Active Sky faced difficulties in bringing the meteorological

[jarmstro 2,405]

37 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I fail to understand what is so difficult about creating cirrus clouds. They’ve existed in AS for as long as I can remember.

Yes but in Active Sky cirrus clouds were not part of the live weather depiction. At least in XP they weren't. They were injected separately and you had to choose how much you wanted via a slider. Not real at all.

[Mike S KPDX 598]

23 hours ago, jarmstro said:

Active Sky is not necessary for MSFS whereas it was for the legacy sims.

I agree fully on this statement

[Ray Proudfoot 9,045]

9 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

Yes but in Active Sky cirrus clouds were not part of the live weather depiction. At least in XP they weren't. They were injected separately and you had to choose how much you wanted via a slider. Not real at all.

Hmmm. Are you sure? I use the Dynamic theme in ASCA which is the one recommended for best results. If there’s an option to inject cirrus can you point me to it?

I’ll look at it tomorrow but I’d be amazed if it wasn’t based on actual data. This is for P3D v5.3HF2, not XP.

[Kevin_28 167]

23 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Ever flown in Australia, New Zealand or Alaska in daytime? If so the sim is depicting night-time weather for a daytime flight. Realistic? Hmmm.

To be fair, I read it the same way jarmstro did, initially. I thought there was some sort of bug where if you are flying in real time, the weather is injecting old data all the time throughout those regions. If you stated that you were flying outside of real time and the weather is not reflecting your set in-sim time, then that would have made things clear. You did clarify what you meant eventually though.

The thing is, there are quite a few other forum topics on here that covered this topic particular extensively. Honestly, I don't really see a whole lot of new info that warrants this. It's the same repetitive statements being made. 

At this point, I can live with most of the deficiencies of the weather in the sim. I don't usually fly historical, and even if I set it to day time, I'm OK with flying in real time weather that doesn't match. I understand that simmers want everything to match, and I get it, but for me it's not terribly important. Expanded cloud formations are also a major plus, but I can tolerate what we currently have now. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few things that I really want, allow for 3rd part devs to at least implement a fully featured WX radar system with tilt, windshear detection, etc. I don't care if ASOBO provides one that devs can tap into or if they open up raw data (unlikely). The second is the bug where there are dramatic random wind/pressure shifts during flight. It's pretty annoying and causes my aircraft to overspeed or potentially stall depending on the shifts. Then it randomly reverts back. It's like some hiccup in the data. Maybe the third one is that they buffer the gust changes, but so far it hasn't been really problematic for me during flight and landing/takeoff phases.

[Ray Proudfoot 9,045]

@Kevin_28, I only posted when I needed to explain about flying in time zones very different to the location of the user and not keeping the sim time to Zulu. It’s something I’ve repeated a few times when this debate resurfaces.

What is different with this discussion is we’ve had input from the Active Sky developers. Damian has explained the problem. These things are best discussed on the official MS/Asobo forums but it’s debatable if they’ll give any useful replies.

[lwt1971 7,464]

9 hours ago, Lucky38i said:

Always funny to see this cope the moment someone finds out their game is on a console, an x86 machine mind you but alas. No, PC users are not restricted to what is available for Xbox, this is demonstrated by the numerous addons that use external programs, WASM compilations etc. that are all available on PC that are not on Xbox. If it hasn't already been shown, Both versions are compiled to different a specification, with the PC variant being standard, and Xbox having functionality removed.

The cognitive dissonance is unreal to suggest Asobo isn't interested in complexity of flight, what so CFD, was just for fun? The "from the ground-up" helicopter flight model, just a figment of your imagination? Partnering with Ini to bring the high fidelity A310, that was for the "gamers" amiright? Where have we seen any other sim with the complexity of weather modelling as we've seen in MSFS as a default offering. Which other sim has dedicated itself to garnering a mass audience to appease simmers of varying levels and allow anyone from anywhere to just get started.

Right?? Well said... cognitive dissonance and just all-around comedy from the usual suspects as evidenced in this thread. The cope is real indeed 🙂 ... The Navigraph survey is always interesting to note: https://download.navigraph.com/docs/flightsim-community-survey-by-navigraph-2022-final.pdf, and in particular these two questions and top answers:

3.8.2 (page 42): Important Flight Simulator Factors:
- Realistic aerodynamic model - 95% (60+% very important, 35% important)
- Realistic world graphics - 90% (50% very important, 40% important)

3.8.1 (page 40): How often do you fly any of the following flight simulator software
- MSFS (PC edition) - 66% (55% most of the time, 11% frequently)
- 2nd place sim platform - 17% (9% most of the time, 8% frequently)
- 3rd place sim platform - 10% (5% most of the time, 5% frequently)

Those two questions along with other ones in that survey of Serious Simmers ™️ make it clear that MSFS is very popular among those who consider flight realism to be a very important factor... That said, having personally used all the sims out there over the many years and experiencing MSFS in its current form I sure didn't need this survey to confirm what I already know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯... In any case, I definitely agree with you and would say MS/Asobo seem to be doing the right things given the reception among the user base and 3rd party devs across the spectrum
 

Edited March 10, 2023 by lwt1971

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

2 hours ago, jarmstro said:

You are assuming that with the "we" you think you are speaking for the majority of MSFS users. I doubt that you are.

The ‘we’ is taken from MSFS’s OWN voting system! Like I say, over 1000 votes for cockpit builders, and barely a decent response from Asobo. Now over 1000 votes is a LOT of votes, comparing to over votes in their system. 

