"The sky to a pilot is as the ocean is to a fish, it's our World!" If we are living in the sim sky, it should be "as real as it gets".

IMO the weather in MSFS is a great start (and better than any sim ever but only because MSFS has World scenery coverage versus DCS); BUT still needs a lot of work. What needs work? Atmosphere (visibility, humidity, smoke, etc.), towering cumulus, cumulonimbus with a reason to avoid them, a true overcast that doesn't start poking holes 2 minutes after loading sim, actual multiple layers "as advertised (60 layers?), cirrus, denser clouds, etc. etc.

 

1 hour ago, KERNEL32 said:

IMO the weather in MSFS is a great start

Imho it WAS a good start. I remember seeing screenshots from the release version and having to look twice to tell if it was a real photo or a screenshot. And I considered it "New-Tech", being based on data from professional weather forecast models and thus creating a lively, belieavable weather environment. Not nearly perfect, but a good start. Unfortunately two things happened: visuals were sacrificed for performance with Sim Update5, in which the lighting and rendering of the clouds changed dramatically for the worse. Sim Update 7 changed the data and their interpretation by the sim in the attempt to increase the accuracy by implementing METAR synthesis. That is what I consider "Old tech", as it was the way to display weather since the very early FS days: reading METAR reports and trying to place clouds into the sky accordingly. The result was hilarious: overcast, multilayered cloudscapes, stratiform clouds - all lost. What remained was "Some weather (TM)", displaying mostly wildfire smoke instead of clouds, and not remotely more accurate than before.

Thankfully with SU11 Live weather is mostly reasonable again and accurate enough, but it lacks liveliness and fidelity. It has a generic look and feel, and every screenshot is immediately identifiable as coming from a game.

 

On 12/2/2022 at 11:22 AM, F737MAX said:

There's a frustration that it's taking such a long time and *appears* to be low on the priority list behind new content.

But the sad truth is that the respective threads in the official forums see little participitation which results in repetitive discussions between the same individuals instead of constructive feedback by many - which is a shame, as many of those threads are tagged "feedback logged", meaning the contributions are fed into dashboards to enable forum staff to identify bugs and flaws and forward the information to the developers.Those could be and not limited to

• true overcast still missing
• multiple layers not overly convincing
• cirrus clouds/stratiform clouds underwhelming
• cloud density unsatisfactory
• cloudscapes in Live weather too cumulus heavy
• TCU and CB in Live weather look like wildfire/Storm depiction underwhelming
• aerosol density in Live weather
• generic look and feel in Live weather
• ...

Edited December 4, 20223 yr by Tom_L

'True overcast still missing' I can't second that. On my todays flight from Prague to Dusseldorf I had overcast all the way. Maybe twice that I saw very small patches of farmland. And this overcast wasn't stretched cumulus either, true stratus type I would say.