The beauty - and the problem - of MSFS is that it offers a number of great feature such as: 

• a real time AI traffic injection with FlightAware, excellent, except that it is missing a large part of the traffic and the injection is terribly slow... Then one needs to turn to AIG or FSTL or the payware to get something that works correctly and relatively accurately!
• a more refined ATC with a variation of instrument approaches, but still far short of what Radar Contact was doing more than ten years ago, then we have a number of payware trying to populate the space with less than perfect solutions!
• a monthly Navdata update, splendid! Well, that is if you don't really dig too much in the data offered (missing SID or STAR for example), then Navigraph becomes necessary to run many of your add-ons.
• all ground services, pushback, mobile jetways, refueling, bagage handling, a first in any simulator, that is until you try to use them and see their flaws, and buy GSX...
• a weather engine with superb rendition, if one does not look in details (lack of accuracy, few types of clouds, historic weather missing, etc), that fits the need of - perhaps - 70% of the simmers, but this is locked, no one is allowed to offer any kind of improvement.

I am part of the 70% mentioned above, but, realistically, I cannot figure what is the huge elephant in the room, even the contract story with MeteoBlue is far from convincing, in any case, even though I am happily using the existing weather, I cannot understand why anybody else among the developers (AS, Rex which I used with all previous sims) would not be allowed to improve what MS/Asobo can't or won't do after close to three years now, would I buy such a product? probably not, but I am sure that many others would and that is the way this sim will evolve.

Last assumption, would it be that Asobo invested so much time and resources in improving their weather engine (to be released later this year???) that they would hate to be beaten on the finish line by those who, for so many years, had a quasi monopoly on weather depiction in previous sims?

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by Bernard Ducret

5 minutes ago, Bernard Ducret said:

The beauty - and the problem - of MSFS is that it offers a number of great feature such as: 

• a real time AI traffic injection with FlightAware, excellent, except that it is missing a large part of the traffic and the injection is terribly slow... Then one needs to turn to AIG or FSTL or the payware to get something that works correctly and relatively accurately!
• a more refined ATC with a variation of instrument approaches, but still far short of what Radar Contact was doing more than ten years ago, then we have a number of payware trying to populate the space with less than perfect solutions!
• a monthly Navdata update, splendid! Well, that is if you don't really dig too much in the data offered (missing SID or STAR for example), then Navigraph becomes necessary to run most of your add-ons.
• all ground services, pushback, mobile jetways, refueling, bagage handling, a first in any simulator, that is until you try to use them and see their flaws, and buy GSX...
• a weather engine with superb rendition, if one does not look in details (lack of accuracy, few types of clouds, historic weather missing, etc), that fits the need of - perhaps - 70% of the simmers, but this is locked, no one is allowed to offer any kind of improvement.

I am part of the 70% mentioned above, but, realistically, I cannot figure what is the huge elephant in the room, even the contract story with MeteoBlue is far from convincing, in any case, even though I am happily using the existing weather, I cannot understand why anybody else among the developers AS, Rex which I used with all previous sims) would not be allowed to improve what MS/Asobo can't or won't do after close to three years now, would I buy such a product? probably not, but I am sure that many others would and that is the way this sim will evolve.

Last assumption, would it be that Asobo invested so much time and resources in improving their weather engine (to be released later this year???) that they would hate to be beaten on the finish line by those who, for so many years, had a quasi monopoly on weather depiction in previous sims?

Couldn't write it better myself!

23 minutes ago, Bernard Ducret said:

The beauty - and the problem - of MSFS is that it offers a number of great feature such as: 

• a real time AI traffic injection with FlightAware, excellent, except that it is missing a large part of the traffic and the injection is terribly slow... Then one needs to turn to AIG or FSTL or the payware to get something that works correctly and relatively accurately!
• a more refined ATC with a variation of instrument approaches, but still far short of what Radar Contact was doing more than ten years ago, then we have a number of payware trying to populate the space with less than perfect solutions!
• a monthly Navdata update, splendid! Well, that is if you don't really dig too much in the data offered (missing SID or STAR for example), then Navigraph becomes necessary to run many of your add-ons.
• all ground services, pushback, mobile jetways, refueling, bagage handling, a first in any simulator, that is until you try to use them and see their flaws, and buy GSX...
• a weather engine with superb rendition, if one does not look in details (lack of accuracy, few types of clouds, historic weather missing, etc), that fits the need of - perhaps - 70% of the simmers, but this is locked, no one is allowed to offer any kind of improvement.

I am part of the 70% mentioned above, but, realistically, I cannot figure what is the huge elephant in the room, even the contract story with MeteoBlue is far from convincing, in any case, even though I am happily using the existing weather, I cannot understand why anybody else among the developers (AS, Rex which I used with all previous sims) would not be allowed to improve what MS/Asobo can't or won't do after close to three years now, would I buy such a product? probably not, but I am sure that many others would and that is the way this sim will evolve.

