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

[abrams_tank 7,426]

33 minutes ago, MDFlier said:

It will not take development time away from Asobo.

Yes, it will.  It will take development time away from Asobo.

There is likely a team dedicated to weather at MSFS. If that weather team is working on an API for weather, they have less resources working on enhancing the live weather in MSFS.

It's a zero sum game. If you have worked on a large software development team before, you would probably know this.

FYI, this is not to say that I am against a weather API at this point in time. However, the belief that there is no downside for the MSFS weather team focusing on a weather API, is not true. There is a downside.

[Noel 4,507]

I'm not an aviation expert in any way shape or form, despite the fact I've enjoyed this hobby for nigh on 3 decades now.  Historical weather has no use whatsoever for me it simply does not come into play.  For glider sailing behavior (Hi jcomm!), same same.  I do appreciate plausible wind effects on aircraft when flying thru inclement weather.  What matters most to me is plausible and detailed cloud depiction involving the various cloud morphologies one sees in the RW, and I live in a weather machine in the Front Range of the Rockies, so am privy to a big variety of changing weather and cloud morphologies.  And near as I can tell HiFi won't be able to play a big role in this component of atmospherics. 

I observe comments about the current weather in MSFS has died down markedly over the past many months or so, at least until a topic like this one appears which rekindles the discussion. HiFi's role in P3D is totally different because P3D does not include live RW weather so one had to pick up an addon for this ginormous element of a flight sim.  I've purchased I think 3 versions of HiFi's work over the years.

This is why I'm a little here nor there on this topic, and I'll venture a guess I'm a bellwether for a majority of MSFS users.  Most users will be impressed with visually plausible weather and clouds more than esoterica related to weather dynamics as it relates to aviation per se.  Damian sums this up nicely in the first words in this post in response to what can AS bring to MSFS, "These are NOT features that all users will appreciate or even understand...."

What all users will appreciate is distinct cloud morphologies with enough resolution to be able to recognize them clearly, the cirrus, stratus and all the rest.  My belief is because of the obsession with frame rate as the de facto indicator of a good experience there does not appear to be headroom to amp up cloud resolution.  But there is for me, with my now 3y/o system.  My GPU sits at around 40-55% tops because it's not being hammered to crank out 70FPS, and I have a 3440x1440 display which helps.  I'm convinced my system could easily handle a substantial increase in voxel density.  I think low voxel density is the primary reason we don't see the kind of cloud depiction detail required to make cloud morphologies distinct.

All that being said I support opening up the API for HiFi for those after more esoterica, historical weather, etc.  And yes there may be some effects I can appreciate as well. 

 

 

[Bob Scott 7,721]

Nearly three years in, you still can't set something as basic as visibility in MSFS. 

Dense clouds look like Krakatoa just blew its top again.  Overcast layers look like cotton balls crammed together in a mat.  No cirrus.

"Real time" weather that shows storms and low clouds 6+ hours after the storms have passed and a quick look out the window says "CAVOK".

Inability to do meaningful flight planning due to inaccessability of enroute weather data.

Weather that's grossly out of phase w/r/t day/night when flying at distant locations due to time differences.

No historical weather capability.

"Good enough"??!  Oh no no no...  Lots of room for improvement here.

[KL Oo 700]

^^^ What he said ^^^

[Mace 1,929]

I have to agree.  Bob Scott is factual in the above post.

[JDWalley 354]

Same.

I've probably said this before on this forum (or even in this thread), but historical weather is a must for me.  Due to rather common reasons, most of my flight time is in the evenings.  If I want to fly in daylight hours, with accurate weather.  I have to do so in places like Armenia or Uzbekistan -- or else be content with local flights in "daylight" combined with nighttime weather conditions.  If Asobo is unwilling or unable to provide at least 24 hours backlog of accurate weather conditions, they need to allow someone else access that will.

[Noel 4,507]

10 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

Nearly three years in, you still can't set something as basic as visibility in MSFS. 

Dense clouds look like Krakatoa just blew its top again.  Overcast layers look like cotton balls crammed together in a mat.  No cirrus.

"Real time" weather that shows storms and low clouds 6+ hours after the storms have passed and a quick look out the window says "CAVOK".

Inability to do meaningful flight planning due to inaccessability of enroute weather data.

