MS/Asobo and opening Weather / Camera SDK to 3rd Parties

[ErichB 3,638]

21 hours ago, Tom_L said:

............however, I would prefer in-house development or the Working Title approach: Look for third parties capable enough to enhance Atmosphere, Weather and Environment and make them contractors. Only if that's not possible - for whatever reasons - then it'll probably be best to open up for third parties. In the end, being probably payware, they'll only succeed if they can deliver a better product than already present.

This was a well articulated thread.  Made me realise just how much is overlooked.  

[jarmstro 2,402]

2 hours ago, Damian Clark said:

These are NOT features that all users will appreciate or even understand.

You are correct. The point for me is that AS was an absolutely essential addon for XP11 because it cured the horrible weather transitioning. I'll buy AS for MS2020 when it arrives no doubt but I am not sure it's going to have the 'essential' label it had in XP because, well, it won't bring much to the table that most users care about. (Ditto the FSR plane wobbler which I bought but never use!) And how well it will sell remains to be seen.

[omarsmak30 4,065]

18 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

I am not sure it's going to have the 'essential' label it had in XP because

Defiantly not essential like P3D and XP. If it comes, it will bring along with it nice extra features like what Damian was describing above, I think many will appreciate those features 

[ega 98]

3 hours ago, Nemo said:

Regard me as a first hour customer when a HiFi weather add-on arrives.

Ditto! Would also be a first hour customer of HiFi weather in MSFS!  

[Lord Farringdon 477]

10 hours ago, WestAir said:

Ideally, I'd want a 3PD to expeditiously make the weather capable of danger. The default engine will allow me to fly straight into the anvil of a CB with a 172. In no small list, the default engine has:

• No hail
• No lightning
• No cirrus or iridescent clouds
• No stratus (or alto-stratus)
• No mesospheric cloud formations
• No microbursts or macrobursts ("Wind Shear - Wind Shear!"
• No squall lines or outflow boundaries
• No lenticular, Horseshoe, Fractus, Arcus, or Velum cloud formations
• No sandstorms, ash clouds, or other city-sized meteorological events
• No human made weather visuals like smokestack smoke, fires, or smog
• No Aurora Borealis, St.Elmo's fire, or other visually unique events
• No Tuba cloud formations like: vortexes, hurricanes depiction, tornadoes, or dust devils
• No wet / contaminated surfaces after rain stops
• No wet / contaminated surfaces due to fog / high dew point
• Precipitation does not care for wind direction or speed. (At high altitudes you should be able to see rain snow or hail hit you from below)
• No proper icing simulation
• No wake turbulence

The engine can depict all of these. The only reason they're not in the base sim is because the devs have their hands full with more important aspects of the simulation. IMHO, much like WT is fixing the 787 and 748, a 3PD would be more incentivized to do these because they tend to focus on niche realism.

The bonus of letting 3PD's drive weather ahead is that the millions of players who don't care for realistic weather can opt out of it, which isn't always possible when Asobo implements things themselves. (See: Lightning in clear skies and icing while flying through 2,000 feet of cumulus.)

This thread confuses me somewhat. There was so much angst about the weather and people crying out to let 3PD's have a crack but it all seems to be a whimper and MSFS2020 is now fine and dandy? Whatever!! @WestAir nails it when saying "players who don't care for realistic weather can opt out of it, which isn't always possible when Asobo implements things themselves".  His list is pretty well my wish. Anyone who has flown IRL or like me as a non-pilot aircrew will be well aware that this is what we all potentially face in the air. I might add the warp factor effect when the landing lights come on in heavy rain at 250knots, it looks like the USS Enterprise transitioning to warp fact 9.99, with some pretty heavy sound too! While physics can easily explain St Elmo's fire, it still looks pretty magical and is another very sci-fi type of effect. Smoke and particulates are important. Burning forests in Indonesia create upper atmosphere smoke and many of the sht hole places I have flown into around the world are surrounded by camps and villages pouring smoke and dust out across the threshold. There are so  many examples that anyone who has flown for a living could easily recite. The thing is that the atmosphere is to an aircraft what the sea is to a ship and particularly a submarine. There are pressures, temperatures, inversion layers, and associated shears, underlying terrain effects, updrafts, downdrafts and above all, aircraft and boats react to all the physics that are thrown at them. How would you like a boat simulator where the sea may be rough, bit the ship is always dead level with no pitch or roll when impacted by waves?   I can just imagine some on here saying "no, no, no....I get sick if it's too rough. we don't need a 3PD to model that. It's fine the way we have it."  (Cue, shortest verse in the Bible). 

