9 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

The best overall weather experience in terms of accuracy of winds, turbulence, gusts are with HiFi ASP3D + loaded flight plan (with or without volumetric clouds).

Although I haven’t bought MSFS I have watched a lot of videos and the clouds have never impressed me. I agree that those in P3D with ASP3D/ASCA and without EA on have always looked the most realistic.

1 minute ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I have watched a lot of videos and the clouds have never impressed me.

If I wrote here what I really think of MSFS clouds, I would be banned for using words not allowed. 😁

10 minutes ago, Rafal said:

If I wrote here what I really think of MSFS clouds, I would be banned for using words not allowed. 😁

Work in progress I guess. 😉

I remain with Prepar 3D the real Flight Simulator, and if i want to play a game i prefer  Grand Theft Auto rather than MSFS..

 

cheers

     Georgio

Maybe I am in the minority... I am not saying that MSFS weather is more realistic, but it was much more visually appealing than what I am getting in P3D 5.3 P3D and ASCA/envtex. 

My reason for staying with P3D is because the plaform is more mature, and the addons for today are more advanced, and it's possible to complete a flight without risks of CTD or relying on online scenery streaming. I am into tubeliner flying which is a no for MSFS at the moment. 

I was not a fan of the flight dynamics in MSFS either, but hopefully this will change in a future update. Due to all the addons I have recently invested in after getting back to the hobby, I'll have to stay on P3D for one or two more years while MSFS develops further. 

P3D today is a better choice for long haul. The biggest cons for me personally in P3D is the badly optimized dynamic lightning, and the anti-aliasing is not the best. 

Edited February 13, 20224 yr by Ikarus280

Dynamic lighting in P3D is a bit of a strange one. It can hit performance relatively hard at one airport (even a relatively small one), and yet hardly make a difference at all at a really large airport. It does not seem to make a lot of sense

Edited February 13, 20224 yr by Christopher Low

We will see which sim is still  around in two years. 

hopefully all of them !

Based on some of the posts I read, I’m starting to think that some folks have big money on P3D failing. Apparently, there is a contest between folks that prefer one sim over another. In my opinion, it is becoming toxic and exhausting. The opening post was thoughtful and well written, and should not incite any “mine is better than yours” argument. Once again, just my opinion as someone who owns both MSFS and P3Dv5.

Cheers, Pete

16 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

We will see which sim is still  around in two years. 

Wouldn’t it be ideal if both sims are around in two years? Seems to me that this would result in the maximum amount of happy simmers.

Cheers, Pete

I agree with you , more sims the better , bickering means nothing only time will tell 

7 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

That was precisely the point I was going to make. Weather is a lot more than ATIS at departure and arrival airports. Over long distance flights all sorts of temperatures and wind levels will exist.

You would have to have access to a huge amount of data and be very committed to enter all that into the sim every 20-30 mins.

It’s an extremely important aspect of flying and serious pilots must rue the lack of historical weather in MSFS. It’s one of the two primary reasons I won’t buy it for anything other than general sightseeing flights below 3,000ft.

True, but then again I don't use ATIS in the sim for that I use metars and notams, I do initially use ATIS for the departure clearance settings and the clearance itself with ATC, but I use windy.com and supplement it with RealVolmet for anything after that if I'm after real-time real world weather, then change en-route weather with that if there is anything significant that I deem is worth making an adjustment for. On a long haul flight where you slap on LNAV and VNAV then do the Telegraph Crossword, it is one of the few things one actually needs to do, so monitoring that stuff is what crews do for real anyway, thus it's no real hardship if one really is sitting at the controls for the entire duration. This would also be the case for P3D, FSX, XPlane et all, since none of those have that stuff completely correct all the way for a long haul flight either when firing in historical weather, especially over oceanic areas where there are no weather stations recording stuff, or at least that's my experience with Active Sky in FSX and P3D. AS is impressive for sure, and if it came out for MSFS I'd buy it in a heartbeat, as I have done with all FS versions of it right from the very first version which I reviewed for Avsim way back when. But as much as a fan of it as I am, it doesn't get everything right all the time.