Last assumption, would it be that Asobo invested so much time and resources in improving their weather engine (to be released later this year???) that they would hate to be beaten on the finish line by those who, for so many years, had a quasi monopoly on weather depiction in previous sims?

Well said. Although I fall in the 30%, and am therefore hoping for a solution, it essentially boils down to giving users more choice. What's wrong with that and letting people explore options that make the sim better for THEM?

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by mmcmah

45 minutes ago, Bernard Ducret said:

The beauty - and the problem - of MSFS is that it offers a number of great feature such as: 

Exactly right. They prioritise things in the wrong order. People screaming out for the above to work correctly and instead we get a world update of New Zealand. (All the ‘but they have different people working on different parts of the sim’ people will chime in now). 
Im not quite sure how they can’t see what we want. Removing the cockpit for home cockpit builders is still pending. I see some items with over 1000 votes at the MSFS forums, and no serious recognition from Asobo. Then I see some with 20 votes, and it gets implemented and a big song and dance is made about it because it’s what people wanted! 

58 minutes ago, Bernard Ducret said:

Last assumption, would it be that Asobo invested so much time and resources in improving their weather engine (to be released later this year???) that they would hate to be beaten on the finish line by those who, for so many years, had a quasi monopoly on weather depiction in previous sims?

This is an interesting point. Couldn't the same argument be made for the flight model? The most fundamental piece of this software collage? A developer can feasibly entirely skip the internal FM, as far as I understand it. Why not weather too?

And I do think Meteoblue is more than just an analogue to what Jeppesen has offered in the past. Their weather data is a fair bit more expansive than just an averaging function between METARS.

Let's put it this way. What most people (except you soaring folk of course!) are really itching for are cloud formations. Meteoblue's data includes cloud coverage and type. This is most certainly directly tied to whatever data structure is being fed into the ray marching algorithms. For example, everyone's favorite: towering cumulonimbus storm cells (soaring?!). From 1k to 45k ft, that cloud structure generally spans the entire active altitude range at a single lat/long. Drawing it would entail winds, pressures, humidity...etc, all the way up, in 4D. Rendering it is a "simple" shader on the GPU. It's a simple idea, just takes a lot of compute cycles to get there. However, defining the rough shape to slap voxels onto is going to be up to Meteoblue's data. In other words, their data essentially is drawing the cloud.

Now, just maybe, Asobo really is planning a happy surprise for everyone in the future! Tada!!! If so, they are excellent poker players!

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by blingthinger

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

They prioritise things in the wrong order. People screaming out for the above to work correctly and instead we get a world update of New Zealand.  Im not quite sure how they can’t see what we want...

Of course they know full well what "we" want, but the "we" is not at all homogeneous and there are other considerations, a lot of them beyond trying to make MSFS into XP/FSX/P3D as fast as possible.  If you see much increase in NEW simmers coming into XP12, it will absolutely be for visual realism more than anything else, at least initially.  

From reading many posts and watching several videos what seems to be the prevaling consensus is this:  MSFS wins bigtime in the immersion department.  Now if you've taken aeronautical fidelity to pedantic levels, you might not allow yourself to experience the immersion piece in MSFS which is understandable.  But on the whole, for most users it seems, therein lies the draw for MSFS over XP12.  Here's a recent video comparing the two sims in this regard.  How do you measure immersion?  This video demonstrates why this is the case in MSFS, and less so in XP12.  Of course one can trick XP12 out to get around some of this presumably, which having been fully spoiled by MSFS, I'd have to do.   I wonder how difficult that would be for someone who flies all over our planet?  A Pilot's Life v2 has me employed by a new airline every 3-4 weeks.  This week I'm w/ Air NZ, prior to that Japan Airlines which was just fabulously rewarding, Lufthansa before that, Air France, American, SW, United and so on.

Anyway you slice it things are far better than ever now in the flight sim world.   But yes, MS/A is not your other sim, it's its own sim w/ very different agendas behind its development, sometimes to the dismay of some veteran simmers, emphasis on some.

 

 

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by Noel

@Noel

OH Boy, here we go again......Another food fight.....🤪

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by Ray Proudfoot
Long quoted post removed

9 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

OH Boy, here we go again......Another food fight.....🤪

Why's that?  What was so inflammatory, disrespectful, wrong, false, etc?  You can help by not expecting a food fight, and there is no need for a food fight here.  I responded to Ian's lament that MS/A misprioritizes development and provided an explanation as to why.  Don't turn it into a problem that doesn't exist please.

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Im not quite sure how they can’t see what we want.

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

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by jarmstro

2 hours ago, Bernard Ducret said:

The beauty - and the problem - of MSFS is that it offers a number of great feature such as: 

•  

It is the whole story of our hobby since the dawn of ages. The sum of all the elements (the sim !) is better than each one taken separately. But MS/Asobo have to deliver if they close the engine to third parties indeed.  I think they will. In due time (don't ask me what I mean here) ...

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

 
Im not quite sure how they can’t see what we want.   made about it because it’s what people wanted! 