I appreciate not everyone wants to fly in cloud, or want the level of reality that @WestAir proposes but as he says, you don't have to buy it!  But just like a ship sails in the water, the atmosphere is what an airplane must fly in and it is an extremely dynamic, sometimes frightening but also wonderous experience at the same time. It doesn't matter how nice the scenery is, or how well the aircaft are modelled, until we have a real world weather simulator we aren't flying, we're just slewing through the scenery!  So bring it on Damien at HiFi. I really hope Asobo use your talents to bring to the sim the atmospheric reality it needs. 

 

Cheers

Terry

 

 

Edited May 17, 2023 by Lord Farringdon

[jcomm 5,890]

I honestly see room for improvement if 3pds are allowed to manipulate the weather variables through a proper API.

MFS still does various aspects of aviation weather in a rather incomplete, sometimes even inconsistent way.

They announced long ago that they had implemented the new established feature that XP12 also now models - geopotential height variation with temperature - but their implementation was bogus / buggy, based on wrong assumptions about that particular characteristic of the atmosphere. Thankfully WT had joined ASOBO, and they managed to fix it for Real World Weather, but **only** when Real World Weather is being used, because if you manually set weather or use a weather preset then it will not be modelled ( btw, it is modelled correctly in XP12 with both Real World and Manually defined weather ).

I am sure the knowledge from long time / experienced developers like HiFi can bring interesting new features and possibly help circumventing bugs and misconceptions in the MFS weather modelling. One area that is very inconsistently modelled is soaring weather / convection / thermals. They're so out of sync with reality that they actually become counter-productive modelled the way they are. This is because teh core ASOBO team knowledge about aviation weather is apparently not their strongest point... Same applies to other areas of the simulation like aerodynamics, engines, and other systems, that developers keep complaining about if you care to browse their Dev Support forums.

Having experienced 3pds cooperating can, IMO, be beneficial !

I look fwd to see the day we can have AS-MFS announced 🙂

 

Edited May 17, 2023 by jcomm

[craigeaglefire 197]

Everything to gain by opening up the weather API,

maybe an Active Sky for MSFS,

could help Rex,

& I know for sure it will provide needed data for FS-FlightControl…

[jarmstro 2,402]

1 hour ago, Lord Farringdon said:

It doesn't matter how nice the scenery is, or how well the aircaft are modelled,

Oh, it does. That's what MS2020 is all about and why it's been so successful.

[Gilandred 690]

One big immersion factor missing is the sense of speed when flying through clouds or breaking out above overcast conditions.  It feels like slow motion compared to real life.  

[ErichB 3,638]

12 minutes ago, Gilandred said:

One big immersion factor missing is the sense of speed when flying through clouds or breaking out above overcast conditions.  It feels like slow motion compared to real life.  

That aspect is substantially more immersive than previous or current versions of any other sim

[Gilandred 690]

19 minutes ago, ErichB said:

That aspect is substantially more immersive than previous or current versions of any other sim

X-plane 11 and the original Xenviro got that aspect right, albeit both were 2D clouds.  One of the Xenviro devs explained that volumetric clouds require a different scaling for performance reasons (in other words the clouds are oversized compared to their real world counterparts). This therefore gives the impression of moving slower past a larger object (ie. cloud pixel) than a smaller one.  Sort of like how driving a big truck at highway speed feels slower than a compact car.

[fppilot 4,350]

22 hours ago, Silicus said:

Yes, weather depiction is much better than all previous flight simulators

???

[ctalpas 113]

I'll add my voice to MS/Asobo working with HiFi.  Let them improve weather as Working Title has improved the avionics.

[mmcmah 372]

2 hours ago, ctalpas said:

I'll add my voice to MS/Asobo working with HiFi.  Let them improve weather as Working Title has improved the avionics.

Me too. All the ones for whom "it's good enough" can be happy and so can those who would rather see a more complete simulator than we have today.

[A330B747 15]

On 5/16/2023 at 9:56 PM, Damian Clark said:

If that had happened, there would have been a limited scope, and it's impossible to create every possible feature and benefit that anyone could every want, so 3rd party weather add-ons and weather API access would still be needed and asked for.  I challenge you to consider that having weather API access available to 3rd parties won't ruin your experience, but rather improve it.  For some folks it will totally transform things for the better.  For others it will just be add-ons they don't want.  For us, it means we get to stay in the flight sim business that we've built up over nearly 3 decades, and can finally make some of the awesome features enabled by a sim like FS2020.  Maybe one day those new features will push things even further as the bar gets raised higher and higher... And maybe some of those features even make it into the base sim, or otherwise help influence further innovation and capability in all areas of flight sim.  I think if you look at Active Sky's history and feature set, and compare it with current sim feature sets, you can see that there was some influence, for the better.

It's been made clear that there are no limitations preventing api access other than a decision.  It's my belief that the decision will be based on public sentiment, and that those deciding are listening.

i cross my fingers and hope that Asobo decide and don't waste any more time to release the APi for third parts developers. They have already wasted 2 years and half

Edited May 18, 2023 by A330B747