Weather that's grossly out of phase w/r/t day/night when flying at distant locations due to time differences.

No historical weather capability.

"Good enough"??!  Oh no no no...  Lots of room for improvement here.

And despite all of these shortcomings it still garners the lion's share of desktop flight sim hours, or so the circumstantial evidence suggests.  I guess that is a testament to just how valuable sensing one is flying thru this real world appears to be.  Will they ever get there?  I think they will it's still relatively early as far as flight sim deployment goes, especially one of this scope which is very different from the other sims in what it has tackled in a relatively short time.

How much better are other voxel-based, volumetric clouds in P3D & XP12 by comparison?  I've not seen EA in P3D.  From my brief foray into XP12's demo I can only say they seemed far worse than even what we have today in MSFS.  One wonders is sticking w/ 2D sprites might have been better.

[Bob Scott 7,721]

Let's not hijack this into another sim-vs-sim debate.  The point I'm making is that there's a pretty long list of significant shortcomings in the MSFS weather environment that need attention.  I'd like to see the guys that proved themselves by solving many of these issues elsewhere get a crack at these problems rather than being summarily excluded.  Hope springs eternal from some of the suggestive commentary coming from Asobo that it might be a possibility, where it was a resounding "no" before.

[Cognita 1,089]

11 minutes ago, Bob Scott said:

Let's not hijack this into another sim-vs-sim debate. 

The problem with going in that direction, comparing MSFS with earlier sims, is that it distracts attention from the real issues with MSFS. Whether weather depiction in MSFS is better or worse than other sims really does not matter, Asobo just needs to give weather some attention as there are important deficiencies. I think the majority of people will agree that Asobo pushed flight simulation forward in a number of important ways, but there are areas that need work -- ground handling and transition, and weather -- are the two most prominent for me. I don't personally care if Asobo improves the weather on their own or if they open it up so a third-party can do it, I just hope we see richer, more vibrant weather soon. Comparing to sims developed long ago just generates complacency. 

[Mace 1,929]

1 hour ago, Noel said:

And despite all of these shortcomings it still garners the lion's share of desktop flight sim hours, or so the circumstantial evidence suggests.  I guess that is a testament to just how valuable sensing one is flying thru this real world appears to be.  Will they ever get there?  I think they will it's still relatively early as far as flight sim deployment goes, especially one of this scope which is very different from the other sims in what it has tackled in a relatively short time.

How much better are other voxel-based, volumetric clouds in P3D & XP12 by comparison?  I've not seen EA in P3D.  From my brief foray into XP12's demo I can only say they seemed far worse than even what we have today in MSFS.  One wonders is sticking w/ 2D sprites might have been better.

No one is trying to compare with other sims.  He was just listing some basic weather shortcomings that should be addressed in MSFS and he's right.

[Mace 1,929]

Here's another user report of what's not working right.  I too have encountered this:

Where are the clouds? - Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) - The AVSIM Community

[JRBarrett 3,080]

13 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

Real time" weather that shows storms and low clouds 6+ hours after the storms have passed and a quick look out the window says "CAVOK".

Inability to do meaningful flight planning due to inaccessability of enroute weather data.

While I agree with many of your points, I can’t agree with these two. There have been instances over the past two years where Live Weather has gotten obviously “stuck” delivering old model data - it is very obvious when it has happened when comparing the cloud patterns on the initial world map with a current satellite photo of the same area.

But, I have not seen that happen for quite some time. I have done several transcontinental flights in the past few weeks across the northern and southern US, and areas of rain or thick clouds have been positioned almost exactly where they are in the r/w at that time.

While it is true that you can’t extract upper wind data for an entire route from the sim itself (for flight planning purposes) there is really no need to do that. Even real world flight crews have to rely on predictive weather models for determining what their upper winds will be for a particular flight. There are no “up-to-the minute, real time” observations of upper winds in r/w aviation.

I normally fly airliners at high altitudes on two to four hour flights.

I use SimBrief for flight planning, whose predicted upper winds for a particular route and altitude come from the NOAA GFS model.

Live Weather upper winds come from the MeteoBlue NEMS Global model. I find that they almost always correspond very closely to the SimBrief predictions.

