TechRaptor interview of Jorg Neumann re the future of MSFS

[RALF9636 1,998]

1 hour ago, Mike777 said:

In past versions of Flight Simulator there have been addons such as Active Sky that performed very well for past weather.  I gather that the MSFS folks are not open to such addons.  Does anyone know why?

It has been a mystery for three years. They said something along the lines of "Weather is such a basic feature of a flightsim that it has to be included by default - and we are going to make it awesome". Which doesn't make much sense to me. Scenery, aircraft and ATC are quite basic for a flightsim as well and MSFS is open in these regards. And they just failed in making it "awesome" - on the contrary it is now worse than it was when MSFS was released.

To me this is the most significant mistake MS/Asobo are making with MSFS. MSFS could be so much better if third parties like HiFi /  ActiveSky could add their experience and expertise. I just don't get it.

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by RALF9636

[sanh 823]

I can't believe there are 500+ people working on the new version. Astonishing.

[Tuskin38 6,635]

7 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

It has been a mystery for three years. They said something along the lines of "Weather is such a basic feature of a flightsim that it has to be included by default - and we are going to make it awesome". Which doesn't make much sense to me. Scenery, aircraft and ATC are quite basic for a flightsim as well and MSFS is open in these regards. And they just failed in making it "awesome" - on the contrary it is now worse than it was when MSFS was released.

To me this is the most significant mistake MS/Asobo are making with MSFS. MSFS could be so much better if third parties like HiFi /  ActiveSky could add their experience and expertise. I just don't get it.

 

It could just be whatever business deal they made with Meteoblue limits it.

[sanh 823]

13 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

 Another illustration that the forums report team doesn't do the job or,, rather, that Neumann and/or  Asobo don't listen to whatever we say. because they don't care or can't with their engine.  

I don't think that's the case. Managing a large project like this with so many releases and the thousands of requests - each very important to the requester - would be almost impossible to keep track of. Their user requested features must run into the thousands. 

[mwilk 1,107]

5 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

These were exactly my thoughts. "Good feedback. I'll bring it to the development team" Seriously? After three years of discussions and wishlist items? Where has he been?

It's called the "okey doke". "We hear you and we'll look into it. Ok, not really."

[JRBarrett 3,124]

33 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

It could just be whatever business deal they made with Meteoblue limits it.

Weather from the previous 24 hours is probably do-able. Historical weather from weeks or years in the past would be absolutely impossible - even if MeteoBlue has data going back decades - at least with the way that MSFS Live Weather currently is designed.

The entire MSFS weather system is based  on the full NEMS 30 global weather model from MeteoBlue. Complete global weather models are huge in terms of the number of files and the file sizes. Many many gigabytes in size. The only way to make this work is to host the latest model files on MS servers and then stream it to end users. Each user gets the weather for their particular location on earth and current UTC time - not the entire worldwide model. 

With this system, if an individual wanted to fly in historical weather from (say) December 14, 2015, Azure would have to reserve multiple gigabytes of server space, download the model files from MeteoBlue for that date, and then stream the location-specific subset of weather data for the individual’s location in the sim. All this for just one end user. Multiply that by hundreds of users, all requesting different historical dates, and you can see that there is no practical way to implement such a system.

However weather going back 24 hours would probably work, because each run of the MB global model contains forecast data for 24 discrete hours worldwide.

 

[JRBarrett 3,124]

33 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

It could just be whatever business deal they made with Meteoblue limits it.

Weather from the previous 24 hours is probably do-able. Historical weather from weeks or years in the past would be absolutely impossible - even if MeteoBlue has data going back decades - at least with the way that MSFS Live Weather currently is designed.

The entire MSFS weather system is based  on the full NEMS 30 global weather model from MeteoBlue. Complete global weather models are huge in terms of the number of files and the file sizes. Many many gigabytes in size. The only way to make this work is to host the latest model files on MS servers and then stream it to end users. Each user gets the weather for their particular location on earth and current UTC time - not the entire worldwide model. 

With this system, if an individual wanted to fly in historical weather from (say) December 14, 2015, Azure would have to reserve multiple gigabytes of server space, download the model files from MeteoBlue for that date, and then stream the location-specific subset of weather data for the individual’s location in the sim. All this for just one end user. Multiply that by hundreds of users, all requesting different historical dates, and you can see that there is no practical way to implement such a system.

However weather going back 24 hours would probably work, because each run of the MB global model contains forecast data for 24 discrete hours worldwide.

 

[RALF9636 1,998]

14 minutes ago, JRBarrett said:

 Historical weather from weeks or years in the past would be absolutely impossible - even if MeteoBlue has data going back decades - at least with the way that MSFS Live Weather currently is designed.

The entire MSFS weather system is based  on the full NEMS 30 global weather model from MeteoBlue. Complete global weather models are huge in terms of the number of files and the file sizes. Many many gigabytes in size. The only way to make this work is to host the latest model files on MS servers and then stream it to end users. Each user gets the weather for their particular location on earth and current UTC time - not the entire worldwide model. 