[Noel 4,563]

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I fail to understand what is so difficult about creating cirrus clouds.

It might be this Ray, from HiFi's website.  The main issue is how volumetric clouds are being modeled now versus in the recent past.  The current low-resolution method (be it MSFS, XP or P3D's Enhanced Atmospherics) doesn't lend itself well to the kind of complexity and detail afforded by the prior 2D sprites method (I think that's what it could be called).  The qualifier from HiFi sums the issue up as it applies to P3D:

*Notice: ASCA content is partially compatible with Prepar3D v5’s EA mode (Enhanced Atmospherics).  When using EA mode, only cloud structures and cloud textures will be (optionally) available for depiction from ASCA, and all other graphics categories are replaced by P3D’s internal EA depiction.  

Damian mentioned (above) they experimented with a hybrid approach but it never came to fruition.   Do you use EA in P3D, or stick w/ non-EA whatever it's called?  The latter seems to be where you get the high detail, nice variety of detailed cloud structures and so forth.  So of course this begs a critical question I saw posed on here or on the MSFS forum:  are we using the wrong model?  Sure seems so in many ways.  That all 3 sims went there--was that the work of the Pied Piper?  When I look at the fuzzy/blurry clouds in all 3 sims it just clear it has a ways to go.  

[pmb 5,138]

I wouldn't overestimate that voting system. It makes sense and tells MS what the community (to be honest, that part of it frequenting their forum) wants, but blindly following it would lead to a zigzag development without a long-term strategy, including a continuous re-assignment of resources.

I am certain MS (Jörg) has a pretty solid plan for the next years and decides on a by-case base what they assimilate out of the community voting. Given they are developing an overall very convincing sim (IMHO) I have a lot of fun with, I am even willing to accept that some wishes - even of mine - are not (yet) prioritized, despite higher votings. Including that nasty horizon line with 698 votes which they reject to even consider, certainly not without a reason.

Kind regards, Michael

[Ray Proudfoot 9,045]

15 minutes ago, Noel said:

Do you use EA in P3D, or stick w/ non-EA whatever it's called?  The latter seems to be where you get the high detail, nice variety of detailed cloud structures and so forth.

I’ve tried EA On and Off in P3D with Volumetric Clouds Off. I prefer the look of clouds and sky that way. Plus that option keeps the virtual cockpits from going too dark. I’ve tried EA a few times but can’t live with the look. Purely subjective of course. I’m sure many love it.

With it off the clouds have lots of detail, have crisp edges and cirrus looks very realistic. The sky is a very natural blue too. It’s also easier on my ageing 1080Ti especially in 4K.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

13 minutes ago, pmb said:

on a by-case base what they assimilate out of the community voting.

The irony being that in this post, most people would love active sky to come to MSFS. Yet Asobo won’t have it. 
 

Let’s see shall we:-

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/enhanced-api-to-access-all-aircraft-state-and-trigger-all-cockpit-functions/454608
 

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/open-up-the-weather-system-write-access-to-3rd-party-devs/266706

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/implement-weather-and-terrain-api-s-for-aircraft-developers-to-implement-accurate-radar-predictive-windshear-egpws-and-metar-wind-uplink/442016

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/c/bugs-and-wishlist/wishlist/163/l/latest?order=votes


 

 

Edited March 10, 2023 by Ianrivaldosmith

[Noel 4,563]

7 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I’ve tried EA On and Off in P3D with Volumetric Clouds Off. I prefer the look of clouds and sky that way. Plus that option keeps the virtual cockpits from going too dark. I’ve tried EA a few times but can’t live with the look. Purely subjective of course. I’m sure many love it.

With it off the clouds have lots of detail, have crisp edges and cirrus looks very realistic. The sky is a very natural blue too. It’s also easier on my ageing 1080Ti especially in 4K.

Yep I rest my case.  You can't yet do crisp edged anything w/ the current volumetric voxel-based modeling.  I think it is certain it will come and at that point it may be very clear it's ready to compete w/ the old model.  From a distance, as Damian referred to, VC can look great, and fully out to the horizon up down and sideways, so not saying it is all bad by any stretch.  But up close....it looks about as crisp as this portrait...well a little better, but not much:

 

[scotchegg 4,252]

4 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

my feeling is, technically they could perhaps allow for 3rd party injection/modifications of a weather system that is client/server based on a platform like MSFS (though I'd think the technical work/challenges to provide this are greater on a platform like this, vs legacy sims that are not dependent on cloud services)..

And again, this is something I don’t get. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, it is already possible to inject live weather from outside as xEnviro is already doing it. So is it not so much a problem of the sim being locked up, but the resources of the dev?

[mmcmah 447]

23 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

And again, this is something I don’t get. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, it is already possible to inject live weather from outside as xEnviro is already doing it. So is it not so much a problem of the sim being locked up, but the resources of the dev?

XEnviro and Rex are using a hack to inject weather. By no means the way they'd rather do it and honestly causes other problems (stutters, crashes).

Also, they inject METAR weather that at the best of times reflects a local area, but they can't inject region wide weather that is different from area to area without reinjecting periodically (as you move, so the weather depiction can change quite suddenly).

I have grudgingly (because I'd really rather a better solution than what the sim provides) given up on Rex as of a couple of months ago.

Edited March 10, 2023 by mmcmah

[scotchegg 4,252]

Just now, mmcmah said:

XEnviro and Rex are using a hack to inject weather.

Ok, it’s a hack, but it’s not like plane addons throughout flightsim history haven’t been using hacks to get around engine / API limitations for years with mostly acceptable results.