was and is simulated.

1. Examples: Accumulating ice on the wings in respective weather conditions.

2.   Runways: in X-Plane at temperatures below 0° C and rain, you get an icy runway with very low friction, i.e. the braking distance is much longer. Same applies for rain at above 0° C, however the braking distance is shorter. FSX has indeed depicted wet runways visually, but ... had even below 0° C a braking distance of maybe 10% longer than on dry runway (as far as I remember, in FS9 it was even no difference at all).

As has been tirelessly pointed out to you ‘over there’, these are not depictions of seasons but localized weather influences that an happen irrespective of seasons.

For someone who says they’re not trying to derail the thread, posting a list of where XP beats FSX in an MSFS forum (at least one item of which is patently wrong) certainly looks like you’re throwing a concrete block on the tracks.

3 minutes ago, mtaxp said:

Possibly, but if on one sdk it takes much less time and manpower hence it is better suited. Meanwhile teams that are 4x larger than HS are lagging way behind in that area even when trying to port existing systems. It's not all about "what is possible" more about effciency. 

Did you consider that some sims and its SDKs have been around for many years (decades?), giving the time to the developers to train, get familiar with it, learn, and find workarounds? The knowledge base is there. MSFS SDK is available for less than 2 years, so there are not experienced developers yet, not at the same level of experience as in P3D or XP. The Challenger popped out at the end of the lifecycle of XP11 and not in the first 2 years, for a good reason.

Some problems don´t get solved faster by throwing more people or more money to them, but by giving time to the people to get experienced. As frustrating as it sounds, we may have to wait some years to get addons at the same level of complexity as we have in other sims. 

53 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

As has been tirelessly pointed out to you ‘over there’, these are not depictions of seasons but localized weather influences that an happen irrespective of seasons.

For someone who says they’re not trying to derail the thread, posting a list of where XP beats FSX in an MSFS forum (at least one item of which is patently wrong) certainly looks like you’re throwing a concrete block on the tracks.

I didn't ... point it out 'tirelessly' 'over there', but only one single time. As no answer came up, I'm trying to get one 'over here'. It's as simple as that 🙂. What I know, where MSFS is better than FSX is e.g. that the forces (drag, lift, etc.) don't act any more only on the CG. That's the reason, why I asked "... what meanwhile is possible in MSFS 2020".

And well - weather and its impact on the environment is dependent on seasons. Not only, but to a great extent.

 

19 hours ago, crimplene said:

You might have missed Matt's explanation right above your post.

That I did miss, using the phone and battling the ads that drop down half the screen in safari lol. At least my minds at ease now. 

On 2/10/2022 at 2:46 PM, micstatic said:

I was disappointed with the ground texture answer.  It's quite often that my airport scenery looks better on other sims from the same developer.  I've heard a developer refer to this as projected mesh in msfs.  For me having crisp ground textures is a massive part of the immersion.  Hopefully they change their mind on that later down the road.  

Yep... this is a real pain. The projected mesh (a method used for developers to add their own ground textures) has a limitation on the resolution (whereas the other sims do not) and also adds an unwanted decal. I'm really hoping at some point this will be fixed as it clearly shows up when porting ground textures between sims. There are unofficial hacks you can do, such as construct the entire ground as a 3d object (then you can texture it as you like), but that also has a host of problems with it as well.