FSLabs?

[bendead 1,085]

8 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

I could be mistaken, but I believe Meteoblue does have historical weather if you pay for it. So they do store the data somewhere.

But it might be the conversion from raw data to MSFS format

[Nemo 1,305]

18 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

So I'm going to counter your opinion, and @Ray Proudfoot's opinion on historical weather, with the link that @bendead posted: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/historic-weather-as-second-timeline/213758

A collective total of 266 people have voted for historical weather.  #266 that voted for it was me, to help placate your preferences and Ray's preferences, and get this request to Microsoft/Asobo's attention, even though I probably won't use historical weather myself.

Your comment that " MS/Asobo simply do not understand why historical weather and save flight situation would be so important" is wrong because they go by what the flight sim community tells them, by a democratic system of voting. If only 266 people voted for historical weather, of course Microsoft/Asobo are not going to prioritize it.

Sometimes I find it very weird how some people blame Microsoft/Asobo for something, and then when I do my own digging on the issue like this case with historical weather, I find that the flight sim community just doesn't find a certain feature to be a high priority (as proven by the 266 votes, which IMO, is quite low).

I support the 'democratic' wishlist. But it should not be the only (or main?) principle to decide what should be introduced and what not. Causual simmers may have different interests or fly only in their region or simply don't care what weather they fly. If software/games would only rely on wishlists, I'm not sure if this would be the best solution. Some 'leadership' by the developers is still required imo. I hope I explained my thoughts well enough and I feel a bit uncertain on this terrain when talking about leadership and voting system, as English is not my first language.

[abrams_tank 7,393]

11 minutes ago, JRBarrett said:

It’s not that Asobo does not understand the desire of users for historical weather - The problem is that with the system they currently use, it simply is not possible.

With MeteoBlue, the entire worldwide atmosphere is modeled. I have worked with other weather models professionally, and they are typically huge - often many hundreds of gigabytes for a complete dataset. MeteoBlue generates and sends the model data to Microsoft every 12 hours where it is imported into Azure to be provided to all MSFS clients using LiveWeather. If a given MSFS aircraft is flying at (example) latitude N35.34, longitude E005.23 at 10,000 feet MSL at 13:30Z it will send a request for the weather parameters for those coordinates, altitude and time, and the Azure server will return it.

With Active Sky in FSX and P3D, the complete weather file is sent to the end user’s computer. Their weather file consists of all current worldwide METAR observations (which are in simple text format) all winds aloft for the world, (again in text format), and a very simplified subset of data from the GFS model - adequate to place areas of clouds and precip in the correct locations but not as detailed as what is provided by the MeteoBlue model MSFS uses.

I believe the ActiveSky current weather file is only a couple of hundred megabytes in size, and they can easily store copies of the combined METAR/WINDS/simpified model data for each hour of every day going back many years on their servers. It is easy to fetch and deliver historical weather in this way to an individual ActiveSky client requesting it.

Not so with MSFS using the complete worldwide NEMS model. The model weather dataset is far too big to be sent to or stored on any MSFS end-user’s computer. The only way this kind of system can work is to have the model stored on the servers at Microsoft, and the relevant data streamed to end users to produce the weather at and surrounding the aircraft location. Historical weather simply is not (ever) going to possible with this kind of system.

I wonder if Microsoft/Asobo can do a compromise though. For example, store only a week's worth of data only, and not store all the detailed weather information, but store a less detailed version of the weather data.

For example, however granular Metoblue's data is (how many miles/km does each Metoblue data encompass?), they could do an average of multiple Metoblue data areas, into a larger area to store for historical data purposes, thus reducing the amount of data stored. And of course, if only one week's worth of data is stored, that would cut down on the amount of data stored.

They could explain that because of the huge storage requirements for historical data, they needed to make these tradeoffs, and I think the users that want historical data, would understand.  It wouldn't be perfect, but with compromises, I think some sort of historical weather data feature is possible.

[bendead 1,085]

3 minutes ago, Nemo said:

I support the 'democratic' wishlist. But it should not be the only (or main?) principle to decide what should be introduced and what not. Causual simmers may have different interests or fly only in their region or simply don't care what weather they fly. If software/games would only rely on wishlists, I'm not sure if this would be the best solution. Some 'leadership' by the developers is still required imo. I hope I explained my thoughts well enough and I feel a bit uncertain on this terrain when talking about leadership and voting system, as English is not my first language.

From what I heard from watching the different Q&A, their also have their own plan about the developement, but they use the wishlist as an extra feedback

Edited May 12, 2022 by bendead

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

I would chose to ignore Ray's comments all together. According to him MSFS is not mature enough but yet we got the Maddog, Bae-146. PMDG 737 , the Milviz C310R and the impeding release of the Fenix but yet MSFS is not "Mature" enough. The goalpost always keep moving.

[flightskyc 257]

The Neo sounds interesting, but I don't buy anything for P3D anymore. Only purchasing things for MSFS.