I print out my SimBrief flight plan for every MSFS flight I do, and upon passing each waypoint in the FP, I check the predicted wind direction, velocity, temperature and ground speed against the actual conditions in the sim, and find they are almost always a close match. Certainly as close a match as a real flight could expect when comparing the actual winds they encounter against predicted conditions in their own FP.

Now, there have been problems in Live Weather where the injected upper winds suddenly, instantly and dramatically change direction and velocity. This usually occurs in a specific and limited geographic area, and I assume it is caused by outdated or corrupted data in a particular “cell” (voxel) in the weather model. It was happening quite often a couple of months ago, but I don’t think I have seen this issue a single time in the past two or three weeks.

Edited May 26, 2023 by JRBarrett

[jcomm 5,939]

@scotchegg regarding your post about METAR at another thread, indeed METAR are limited in the type and geographical scope of the information they provide, but still rather accurate in terms of some of the variables like wind intensity and direction + gusts and variability, pressure, temperature and visibility.

A simulator using "only" GRIB data from models, as MFS did at start, would suffer from some myopia regarding this important parameters.

When it comes to cloud coverage and ceiling, it all depends on the MSA, and there can actually be huge "discrepancies" between what is reported and what is observed.

Regarding this all discussion about opening or not the access of developers to internal data and processes that could allow those who know how to do it to get a better / more realistic representation of weather, visually and / or physically, it is for me the same as asking for developers to have access to the flight dynamics SDK in order to be able to design their addon aircraft or modify / fine tune existing / default ones.

Should ASOBO have announced that they would not open  FDM to developers I guess it would have been the end of FS2020 at the start, unless they offered a set of "perfect" representations of a series of aircraft. 

Isn't, for so many of you, the default FDM so good and capable? Why wouldn't then it be possible to give ASOBO only,, access to it and to the development of addon aircraft? Are you satisfied with the default aircraft that came with MFS, not counting the MODs offered by many talented developers?

Indeed it appears to be the case with the extraordinary work of a team like WT that after all ended up making part of ASOBO. They not only have been developing the extraordinary avionics implementations we now get in various aircraft, default or addon, but are also fine tuning their flight models, and yet the end result isn't still up to the level of addons like those offered by PMDG, Fenix, FBW...

At most, I would really be happy to find out that HiFi had now became part of ASOBO too, but that would bring a serious problem for X-Plane and Prepar3D users 😕

What about scenery? Well, default scenery in MFS is already so so so good compared to what I experienced in the past and experience in the present with other simulators that I only have the Portugal and Spain World Updates (because those are the two most beautiful countries in the whole World! and also have the most astounding Chicas in the whole World! And the Best Pilots in the whole World!!! and cuisine, and....). But still for many of you having even more detailed / customized scenery for some areas is a priority. Just imagine what it would be if ASOBO closed scenery development to 3pds?

Honestly, ASOBO has been doing a REMARKABLE job, of that I am more than aware and grateful, because I would not have imagined such a level of overall detail and functionality would become available, again, from an MS-based flight simulator (after the MS FLIGH catastrophe...), but they can't do everything. They have to concentrate in creating and fine tuning CORE functionalities, and open further development to 3pds. This will not kill their business but rather make it even more sound and dynamic IMO. 

Edited May 26, 2023 by jcomm

[MarcG 3,013]

I won't go into the SU7/METAR fiasco but I will say that Asobo have clearly taken on too much and they need to spread the workload, the weather side of the Sim simply needs vast improvement and even though there's been some since SU7 it's at a glacial pace.

By opening up the API they will release some of that pressure which they then could focus onto other areas, clearly they're struggling to fill positions (the job listings have largely remained the same for well over a year now) but whether Jorg will swallow his pride and accept they need help is another question.

He/they did with bringing in Working Title which has been a monumental success, so quite why they're so protective of other areas is beyond me. It's quite evident they need help with the weather, if they don't we could be waiting years before it's in a fully decent state.

[jarmstro 2,405]

If they have a contractural agreement with MeteoBlue (or whatever they are called) wouldn't opening up the API have potentially serious legal consequences?

In addition am I correct in that external apps such as Active Sky are not compatible with XBox? As Xbox represents the largest proportion of users what would be the incentive for Asobo to undertake the necessary complex work involving two branches of code? There is no way Active Sky would ever be available from the Marketplace.

Edited May 26, 2023 by jarmstro