I had been using SI rather happily, but the recent drop of Active Sky and the "Living World" model they are moving to both seem to work against my intended usage of the sim. I use Active Sky on every flight and, while it's far from perfect, I love the historical weather and the ability to time shift my flights and have an accurate representation of what the weather was like at that time. I also appreciate the representation of the weather more than the MSFS default representation.

As for the "Living World" idea that they have, I think it's great, but likely not for me. They want to offload as much processing and localizing as possible from the simmers' machines, and move as much as possible to the cloud. There will still be the performance hit of the various models that get injected once traffic is added, but as I understand it, the idea is to have a single global environment for traffic, weather (likely based on live weather), and transmissions related to the ATC controlling other players. Once you want to bring everyone to the same "world," you kind of have to make it the same for everyone.

Consequently, I would not really be able to fly at different times of the day, with different weather and still have ATC know what I'm doing and how it ties into the injected traffic and other simmers, because I'd have a different environment. Since those things are important to me, I stopped using SI and am now back to P2ATC. Once the other ATC add-ons mature further (including the new iteration of P2ATC, which should be out soon-ish), I will reexamine.

I am curious about SI's RW weather.  I also use historical weather, right now flying a lot of flights "down under" and not at all feasible to do in real time for what I want to do (I am in the States).

After reading about the SI/AS issues I was tinkering with SI and MSFS live weather this morning (did not fly, just sat at the YPPH apron).  The SI METAR was not sync'd with MSFS, 30+ minutes behind, SI using 1230 UT METAR when MSFS was using 1300.  Stayed that way for 20 minutes, even did a clean restart to check and SI METAR stayed behind even.  Might be a one-off issue but would think the two should be in sync at least.

Edited August 30, 20241 yr by Joe L

48 minutes ago, mmcmah said:

I had been using SI rather happily, but the recent drop of Active Sky and the "Living World" model they are moving to both seem to work against my intended usage of the sim. I use Active Sky on every flight and, while it's far from perfect, I love the historical weather and the ability to time shift my flights and have an accurate representation of what the weather was like at that time. I also appreciate the representation of the weather more than the MSFS default representation.

As for the "Living World" idea that they have, I think it's great, but likely not for me. They want to offload as much processing and localizing as possible from the simmers' machines, and move as much as possible to the cloud. There will still be the performance hit of the various models that get injected once traffic is added, but as I understand it, the idea is to have a single global environment for traffic, weather (likely based on live weather), and transmissions related to the ATC controlling other players. Once you want to bring everyone to the same "world," you kind of have to make it the same for everyone.

Consequently, I would not really be able to fly at different times of the day, with different weather and still have ATC know what I'm doing and how it ties into the injected traffic and other simmers, because I'd have a different environment. Since those things are important to me, I stopped using SI and am now back to P2ATC. Once the other ATC add-ons mature further (including the new iteration of P2ATC, which should be out soon-ish), I will reexamine.

The official announcement regarding ActiveSky is posted a couple of posts above yours. We are not dropping it, we are leaving it at the current state. So if it was working for you, nothing has changed. We are in talks with the developer and trying to find out what causes the massive amount of support cases created by the combination of AS and SI, wherever the cause may be. News to follow when we have them.

The rest of your post is 100% speculation.

 

28 minutes ago, ifred said:

The rest of your post is 100% speculation.

We believe the new weather system in MSFS 2024 will make ActiveSky unnecessary.

So is that quote from you, what "new" weather system? How can you possibly know AS will be "unnecessary"?

Seems like 100% speculation to me 🤔

1 hour ago, ifred said:

The official announcement regarding ActiveSky is posted a couple of posts above yours. We are not dropping it, we are leaving it at the current state. So if it was working for you, nothing has changed. We are in talks with the developer and trying to find out what causes the massive amount of support cases created by the combination of AS and SI, wherever the cause may be. News to follow when we have them.

The rest of your post is 100% speculation.

 

I'm not sure that the rest of the post is 100% speculation. This was part of the announcement (which made no mention of an approach to HiFI; the mention in this thread was the first I saw of that):

"The move towards a "living world" scenario will require that we use common weather. In this case, "real world weather" will need to be the common denominator."

That tied with comments like this one from McCracken on Discord led to my comments above:

"[W]e're slowly getting more and more traffic aware! The big push right now is to inject MP traffic between different sims similar to Vatsim. Once everyone is showing on the same network, we'll be adding the planes from our "Recorded Historical Chatter" feature. 

That will serve as a sort of stopgap between now and full AI traffic injection and control. 

The end goal being a living world of ATC, where you see all other players and all players will see the same AI traffic, and be  sequenced together with it all 🙂"

Now, you are correct that I'm drawing conclusions. However, if everyone can see the same, how do you allow for differences in weather and time of day and how that traffic can vary depending on the time of day you choose. I will be following the developments of the platform.

 

1 hour ago, MarcG said:

We believe the new weather system in MSFS 2024 will make ActiveSky unnecessary.

So is that quote from you, what "new" weather system? How can you possibly know AS will be "unnecessary"?

Seems like 100% speculation to me 🤔

Seems like that statement on the original announcement prompted a rewrite. The new wording is: "This decision will be re-evaluated once MSFS 2024 is fully deployed."

 

I can give you my personal opinion regarding the weather: If there was only one source available that will guarantee that the user and any of the third party tools (all atc, all weather injectors, cloud painters, name it) will have the same weather source at the same time - then 90% of all those problems would be solved. My personal hope is that there will be some kind of solution with FS2024.

