It is such a shame that MSFS still does not provide historical weather and it still is no more than "under investigation" - whatever that means. The sim just is not complete without historical weather for those who care for the differences in weather between night and day or summer and winter.

That alone is a reason to wish for Active Sky to come into the picture.

 

Edited March 9, 20233 yr by RALF9636

38 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

One of the many reasons that MSFS appeals to me over my previous P3D and XP experiences is not worrying about add-ons upon add-ons to improve a subpar default experience. 

Ok, so then no addon -- Asobo really need to add the ability to have the past day's weather, so that when I get home from work in the evening, I don't have to always fly in nighttime visibility.

What technical barriers do other devs have that XEnviro doesn’t in injecting live weather? 

1 hour ago, Silicus said:

Really? MSFS has 'gamefied' weather. There are at least 16 cloud types in the real world. MSFS has max 2 plus fog/vis.

If they are not willing to open up the weather API they should at least work on more realistic weather, without sudden changes that make the AP disconnect, wrong/no humidity depiction, very limited cloud representation, etc.

They are a long way from 'pretty good' in my opinion.'

ActiveSky would be a welcomed addition as they did a 'pretty good' job in past sims!

You are right about the lack of many types of clouds. It is, in my opinion, a current limitation of the base cloud-graphic engine, kind of. As a consequence, I'm not sure any 3rd party weather engine would be able to draw anything better, or anything that the base engine is not natively able to draw. But I actually really hope I'm wrong on this. 

There is also, as you mentioned, the problem of the humidity level being incorrectly depicted. However, this is just a temporary bug of the real weather feature, since the base engine is able to draw that (and we see it in themes or manual weather).

Overall, I still think the weather depiction we get in MSFS is ahead of anything we had in the past. The 2D rotating sprites we had in the previous sims were already quite bad when flying in 2D, but I simply couldn't stand them anymore once I switched to VR. The cloud lighting at various time of the day/night is also another element that made the 2D clouds outdated. Yes, there is always some screenshots showing beautiful, photorealistic REX cumulonimbus cloud formations... but these look good only on fixed screenshots. When flying around them, it's a whole different story.

All these problems have finally disappeared with the 3D clouds, and I'm so glad about that. I just hope the missing cloud types are purely a matter of time and we'll eventually get them...

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I hope they can stay afloat in what must be challenging times for them.

Can’t be that challenging if they’re giving active sky XP11 users this version for free. I bought it way back in 2019, and I can now use the new version absolutely free of charge. Bonkers .

Thankfully it's working great in XP12 - ASXP12 has just been released in Open beta today, and the experience is ASTOUNDING!!! including radar echoes in my Zibo 737 😍

Edited March 9, 20233 yr by cagarini

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I hope they can stay afloat in what must be challenging times for them.

Indeed  ...... only recently, when I asked ASP3D to increase its server capacity so as to provide "all metars" (alongside TAF's) recorded with live/current weather for their historic records (they are only hourly snapshots of the latest in that hour at the moment), I felt their reluctance to do so was more for financial than technical reasons.

So for now, when regularly "flying" historic, I need to rely as much if not more so on the "fortunately" included TAF's for airport conditions I might see. Disapppointingly, ASP3D's current data is way more accurate than historic.

 

 

9 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Can’t be that challenging if they’re giving active sky XP11 users this version for free. I bought it way back in 2019, and I can now use the new version absolutely free of charge. Bonkers .

That was my estimation rather than fact. I have no idea what other projects they are involved with.

Seems they can’t win. If they’d charged for the update some people would no doubt complain why they have to pay for it.

1 hour ago, Silicus said:

Really? MSFS has 'gamefied' weather. There are at least 16 cloud types in the real world. MSFS has max 2 plus fog/vis.

If they are not willing to open up the weather API they should at least work on more realistic weather, without sudden changes that make the AP disconnect, wrong/no humidity depiction, very limited cloud representation, etc.

They are a long way from 'pretty good' in my opinion.'

ActiveSky would be a welcomed addition as they did a 'pretty good' job in past sims!

To me 'pretty good' means plausible enough to not ruin the 1000's of hours of flights logged but yes a lot is missing.  I can't imagine how HiFi, which AFAIK has no finished products using the basic low voxel density structures you see in MSFS and XP can turn those into distinct cloud types.  Their work in the 2D world was very different.  I see HiFi's XP Beta is claiming to show "cirrus and stratus" clouds and they suffer from the same problem--low density.  Here's an example posted by someone who commented, "even more variations in high clouds are possible!"   Do you see how blurry these are? I have yet to see anything (it's way early so hopefully that will change) that looks any better/different that what we see in MSFS.  In fact I see cloud depiction in the screenshot from ASXP12 below all over in MSFS, the thin cirrus layers.   In Aug 2020 I was using an RTX2070 Super and kept clouds on Ultra 95% of the time w/o a problem.  My hope is Asobo will increase the density and right now there is horsepower to drive more detail for certain at least in the PC realm. To me this must be solved first before anything very meaningful w/ cloud depiction can happen.

 

 

23 minutes ago, cagarini said:

Thankfully it's working great in XP12 - ASXP12 has just been released in Open beta today, and the experience is ASTOUNDING!!! including radar echoes in my Zibo 737 😍

Gee whiz post some screenshots--or is this another one of those XP12 features that screenshots can't depict?  I went to HiFi's site looking for screenshots and didn't see anything....

I hope HiFi can pull through.

One of my biggest wishlist items for MSFS is realistic weather. I want to look at the sky and get that "Let's avoid that" feeling I get in real life. I want to see lenticular clouds and hail. I want to fly through an anvil and see -13,000 ft/min on the other side. I want St.Elmo's fire, aurora, dust devils, and tornados.

Asobo knocked it out of the park with the 3d model of Earth. The next step is the sky.

3 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

It is such a shame that MSFS still does not provide historical weather and it still is no more than "under investigation" - whatever that means. The sim just is not complete without historical weather for those who care for the differences in weather between night and day or summer and winter.

That alone is a reason to wish for Active Sky to come into the picture.

 

They cannot supply historical weather because that would require them to provide "ACCURATE" weather depiction, which they do not. Some simple cloud layers and puffy clouds - There needs to be m ore than two layers to provide accurate visibility levels. Wind direction and speed accuracy is a hit or miss situation at best. Other than being pretty at times weather is MSFS is an epic fail.

If you just want to fly around with clouds, then I guess it'll do but not for anything that needs accuracy like estimating weather effect on fuel burn etc.

For some unknown reason, Asobo has maintained a closed mind to 3rd party weather devs since day one.

4 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

And that kind of control of turbulence is coming in MSFS SU12 soon.

A turbulence slider coming in SU12... that would be spectacular!!! I look forward to setting it to zero with a slider.

7 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.

As the resident former meteorologist....  we need better.  And we need adequate SDK for whatever developers, captive or 3rd party, so that in-simulation ATIS/AWOS communications jive with the actual conditions we are experiencing. Currently, despite at least occasion quality weather injection from both MSFS and REX, what we are hearing of it is not from Mars, it is from Neptune! (most distant)

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by fppilot

1 hour ago, vgbaron said:

 

If you just want to fly around with clouds, then I guess it'll do but not for anything that needs accuracy like estimating weather effect on fuel burn etc.

 

You do have MSFS do you ? LOL Yes wind sock depiction currently suffer and ATIS as well. But  I disagree that MSFS weather is absolutely inaccurate. May be some places lack correct weather depiction, but parts where I fly in US it's pretty close to actual.

Simbrief does a good job estimated forecasted weather effect on performance and if you fly MSFS you get pretty close to those estimation