I don't know if that would really be a problem for MS. They already provide more than 2.5 Petabytes for streaming the world scenery. Related to that, how large is a dataset for the worldwide weather for one day, when snapshots are taken every three hours?

 

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

14 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

He responded that it's good feedback and he'll bring it to the development team. 

Politicians answers. A bit like my local village screaming for a certain change in the road for the last 40+ years, and each successive council saying ‘we acknowledge blah blah’ and nothing is ever done about it. 

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

All this talk about firefighting and missions. No mention of AI or ATC. 500 people working on it they say, wonder if any of those 500 are assigned to the poor LOD, poor ATC, poor AI. It will certainly be interesting when it’s released. 
 

Jorg sometimes reminds me of Austin of XP. Shouts a lot of things that don’t come to fruition, or they do and they’re only half baked. 
 

Don’t get me wrong, MSFS is a marvel at certain things, and I love using it, and I will purchase 2024. But the above points are just so frustrating. 

[JRBarrett 3,124]

3 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

I don't know if that would really be a problem for MS. They already provide more than 2.5 Petabytes for streaming the world scenery. Related to that, how large is a dataset for the worldwide weather for one day, when snapshots are taken every three hours?

 

I can’t say how big the MB model file is, but I have worked with data sets from the US GFS worldwide model, and that is tens of gigabytes  in size.

I don’t think MSFS uses the MB model directly in its native GRIB format. It probably has to be modified to work within MSFS, which would either be done by Meteoblue before each new model run is sent to MS, or by Azure upon receipt as part of the server ingest process.

To expect this to be done for each individual MSFS user who might want historical weather is just not realistic. It would kind of be like asking a restaurant which is closed for the day to bring in a full staff of cooks and servers to provide a meal for just one customer.

Edited September 21, 2023 by JRBarrett

[Fielder 3,738]

Here's the video.

The best part for me was next local  legend is Japanese. The first WU was tiny. I hope next WU is Japan II !

EDIT: I posted this link because the TechRaptor pages are in dark mode. I can't read in dark mode well enough to find things. Such as hyperlink to videos.

 

Edited September 21, 2023 by Fielder

[Dominique_K 10,152]

47 minutes ago, Fielder said:

The first WU was tiny. I hope next WU is Japan II !

I second that. Japan is a great flying ground.

6 hours ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Politicians answers.

Precisely

7 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

However weather going back 24 hours would probably work, 

And it would be enough for most of the users.

But according to MB pages I linked to upthread,  «  Any place worldwide is available in hourly intervals without gaps since 1940 » contrary to what Neumann says and the data doesn’t seem impossibly huge  . He has been reluctant since the beginning with unconvincing arguments , first he didn’t understand why anybody would be interested, now it is technically impossible… and after three years of users pounding at the door, it will pass the idea of an offset to the devs. Come on…

 I suspect that Neumann’s pol speak hides the facts that the Azure people are not enthusiastic to add a load to the servers but also that the upper management is not ready to finance a new enhanced contract with MeteoBlue..

[MarcG 3,031]

9 hours ago, sanh said:

I can't believe there are 500+ people working on the new version. Astonishing.

That's including all the partners, Asobo staff are around 175 according to Jorg recently. Still a huge number of course overall, hopefully the end result will be a vast improvement.

[martinboehme 524]

5 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

I can’t say how big the MB model file is, but I have worked with data sets from the US GFS worldwide model, and that is tens of gigabytes  in size.

I don’t think MSFS uses the MB model directly in its native GRIB format. It probably has to be modified to work within MSFS, which would either be done by Meteoblue before each new model run is sent to MS, or by Azure upon receipt as part of the server ingest process.

To expect this to be done for each individual MSFS user who might want historical weather is just not realistic. It would kind of be like asking a restaurant which is closed for the day to bring in a full staff of cooks and servers to provide a meal for just one customer.

I don't think this is an accurate analogy. You wouldn't do the ingest / data conversion every time someone requested a certain date and time; you'd do it once, when a new model run becomes available, and then you'd store the data on your own servers in the format required by MSFS.

How much data are we talking about? You say the US GFS model is tens of gigabytes in size. Which time window does that cover -- 24 hours? Let's assume it does, and let's assume NEMS30 is in the same ballpark -- let's say 30 gigabytes for a dataset covering 24 hours. The data for an entire year would then be just over 10 terabytes. That's not a lot of data to store and serve. Someone else mentioned that the global scenery that gets streamed is in the petabyte range -- 2.5 petabytes IIRC. Compared to that, the weather data for a whole year would be just a blip.

Another point of comparison: On Google Drive, the free tier gives each user 15 gigabytes of data. 10 terabytes is therefore equivalent to the amount of storage consumed by about 700 users on the free tier. And Google Drive has about a billion active users.

Technically, I think historical weather is eminently doable. The question is whether MS / Asobo will choose to make it a priority.