The problems having weather out of sync starts (and do not end) with:

- availability/uptime/reliability of service providers
- 3rd party tools with certain settings ("dont inject when on the ground" for example leads to sync problems)
- METAR/ATIS being interpreted differently "because we know better") (etc.)

All that is causing problems. And I may have missed others.

Thats the problem we all have to deal with especially if we want to give the users maximum freedom when it comes to weather / time settings. One weather source that is reliable for the users and also accessible for third party, while covering ALL weather and turbulence settings, will be the solution for it. Perferrable one which is 100% compatible to the simulation you use.

(Well - this post has a lots of opinions in there and is not necessarily the view of my colleagues at SI, so I want to point that out). 

35 minutes ago, ifred said:

I can give you my personal opinion regarding the weather: If there was only one source available that will guarantee that the user and any of the third party tools (all atc, all weather injectors, cloud painters, name it) will have the same weather source at the same time - then 90% of all those problems would be solved. My personal hope is that there will be some kind of solution with FS2024.

The problems having weather out of sync starts (and do not end) with:

- availability/uptime/reliability of service providers
- 3rd party tools with certain settings ("dont inject when on the ground" for example leads to sync problems)
- METAR/ATIS being interpreted differently "because we know better") (etc.)

All that is causing problems. And I may have missed others.

Thats the problem we all have to deal with especially if we want to give the users maximum freedom when it comes to weather / time settings. One weather source that is reliable for the users and also accessible for third party, while covering ALL weather and turbulence settings, will be the solution for it. Perferrable one which is 100% compatible to the simulation you use.

(Well - this post has a lots of opinions in there and is not necessarily the view of my colleagues at SI, so I want to point that out). 

I don't really understand the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when using ActiveSky the weather will be injected into the sim and the ActiveSky METAR into SI, so the SI weather and the actual in-sim weather will always be the same. Isn't that exactly what you're asking for? It's the same source for everything.

Also out of interest - what "enroute" problems could Active Sky possibly create for an ATC tool? ATC only needs the weather for airport-related stuff, i.e. active runways and METARs. This is being given anytime by ActiveSky via their METARs. Why would SI care about what happens enroute with the weather?

48 minutes ago, Fiorentoni said:

I don't really understand the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when using ActiveSky the weather will be injected into the sim and the ActiveSky METAR into SI, so the SI weather and the actual in-sim weather will always be the same. Isn't that exactly what you're asking for? It's the same source for everything.

Also out of interest - what "enroute" problems could Active Sky possibly create for an ATC tool? ATC only needs the weather for airport-related stuff, i.e. active runways and METARs. This is being given anytime by ActiveSky via their METARs. Why would SI care about what happens enroute with the weather?

We can discuss weather problems in a separate thread since it would derail this one in my opinion. 

 

OK, things moving fast and furious - this just posted on Discord  a short while ago:

```ActiveSky: Good news.. the developer of ActiveSky reached out to me, and we've come up with a VERY good solution to the issues. He's going to build a custom integration for us. This means ActiveSky support is back in play, but we'll need some time to get it all hooked up the right way. I'm very excited about this. (No ETA, since this is mostly an effort on his part, rather than ours).```

14 hours ago, ifred said:

Define "flawlessly". In my opinion its working flawlessly, since a couple of weeks already. That doesnt mean that we are not fine-tuning it, or being in talks with NG to get better data to make it even better than it is.

But when you mean something like "I file my simbrief-flightplan and go" - yes. You might even get a change to the Arrival due to weather/wind changes and it will work "flawlessly". You can also tell your cabin crew to announce a delay due to weather or whatever reason comes to your mind. 
 

So the answer is: In my opinion yes. But I am certainly not "neutral" here to be honest.

Ok, thanks. I am not here to bash the software but last time I tried IFR it was a mess.

Will give it a go again! I hope it is worth it because it is not cheap 

Edited August 30, 20241 yr by rob0203

A shame AS had to reach out to this company in the first place, quite why Say intentions couldn't approach AS privately with the concerns instead of going public with a poorly written reason including pure speculation on a "new" weather system for MSFS2024 (nicely ignored above....).

I can see this application diverging somewhat from the core idea of ATC e.g. copilots, making cabin crew announcements or whatever - hence the reason I have ceased subscribing for now to see how it develops and consider other alternatives in the meantime.

18 minutes ago, DavidP said:

I can see this application diverging somewhat from the core idea of ATC e.g. copilots, making cabin crew announcements or whatever - hence the reason I have ceased subscribing for now to see how it develops and consider other alternatives in the meantime.

Same, I noticed months ago that their vision wasn't exactly clear and seemed more "gamey", after all the core of an ATC add on would be... ATC right? And is ATC defined as controlling the players aircraft only? I think we all know the answer to that. I mean even default MSFS ATC knows that 🤣The "other" ATC add-ons seem to have a pretty good grasp on the end goal, and will be very interesting to see how they evolve.

42 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

Same, I noticed months ago that their vision wasn't exactly clear and seemed more "gamey", after all the core of an ATC add on would be... ATC right? And is ATC defined as controlling the players aircraft only? I think we all know the answer to that. I mean even default MSFS ATC knows that 🤣The "other" ATC add-ons seem to have a pretty good grasp on the end goal, and will be very interesting to see how they evolve.

I've seen a few of their weekly live casts, and their company address that point in the ones I've seen.

They have a fairly large team now, and all this other stuff is contributions from those other team members, not from the ATC devs. I think they have over 20 volunteers working on projects there?

I think it's smart of them to do that, allows for the same resources applied towards ATC development while also giving us a bunch of these high value side features. I don't fly without a tourguide anymore personally. The tech they use gives us some really cool options. 

But to each their own 🙂