9 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

1.  ASFS can not show a weather front in the distance.
2.  Flying towards a weather front in ASFS will be displayed as a series of merged weather areas.

If you load into MSFS where the sky is cloudless, ASFS will show you a cloudless sky.  When the next weather download occurs, and the sky now contains cirrus, ASFS will merge the sky from clear to cirrus in the time interval the user sets in the options. At the next weather update the real sky may contain cirrus and stratus.  Again, ASFS will merge from pure cirrus to cirrus and stratus. This will continue until the front is overhead with a low cloud base and rain.

I don’t see how that can meaningfully be described as a front. That’s just taking the weather at the front and painting the whole world with it, gradually.

21 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

use a global weather model will not show a weather front in the distance or different clouds in different directions. 

Well, THAT is per definition what a weather front is called, no? It is just plain wrong if you fly at 38000ft and you can see 180m around you and you do NOT see a weatherfront just 30nm away. Immersion killing at best. And yes, the default engine is capable of showing an overcast cloud layer 30nm away and if you approach it and cross the boarder of such a front, you have overcast in front of you and clear skies behind. Something AS nor REX is capable of unless you use a preset...

4 minutes ago, AnkH said:

Something AS nor REX is capable of unless you use a preset...

This is something I thought is a problem with both their products for any sim, they don’t seem to have access to a unified global weather dataset? I think Xenviro has their own weather data so can / could display fronts, but afaik, AS and Rex have never been able to do it.

That’s one reason I’m not sure it’s fair to ask MS to ‘open up’ the weather, as I think that means giving 3rd parties Meteoblue’s data for free, which I can understand they’re not too keen to do.

2 hours ago, scotchegg said:

This is something I thought is a problem with both their products for any sim, they don’t seem to have access to a unified global weather dataset? I think Xenviro has their own weather data so can / could display fronts, but afaik, AS and Rex have never been able to do it.

That’s one reason I’m not sure it’s fair to ask MS to ‘open up’ the weather, as I think that means giving 3rd parties Meteoblue’s data for free, which I can understand they’re not too keen to do.

No, AS has access to he data, they just cannot access MSFS properly to display it. Due to Asobo restrictions they are limited to essentially preset theme reloads.

IMHO, what Damian has done with that is freaking amazing.  I always fly with AS and I see fronts and TStorms etc. I know they are not there "technically" but unless I am just staring at the weather waiting to see a front, I don't notice. During the flight, monitoring the instruments, doing flight planning etc I do not notice the scene changes or weather reloads - that's the point of immersion.

If you are flying looking for something to break the immersion, you will find it. To me, the whole flight is a package, a little weather, lighting, sound, planning etc. all come together to make a fun flight. Inspect each detail? Then it's a different story because I can always find something to complain about.

1 hour ago, vgbaron said:

No, AS has access to he data, they just cannot access MSFS properly to display it. Due to Asobo restrictions they are limited to essentially preset theme reloads.

Just to clarify, AS does have a unified, global weather model ready to go and have been able to display fronts / different weather in the same sky in previous sims?

from what I remember from p3d, AS was better able to show distant changes in weather there.  I don't think it could have been said that they ever had true global airmass coverage, but it was depicted better in sims where they had more access to the weather engine.  no idea how the XP integration was.  The lack of access to msfs weather is a real thing, and for what it is AS in msfs is excellent.  More historical data in default, and an option to force live weather in sim would cause me to uninstall it tho.

4 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Just to clarify, AS does have a unified, global weather model ready to go and have been able to display fronts / different weather in the same sky in previous sims?

Yes, this was debuted about 11 years ago with ASNext for FSX. (2013 release, corrected - we had some experimental functionality in ASE and AS2012 prior to that but the official release with localized weather variation was with ASNext).

Edited December 27, 20241 yr by Damian Clark

8 hours ago, scotchegg said:

This is something I thought is a problem with both their products for any sim, they don’t seem to have access to a unified global weather dataset? I think Xenviro has their own weather data so can / could display fronts, but afaik, AS and Rex have never been able to do it.

That’s one reason I’m not sure it’s fair to ask MS to ‘open up’ the weather, as I think that means giving 3rd parties Meteoblue’s data for free, which I can understand they’re not too keen to do.

We have had "unified global weather dataset" for nearly 2 decades with localized weather high-resolution weather setting capability since ASNext around 11 years ago

We are asking for write access to weather, to be able to set it, at the level we were able to with FSX, and P3D, and X-Plane. We're not asking to read proprietary weather data. Until such time that such capability is provided in MSFS2020/2024, we are depicting localized variation with some "educated guessing" which has limited variation not directly attached to the localized weather data.... but we try and make up for this limitation with smooth and smart transitions. It's getting better. But as mentioned many times in the past we really need some more open API capability to make things shine in this department.

Edited December 27, 20241 yr by Damian Clark