[abrams_tank 7,393]

1 minute ago, Nemo said:

I support the 'democratic' wishlist. But it should not be the only (or main?) principle to decide what should be introduced and what not. Causual simmers may have different interests or fly only in their region or simply don't care what weather they fly. If software/games would only rely on wishlists, I'm not sure if this would be the best solution. Some 'leadership' by the developers is still required imo. I hope I explained my thoughts well enough and I feel a bit uncertain on this terrain when talking about leadership and voting system, as English is not my first language.

Yes, but in this very thread, you have a lot of people that aren't casual simmers.  Is @Nyxx a casual simmer or @omarsmak30 a casual simmer? But they also both said they don't really use historical weather.  In fact, many of the people that use Avsim probably make up the "hard core" flight simmer market, IMO. There are a lot of people, even here at Avsim, that don't find historical weather to be a high priority.  And it's shown by the votes for it (266 votes when I voted for it).

And to be honest, I find the people that vote for topics in MSFS are actually the passionate "hard core" flight simmers. Most of the casual simmers for MSFS probably have quit by now, or they don't really bother to follow what Microsoft/Asobo is or is not doing.  Like when FBW asked for weather radar to be implemented in WASM, it was the "hard core" flight simmers that voted that topic to the top. And when another topic asking Microsoft/Asobo to support high fidelity 3rd party aircraft makers like PMDG was voted to the top, that was also pushed by the "hard core" flight simmers (casual simmers aren't going to pay $70 USD for a 737).

266 votes is what I expected, given the interest for historical here at Avsim in the MSFS forum.  

[honanhal 1,420]

11 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

I wonder if Microsoft/Asobo can do a compromise though. For example, store only a week's worth of data only, and not store all the detailed weather information, but store a less detailed version of the weather data.

For me, even offering one or two days worth of historical weather would solve 99% of the problem. You'd never have to fly with midday weather at night and vice versa.

[Manny 1,293]

What were they6 doing the last one year? They are just starting? Another two years?

[JRBarrett 3,038]

14 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

I wonder if Microsoft/Asobo can do a compromise though. For example, store only a week's worth of data only, and not store all the detailed weather information, but store a less detailed version of the weather data.

For example, however granular Metoblue's data is (how many miles/km does each Metoblue data encompass?), they could do an average of multiple Metoblue data areas, into a larger area to store for historical data purposes, thus reducing the amount of data stored. And of course, if only one week's worth of data is stored, that would cut down on the amount of data stored.

They could explain that because of the huge storage requirements for historical data, they needed to make these tradeoffs, and I think the users that want historical data, would understand.  It wouldn't be perfect, but with compromises, I think some sort of historical weather data feature is possible.

I’m not saying it would be impossible - but it would involve a major change in how LiveWeather is currently implemented, (to deal with a “scaled back” version of the MeteoBlue model for those who want historical data) plus the willingness of Microsoft to host the additional model files in their server infrastructure. 

[ryanbatc 12,803]

2 hours ago, Ricardo41 said:

Yawn.

I have to agree with you this time.

[dbw1 444]

I've been pleased with FSL A320 series. I'll support them when the time comes.

[evaamo 549]

Has Fenix mentioned anything with regards to expanding their products to the rest of the A3XX family? I understand what many here are saying with regards to FSL A320, however, unless Fenix manages to bring an A319 and an A321, then I don't see a reason not to go for it. Competition is great. Besides, FSL has a good record when it comes to delivering great products, we're yet to see what Fenix brings to the table.

     

[lefteris 70]

45 minutes ago, Fiorentoni said:

Unfortunately to me between the lines it seems like it's too late already, from what I've heard a lot of talented people left FSL because there was no future to be seen (it's hinted at in FSL's announcement). Now they are probably left with a worse, new team and way behind the market situation. Still they seem to have their focus on P3D and that's why I predict they will be effectively dead as a developer (perhaps like Qualitywings). Sad to say.

Someone brought this forum post to my attention - I am surprised to read this, as our development team has grown, rather than shrunk, as I mentioned in our announcement - you can read it here.

[Nemo 1,305]

16 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Yes, but in this very thread, you have a lot of people that aren't casual simmers.  Is @Nyxx a casual simmer or @omarsmak30 a casual simmer? But they also both said they don't really use historical weather.  In fact, many of the people that use Avsim probably make up the "hard core" flight simmer market, IMO. There are a lot of people, even here at Avsim, that don't find historical weather to be a high priority.  And it's shown by the votes for it (266 votes when I voted for it).

And to be honest, I find the people that vote for topics in MSFS are actually the passionate "hard core" flight simmers. Most of the casual simmers for MSFS probably have quit by now, or they don't really bother to follow what Microsoft/Asobo is or is not doing.  Like when FBW asked for weather radar to be implemented in WASM, it was the "hard core" flight simmers that voted that topic to the top. And when another topic asking Microsoft/Asobo to support high fidelity 3rd party aircraft makers like PMDG was voted to the top, that was also pushed by the "hard core" flight simmers (casual simmers aren't going to pay $70 USD for a 737).

266 votes is what I expected, given the interest for historical here at Avsim in the MSFS forum.  

Now we have five more = 271 votes 🙂 Just one last comment about this. It is some time ago when during a Q&A session JN asked why simmers would wish historical weather. Not sure if he got a good reply during this session because the users are asking questions and the devloper try to answer them.