JanH

Where? It's true that I personally don't remember any specific confirmation of this feature by the developers themselves, but I don't remember any specific denial, either. Also, some Dutch guys who were invited to the Seattle preview event reported that time and date can be adjusted via a slider, and that setting back the clock would also load the corresponding historic weather at that time. What they left unclear is how much you can go back, since they only mentioned that you can load "the situation of an hour, a day or even longer ago", and as such it's not clear how much exactly "even longer ago" covers.

And of course, even "just real-world traffic"-mode technically still is a blend between the player plane and the real-world mirror planes, though the conflicts will be a bit less blatant than for the full mix. Still, good to have it confirmed that traditional AI traffic that can truly react to the actual in-sim conditions will make an appearance, too.

So it does, but with what little Dutch I can understand, it don't see any glaring translation errors compared to the original text.

Regarding the weather, somebody who was invited to the preview event in Seattle a little while ago reported that "At departure you can indicate what time it is and in what weather you want to fly. [...] That does not have to be the current weather. The interface has a simple slider with which you can easily turn the time back to the situation of an hour, a day or even longer ago." (original post). So while it's not yet clear whether the built-in historic weather data actually reaches back a full year (to cover the weather in all seasons you'd care about), at least weather matching the time of the day doesn't look to be a problem. so I'm optimistic in that regard. I do share some of the scepticism regarding the AI traffic though - I concede that merely mirroring the real world traffic is a quick way to fill the sky with life and certainly better than nothing, but dumb AI traffic that simply stupidly mirrors the real word traffic without regard to what is happening in the sim world (i.e. which is in fact missing the "intelligence" part in AI) causes a number of other edge cases.

And indeed all major cloud computing services offer significant price reductions if you're making use of that spare capacity off-peak so to speak and are ready to yield to higher-paying customers at a moment's notice. Within the context of MSFS, this might be suitable for the Bing data to scenery data conversion for example - that wouldn't seem a time-critical task and only needs to run on demand anyway (i.e. when there's actually new Bing data or some improvement of the conversion algorithms that means the scenery data has to be regenerated)

... and also hopefully some of the other more egregious issues I remember (unless they've already been fixed in FSX - since I'm flight simming only very intermittently, I've still remained on FS9 so far): better handling of spacing planes on approach and controlling approach speeds, so you're no longer suddenly being overtaken by the jet behind you when doing an approach in a slower plane (i.e. what you now have to use AI Smooth/AI Separation for) Better handling of ground traffic wanting to cross active runways - if I remember correctly, a single plane on approach will cause all ground traffic to come for a standstill for ages, even if it is still miles away Better distribution of traffic across active runways that isn't based solely on direction of arrival/departure, so you no longer end up with one runway possibly grossly overloaded and the other sitting empty And ingenious as the crossway runway technique and other similar hacks are, I'm sure airport scenery creators would appreciate if some additional options for configuring which runways should be used when could be used if desired.

While it's better to throttle further upstream if possible, any reasonable server that isn't mounting a DoS-attack on you should eventually back off if it notices that you aren't receiving as fast as the server is sending. Indeed with TCP traffic that should happen automatically because the throttling means that the receiving device will be slower to acknowledge the received packets, which will eventually cause the server to slow down.

According to this post, some historic data might indeed be available, although unfortunately so far nobody has come up with either a second source to verify that statement or alternatively some clarification what "an hour, a day or even longer ago" exactly means, i.e. whether it would possibly even stretch back a full year for complete seasonal coverage. They'd have to match the new input data quality the sim now supposedly is able to use (i.e. much more detailed and finer-grained cloud coverage for example as opposed to simply METARs), though...

... but would likely still require some support by the base game if they're to be done properly (especially regarding the interaction between AI traffic and ATC).

Using live traffic more or less restricts you to using the corresponding real-life weather, too, because otherwise you can end up with situations where the required runway usage due to the in-sim weather doesn't match the runway usage of the real world AI traffic, and going against the stream of AI traffic - even with a "safety bubble" - doesn't seem very immersive Ground traffic that doesn't react to your presence other than fading in and out generally seems an iffy proposition, even when you don't want to use the runway in the opposite direction to the rest of the AI traffic How good is the coverage of potential live traffic data sources a) globally and b) for smaller GA traffic, too? True "live" traffic means you need to be flying in real time, which can be rather restrictive depending on where you want to fly (e.g. when for me it's a reasonable time of the day for flight-simming, it's stupid o'clock in Australasia with probably not much traffic around anyway), so at a minimum you need some amount of recorded historic traffic, too