2 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

Improving cloud depiction would require having expertise in the internals of the MSFS graphics rendering engine which neither Damian nor any non-Asobo third party developer is likely to have.

And not only that but the performance implications might be prodigious w/o some new magic--and it's always looked that way to me.  It seems like voxel density is too low to enable more crisp edges and more distinct morphologies that you could do w/ 2D sprites and the more voxel density the greater the processing demands.

No !

I am not a friend of Active Sky, the weather in MSFS is good enough for me and i think it slows down MSFS itself, it was never good to put too much Apps working from outside into a Sim - so NO not interested in that !

cheers 😉

My biggest problem, no, pet peeve, is the clouds in msfs. Everything is dramatic looking cumulus. If there is cloud layer reported in real weather,  msfs mashes all those layers together into giant cumulus. 

There are 16 cloud types defined in real weather. msfs has maybe 3. It is a shame. Don't tell me msfs is 'for simmers', the clouds they are producing are 'gamer clouds'. The more dramatic the better.

I have been using Active Sky since it came out in April and I have never looked back. The cloud variety, the defines layers, the fog/visibility depiction is convincing and I have been enjoying the weather in msfs much more. 

I am personally super happy with the current default weather, so yeah, pass for me as well.

Seems most only care about the visual's of the default weather they cannot be bothered to stop being 1 track minded that maybe it could be even better, Sad.

Edited May 28, 20242 yr by sultanofswing

9 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/hire-hifi-sim-damian-to-fix-the-weather-in-the-sim-for-good/639851?u=riverrover

Quick question: does Damian from HiFi even want to be hired by MSFS? If he doesn't, this is a no go.

I did vote for this. But only if Damian is working with MeteoBlue (is there a weather provider data company that is better than MeteoBlue?).  And most likely, this would be for MSFS 2024 as the MSFS team isn't going to do a major weather engine rewrite for MSFS 2020.

While I did vote for this, realistically, if Damian was to be hired for MSFS 2024, he would have been hired some time ago, while the weather engine for MSFS 2024 was initially being designed.  The problem is, MSFS 2024 is coming out by the end of this year, so if there is a new weather engine, it's way past the design stage already and they are probably finishing the development of it, or polishing it off. 

Therefore, it's probably too late for Damian to join MSFS 2024 and make a huge impact. The most Damian could do for MSFS 2024 is make some minor design changes before MSFS 2024 releases. They are not going to do a major overhaul of whatever weather engine they have prepared for MSFS 2024, this late in the development cycle before MSFS 2024's release.

The right time for Damian to join MSFS 2024 was probably when Andrey (Petrovich) Solomykin from IL-2 joined the MSFS team. If MSFS 2024 has a new and improved flight model, I am sure Petrovich was part of designing the new flight model for MSFS 2024 because he was hired almost 2 years ago.  So hiring Damian 2 years ago to make the live weather in MSFS 2024 would have been the right timing, but hiring him now is probably too late.

If MSFS 2024 live weather is not up to par and not what it's supposed to be, then perhaps the MSFS team can hire Damian to make a better live weather engine, which would come in a future Sim Update for MSFS 2024.

Edited May 28, 20242 yr by abrams_tank

1 hour ago, Silicus said:

There are 16 cloud types defined in real weather. msfs has maybe 3. It is a shame. Don't tell me msfs is 'for simmers', the clouds they are producing are 'gamer clouds'. The more dramatic the better.

Not all cloud types are doable with the graphics and CPU technology that we have at the moment. My understanding from a previous live weather discussion is, some of the cloud types will take an extreme amount of processing and GPU power, and that would cripple the FPS.

Having said that, more cloud types should be used in live weather. Whatever clouds the MSFS engine can generate now when you use custom weather settings, those same clouds should also be used in live weather, but I think it's an issue with the current live weather engine in MSFS 2020.

As for the cloud types that are not available in MSFS 2020, even when you use custom weather settings, the MSFS team in MSFS 2024 would have to pick and choose which of those cloud types can be generated by the GPU and CPUs we have today, that won't drastically lower the FPS, if they add them to MSFS 2024. We don't really know much about live weather for MSFS 2024, or whether they are even doing a major weather engine overhaul (but I assume that they are).

Edited May 28, 20242 yr by abrams_tank

A few points;

1) Asobo are capable of offering decent live weather, they did just that pre-SU7 before it all went wrong.

2) As above it's not our place to ask Asobo to hire an individual without that individuals consent or thoughts on the "Vote".