NZ : Yes there were more urgent matter to deal with, including in the scenery department but I am not sure that Asobo was really in the loop. NZ was purchased by MS from Orbx.  

I always had  the feeling that MS has an overall plan and they stick to it whatever we may want (aka the votes !)  except when they see  torches and pitchforks rising 😄

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by Dominique_K

2 hours ago, Bernard Ducret said:

I am part of the 70% mentioned above, but, realistically, I cannot figure what is the huge elephant in the room, even the contract story with MeteoBlue is far from convincing ....

Last assumption, would it be that Asobo invested so much time and resources in improving their weather engine (to be released later this year???) that they would hate to be beaten on the finish line by those who, for so many years, had a quasi monopoly on weather depiction in previous sims?

That last assumption is a wild one to put it mildly .. It's in MS/Asobo's interest to have a thriving 3rd party add-on community which has been very clear since release and as evidenced by the huge 3rd party buy-in and interest we've seen so far for MSFS. MS/Asobo also have a monetary interest if these add-ons are sold on the marketplace. So ya, highly doubt they are holding back on opening up the weather system due to childish insecurities about being "beaten" by others.

From some previous Q&A streams MS/Asobo have pretty much conveyed that part of it is due to contractual/legal issues with Meteoblue, and part of it is one of priorities... 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).. but in terms of where that falls in the priority and grand scheme of things on their backlog, it's low... so it is what it is.  Given MS/Asobo's track record of continually improving the base platform including weather, I'm willing to wait and see where they take it, and unlike with other sims what MSFS provides in the default weather experience is orders of magnitude better, therefore I'm in much less of a hurry to be in need of 3rd party weather add-ons (as compared to say 3rd party aircraft add-ons, especially in early 2022 when the default aircraft were really subpar.. though it's interesting how even in the aircraft & avionics aircraft category the default MSFS experience is really compelling now in the latest versions).
 

10 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

So ya, highly doubt they are holding back on opening up the weather system due to childish insecurities about being "beaten" by others.

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

Are special skills required? Perhaps @Damian Clark can shed some light.

2 hours ago, blingthinger said:

This is an interesting point. Couldn't the same argument be made for the flight model? The most fundamental piece of this software collage? A developer can feasibly entirely skip the internal FM, as far as I understand it. Why not weather too?

That understanding is wrong. It is not possible to have a flight model that is external in MSFS (Fenix confirmed it early on in their development cycle when they were queried about it given that their systems modelling is external), so have some MSFS devs in the past. Short of having something completely external only communicating with MSFS via simvars or whatever to slew the aircraft and use MSFS for display purposes only, there is no other way to do this... even in this case, that external system would have to do its own weather/atmospherics simulation since in order to interact with the sim's weather the aircraft's FM needs to be an implementation of the core FM.

All 3rd party aircraft released so far are based on the core FM with various specific tuned parameters and other extensions to certain parts of the core FM where ever the MSFS FM architecture allows it, as would be expected (Fenix, PMDG, Milviz C310, iniBuilds' various aircraft, FSW C414, FSReborn Sting S4, Honda HJet, etc, etc).
 

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by lwt1971

10 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

That last assumption is a wild one to put it mildly ..

I wonder if it's not so much Asobo having tricks up their sleeve, but that they understand it's not really possible to go where most of us would love it to go:  multiple detailed, distinct varied cloud morphologies--that visual part.  Yes others can bring in historical weather, perhaps, but the item most will love isn't going to be possible until Asobo ramps up cloud resolution/density.  From HiFi dev's comment, which is what has been so obvious from the start, and made worse sometime after SU5/7 or whichever one it was, so much hangs on density/resolution and its inherent performance demands:

Sure.  The problem is performance.  To get the resolution we want at those closer ranges, it will bring the sim to a slide show.  Thus resolution must be kept at a reasonable level (fairly low).  So these procedural volumetric/voxel-based clouds look great at longer ranges and not so great up close. 

In Aug 2020 I had a 2070 Super in the box and ran clouds on Ultra 95% of the time.  It was only certain types of thin clouds that would kill that GPU.  2.5y later the hardware has already improved rather dramatically--just go ask 4000 series owners about that.  I see no reason that can't be exploited over time, with controls to protect what Xbox can deliver, that 'slider' thing.  So perhaps they might be going down that road which would be so fabulous.  No question my 1.5y/o 3080Ti can easily handle significantly greater cloud resolution the thing hobbles along at 65% most of the time now w/ everything on Ultra, and it's not a 4000 series card.  So for me, far more important than opening up the weather API to 3rd parties who are limited by the same problem of low resolution, is Asobo adapting to increasing hardware capability.

9 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

Short of having something completely external only communicating with MSFS via simvars or whatever to slew the aircraft and use it for display purposes only, there is no other way to do this

This is exactly what I was referring to. Certainly would be a significant undertaking.

Either way, there are far more hooks into the FM than WX, so I agree that this isn't a 'pride in our product' decision.

I disagree on the priority status though. If there wasn't a contract in place, they'd have addressed it by now. It's kind of a big deal.

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by blingthinger