Another tthing I did initially sorely miss with MSFS, which for a while was only available for P3D but is now also available for MSFS, was MA RealTurb's REALVOLMET add-on, which allows one to tune the radio into real Volmet stations along the route and get the weather from all the ground stations in Europe. That one is really useful for airliner flying over distances greater than about a thousand miles where you've got two hours of time in which a significant change can occur, as are those Volmet stations in real life in reporting that stuff. But perhaps more noteworthy for me, was the fact that its subsequent availability for MSFS was indicative that these sort of useful and more 'hardcore' type of add-ons are slowly getting released for MSFS . This was also a reason why I was glad I'd bought it for P3D previously, because it came with a half-price discount for the MSFS version as a result of having bought it previously for the LM sim.

When it comes to weather in a flight sim, what really interests me more than anything is the stuff one has to be very wary of in real life which can surprise you, i.e. the CBs which you would either try to climb over, slip under, completely steer around, or just avoid completely by not taking off in the first place! As good as Active Sky with AS Cloud Art is in P3D, it never represents these things in their truly visually threatening and stunning form. MSFS on the other hand was the first sim I've seen which really makes CBs look massive, threatening and genuinely scary, as they are in real life.

Below is a pic from MSFS initial release version. Things have improved a bit since then visually, but I had this shot to hand on imgur, so I used it here, but even in this shot of CBs prior to a number of further visual tweaks to the way clouds look in the sim, you can see that the CB off to the left really does look like something you'd not ever want to mess with. It really does look like it would rip your wings off and it also looks like asking ATC to vector you around it would be a good idea. I've never seen anything like that in P3D, even with Active Sky or TrueSky. I can't say I think the lighting on those clouds is perfect by any means, but the overall effect of it does get the idea across that it's a dangerous bit of sky for sure.

Of course pretty visuals aren't everything and they aren't, nor ever have been, top of my list where flight sims are concerned, but when it comes to a visual representation of the medium your aeroplane actually flies through where it might affect one's decision to steer around stuff, those looks do take on some greater significance for me.

@Chock, good post. Do you not find it tiresome having to add this info manually into the Wx engine in MSFS. I would.

Have Asobo given no indication as to whether they will add historical weather?

I agree that those CBs do look very impressive. Later screenshots and videos less so. I understand only cumulus are currently depicted due to some mess up.

I’m guessing Active Sky have never gone for those dramatic skies as the fps hit was too severe.

2 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

We will see which sim is still  around in two years. 

I know which simulator will be on my SSD in two years: Prepar3D 5.x

12 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Do you not find it tiresome having to add this info manually into the Wx engine in MSFS. I would.

In fairness I don't often do that because I'm usually fairly happy with what MSFS comes up with when just letting it do the business itself, so I tend to fly with whatever the real weather is at that time whatever it is, particularly since I like using RealVolmet en-route and that is of course pulling stuff it generates from the real VOLMET transmissions in real time, as its name of course suggests.

Generally speaking I can crank up a flight at Manchester in MSFS, look out of my window toward the real place which is about three miles away as the crow flies, and it looks the same in the sim as it does out of my window, so I know it's not doing a terrible job of replicating stuff from the data its getting. Cross-checking with windy.com, I also find it appears to be doing a decent job of the weather at the other place where I tend to fly in the sim a lot, which is Madagascar and the African mainland, since that is where my Air Hauler company is based. High altitude winds are not something which affects those flights, as I invariably operate old bangers like the DC-6 and modern turboprops, both of which tend to fly at the 20,000 feet mark. This is why the visual depiction of thunderstorms plays a big part in things for, as those old and new prop jobs can't climb over those Charlie Bravos and most of them don't have any fancy GPS avionics to display weather overlay, nor do they usually have radar either. This is why I'm very much looking forward to the forthcoming Wing 42 Boeing 247 for MSFS, because there's never been a decent payware one of those for any sim, and I just love those old thirties and forties airliners more than anything else with wings.

All of this is not to say I don't think MSFS couldn't be improved and given other capabilities, but for me it does the job, and that was related to the title of this thread, which was concerning what MSFS does and what P3D does for the OP and why he personally chooses the latter, but then also asked 'what about you?' So whilst  I agree it would be a bit more tedious to do it all for historical weather and such, the point I was making is that it's not impossible, just not as easy as it is in other sims. There are still plenty of good reasons to use more than one flight sim, which is why I do, but I do tend to use MSFS a lot more than anything else these days although if historical weather was a big thing for me, I might, like the OP, be inclined to do differently.