3) Who knows they may well open up the Weather API for MSFS2020 once MSFS2024 is out, then Active Sky could get even better than it currently is (I love it).

4) I'll await and see what Asobo do with live weather in MSFS2024 before I ready my pitch fork, they screwed it up with SU7 and history shows they don't learn from their mistakes so time will tell and proof will be in the pudding, I'm however willing to give them a chance to redeem themselves.

5) I've said it before and I'll say it again, Meteoblue are not the best weather data provider but MS are clearly tied into a contract with them, that much is obvious.

Apparently MSFS users and Asobo don't consider weather important to flight ... lets just ignore what real world pilots do when the first thing they check is the weather before then even get close to the aircraft.  Boggles my mind they can associate "Simulator" to this game.

13 minutes ago, CO2Neutral said:

Apparently MSFS users and Asobo don't consider weather important to flight ... lets just ignore what real world pilots do when the first thing they check is the weather before then even get close to the aircraft.  Boggles my mind they can associate "Simulator" to this game.

That's a pretty obtuse statement, IMO. Maybe you should just go back to the P3D forum if you are going to make statements like this that don't contribute anything constructive to the discussion.

Live weather in MSFS 2020 is not perfect, but it's quite good. And live weather in MSFS 2020 can be used on VATSIM, IVAO, and Pilot Edge because of its improvements over the last few years.

To make the obtuse statement that you just made above, it's just disappointing.

Edited May 28, 20242 yr by abrams_tank

Voted.

However when you sort by most votes this thread was the third highest voted, sitting at 1,193 votes and they ignored it so I won’t hold my breath. 

 

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/open-up-the-weather-system-write-access-to-3rd-party-devs/266706/395

Edited May 28, 20242 yr by UAL4life

Every improvement in the MSFS weather is welcome as long as it stays local based, so clouds will be sync’d on different view pc’s…

Would be already sufficient for me if they would finally fix the bugged snow coverage...

4 hours ago, MarcG said:

5) I've said it before and I'll say it again, Meteoblue are not the best weather data provider but MS are clearly tied into a contract with them, that much is obvious.

There is nothing “wrong” with MeteoBlue as a weather data provider. The NEMS model that is used for MSFS Live Weather isn’t even a MeteoBlue proprietary product - The NEMS model was developed by the US NCEP - the same people who developed the GFS and HRRR models.

The NEMS model was probably chosen because it is 1. global in coverage and 2. produces output for each hour in a 24 hour period. The GFS model is global, but (at best) produces forecasts at 3-hour intervals not every hour.

The HRRR model (High Resolution Rapid Refresh) does produce forecasts every hour - it can even be configured to generate forecasts at 15-minute intervals - but the HRRR geographic coverage is limited to the United States only.

Any agency with sufficiently powerful supercomputers and access to the initialization data could run the NEMS model and the output would be identical to what MeteoBlue produces.

The problem is that most global weather models are generated by national government weather agencies. The US NOAA/NCEP, the UKMet office, the European ECMWF etc. I don’t think that Microsoft wants to depend on government sources for weather data - even if that data can be obtained at no charge.

They probably prefer to deal with commercial resellers of weather forecast data, with whom they can enter into formal licensing contacts, and MeteoBlue is one such provider.

I don’t think there is any serious flaw in the MeteoBlue forecast data. The biggest problem is how clouds are rendered by the MSFS graphics engine, which is not a “MeteoBlue” problem but a “Microsoft” problem. The cloud rendering was “simplified” in SU5/SU7 to improve performance. As ASFS and Rex have shown, the MSFS cloud rendering system is still capable of generating much more variety of cloud types when setting weather in local “manual” mode. 

Hopefully Asobo will return to using the more advanced cloud rendering capabilities that already exist in MSFS for global Live Weather in MSFS 2024.

6 hours ago, pmplayer said:

No !

I am not a friend of Active Sky, the weather in MSFS is good enough for me and i think it slows down MSFS itself, it was never good to put too much Apps working from outside into a Sim - so NO not interested in that !

cheers 😉

Also, I find that the MSFS real weather is matching the real weather very well, smooth transition, very good turbulences and metars matching the real world, so I don't understand what some people are claiming for, other than a supposed better weather depiction. In my opinion the real target should be a good reliable and "real" weather radar, not the real weather from third part devs. The Ini A320 has a weather radar in the 2D "form", but it makes the flight so immersive and "real": without a good weather radar in a liner, you're blind.