Hi all! For those of you having read the SU14 will release tomorrow thread, in which I had some grievances to share about the units of air pressure, being wrong in bloody everywhere in the world except the US, I´m most unhappy to announce that after fourteen sim updates this is still an issue! Isn´t this supposed to be a significant realism factor? Is there a thread about it in the official forums? Please point me towards it that if it exists (I can´t seem to find it). I want to make it my life´s work to get Asobo to fix an obvious flaw like this, so that in Europe, and practically anywhere else except for the US, ATC will give me QNH in millibar instead of inHg, when I have my settings at hybrid or metric. Thank you!

Yes, after SU14 sky is pretty and all 😁

Yeah especially since that's about one line of code to convert inHg into Hpa. Actually they already have that kind of code because they literally take the Hpa from the real-world metars and convert it into inHg...

Edited December 5, 20232 yr by Fiorentoni

Imagine my complete and total lack of shock at this.

Expect to see another frustrated disappointment thread when I test DX12 again only to see that the airports are still disappearing and it's still unusable.

When my download completes in the new year, that is 🙄

Looking forward to new skys though, I must say.

The updates and what they do is always a mixed bag, and always will be I suspect.  Gradual progress, but not always on the stuff that 'serious' simmers want.  We have to make do with what we are given.  It is just that I don't understand why Asobo don't see these things.

17 minutes ago, Fiorentoni said:

QNH from the real-world metars and convert it into inHg...

QNH can be expressed in inHg as in Hpa, just a side note.

33 minutes ago, polosim said:

QNH can be expressed in inHg as in Hpa, just a side note.

Of course, sorry I got totally confused here 😄 Edited my post

So is anyone aware of a thread on the official forums?

13 hours ago, bobcat999 said:

The updates and what they do is always a mixed bag, and always will be I suspect.  Gradual progress, but not always on the stuff that 'serious' simmers want.  We have to make do with what we are given.  It is just that I don't understand why Asobo don't see these things.

The strangest thing is that in the beginning they even announced Sebastien was doing flight training in France.

At least another rw pilot and aerodynamicist  joined ASOBO even before Petrovich (ex IL2), then Petrovich...

Didn't anyone notice it is wrong?

14 hours ago, Fiorentoni said:

Yeah especially since that's about one line of code to convert inHg into Hpa.

It might be just a single line of code to do the conversion, but you also need to figure out whether to do the conversion.

• You need a list of countries that use inHg. US and Canada, right? What about Mexico... oh yeah, Mexico too. Hm, what about the Bahamas... they're pretty closely aligned with US aviation regulations. Let's see... OK, the Bahamas too. Guess we're going to have to check all of the Caribbean and Central American countries. But surely we can stop there, right? What's that you say? Japan? Japan??? (Really, Japan -- why?) OK, now I'm getting paranoid -- I guess there's nothing for it but to check every country in the world.
• Hopefully, the airport scenery format contains a field that tells you the country the airport is located in. Yes, it does -- but unfortunately the field is not required. So let's hope every addon developer has set this field for their airports -- if not, what would we default to? Whatever default we choose, hPa or inHg, it's going to be wrong for some addon airports, and we're going to get bug reports about it. Maybe we can use the lat/lon fields to find out which country we're in -- but now we need a map from lat/lon areas to country codes. Ugh.

So it turns out that once you start thinking about how you would really implement this, it's not a super simple feature any more. Yes, it would probably still be very feasible, but this brings us to...

56 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Didn't anyone notice it is wrong?

I assume they did, but they're just not prioritizing this as a bug to fix. If you care about this, by all means make some noise on the official forums or ask questions about it in the Q&A (that's how these things tend to get attention).

2 hours ago, martinboehme said:

It might be just a single line of code to do the conversion, but you also need to figure out whether to do the conversion.

• You need a list of countries that use inHg. US and Canada, right? What about Mexico... oh yeah, Mexico too. Hm, what about the Bahamas... they're pretty closely aligned with US aviation regulations. Let's see... OK, the Bahamas too. Guess we're going to have to check all of the Caribbean and Central American countries. But surely we can stop there, right? What's that you say? Japan? Japan??? (Really, Japan -- why?) OK, now I'm getting paranoid -- I guess there's nothing for it but to check every country in the world.
• Hopefully, the airport scenery format contains a field that tells you the country the airport is located in. Yes, it does -- but unfortunately the field is not required. So let's hope every addon developer has set this field for their airports -- if not, what would we default to? Whatever default we choose, hPa or inHg, it's going to be wrong for some addon airports, and we're going to get bug reports about it. Maybe we can use the lat/lon fields to find out which country we're in -- but now we need a map from lat/lon areas to country codes. Ugh.

So it turns out that once you start thinking about how you would really implement this, it's not a super simple feature any more. Yes, it would probably still be very feasible, but this brings us to...

I assume they did, but they're just not prioritizing this as a bug to fix. If you care about this, by all means make some noise on the official forums or ask questions about it in the Q&A (that's how these things tend to get attention).

No no, that‘s not even what we are talking about (even though that would be much less of a problem, since you can use lat/long as you say; it‘s pretty easy to code). It‘d be enough to have a MANUAL setting in the options to choose hPa instead of inHg, but they are not even doing that.

It can't be that hard to implement. Radar Contact knew when to use Inches and when to use Millibar over 10 years ago.

1 hour ago, martinboehme said:

It might be just a single line of code to do the conversion, but you also need to figure out whether to do the conversion.

It isn't straight-forward to do the conversion automatically according to where you're flying, but a first step could be to make it a configuration option.

In my opinion the options for setting up the display units should provide better granularity anyway. For instance, once I tried to get rid of Fahrenheit in favour of Celsius in the weather settings, but the only way to achieve this was to switch to hybrid units of measurement in the misc settings (or metric, but measuring altitude in meters disqualifies this for most uses). This worked well for  the weather settings, but it made distances show in kilometres instead of nautical miles and speeds in kph instead of knots... Not on the cockpit instruments, but definitely in the flight planner, and if I remember correctly, also in the communication with ATC. 

Can we please get more options for a fine-grained control for setting the display units? 

 

10 hours ago, Farlis said:

It can't be that hard to implement. Radar Contact knew when to use Inches and when to use Millibar over 10 years ago.

Addons have been using lookups to figure out transition altitude and level for a long time too (FSL I think??), HPa vs mmHg is a lot less complicated than that

Edited December 6, 20232 yr by mspencer

15 hours ago, Rimshot said:

So is anyone aware of a thread on the official forums?

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/how-do-i-get-atis-to-tell-qnh-in-hpa/443023
 

from 2021. 

On 12/6/2023 at 11:45 AM, Fiorentoni said:

No no, that‘s not even what we are talking about (even though that would be much less of a problem, since you can use lat/long as you say; it‘s pretty easy to code). It‘d be enough to have a MANUAL setting in the options to choose hPa instead of inHg, but they are not even doing that

Exactly. It was like this in FSX: with settings to metric or hybrid ATIS/ATC uses millibar for QNH.