Bottle

Hold my beer. Did you hear them talking about the hibernating bear update?! No? Nor did I. We're like years in, everything else is being fixed, all this completely useless flight model stuff and eye candy, but no mention of HIBERNATING BEARS!!! What a complete mess. I'm going back to FS9.

LOL. Purely at random I went to Kadena (RODN) and thought it looked very strange (empty with no aircraft or ground crew). Looked like a bug so I checked on Google earth. Oops, it's an airforce base and indeed is just a series of parking bays!

There's hope then that "Press any key to continue" will eventually snuff it.

I see, I didn't know visibility limits were not definable in MFS. But at least cloud bases and tops are. I thought your "hate" comment was directed at my post, not at the thread in general. I'm not hating, just trying to puzzle it all out snd why there are such strong feelings.

I must be missing something and am completely willing to accept that it's me who's at fault. In your counter scenario, if I wanted to practice ILS etc. under certain weather conditions, I certainly wouldn't wait days until the real METAR data happened to give me the conditions I wanted via REX. I'd use the sim's weather system to set it up at a time that's convenient for me to do the practice at my computer. It seems to me that your counter is in fact a very good argument for not getting REX. So I'm genuinely puzzled and not trying to hate (the only hate I'm detecting is the "eye candy" and "cute"). But maybe I've misunderstood what REX can do. Everyone's talking about its ability to give the real-time weather (which is what I was questioning). But is REX also better at fine tuning the weather conditions to user-specifications? If that's the case (and so will let you more specifically practice as you want), then why is everyone so fixated on "reality"? Or is it that the weather REX presents, whether it's real-time accurate or not, is more nuanced and so realistic? That I could understand, but it's not the claim that I've been seeing.

I'm at a loss to understand why having a depiction of the realtime weather is so important to some people. I suppose each to their own, but having "it must be real" as a criterion and standard seems a bit odd as you sit in front of your computer making pretend that you're flying a plane. It seems like arguing about angels on the head of a pin to me.

Didn't they write in the last update (24th Sept. 2020) that they had moved more staff to the SDK development? cf. "The SDK team has been expanded to improve and expand the SDK functionality more quickly and to provide more thorough documentation"

I can't work out if the OPs "brilliant idea" was facetious or not. But it was a brilliant idea and apparently very succesful.

I'm pretty sure at the press event at Renton airport they stated they would eventually transition to DX12, so it's not new news. But considering everything else they need to do I wouldn't expect this any time in the next 2 years.

In that bush trip there are even some instructions which are the complete opposite to what they should be (tells you to go East when you should go West), so yes, QC was a little low for them. Still I like them a lot but personally I'm waiting to continue after they fix the bug introduced in Patch 2.

Somewhere out there is an article by a scenery developer that nicely explains the benefits and risks of DX12. Sorry I can't find it to post here. From what they wrote, the move to DX12 fills me with trepidation. The take-home message was DX12 takes direct control of the GPU without the safety net of going through drivers. It means a program can become very unstable and close down the whole system unless it's programmed very well and extensively tested. Asobo might be able to do it, but we might see a massive increase in CTDs from addons.

I shared a YouTube video by Moore's Law Is Dead a little while back where he predicted supply at launch would be very scarce and that that the 3090 wasn't what Nvidia was hyping it up to be (nor the 2080 for that matter). I was told not to believe him. Turns out he was 100% correct.

Their unprofessional snide comment about Asobo on Facebook made me instantly wonder about them. Seems consistent with what others are saying about them. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

The devs stated previously that they weren't happy with the effects system and so are totally reworking it. Hence no splashes, etc. The have mentioned progress with the new system in the last 2 updates. So keep your hair on, it's coming.

Kongsberg Satellite Services is partnered to the system and they include significant satellite image systems. Could be good news for quality and frequency of Bing maps updates. Thanks for pointing this out.

People are well ahead of you there. For instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coddling_of_the_American_Mind and http://www.jeantwenge.com/igen-book-by-dr-jean-twenge/ Philosophically this all starts way back with Rene Descartes and runs through to today's postmodernism.

My bad. I was only looking at the PFD and not the MFD. Yes, I can see that the wind is in the opposite direction in the latter. At least it's opposite and not something random. That suggests it's just a sign error in the code which should be easy to fix.

Me thinks you should review the concept of arrows and what they mean.

It looks like, "The patch downloads so slowly!" has become the new "Let me into the alpha!"

I'm part of the Microsoft User Research Survey. Week 4's questions included one about what we think of the "Press any key". So they know that people don't like it and there must be a possibility of removing it otherwise they wouldn't have asked. Let's hope the message comes loud and clear to them. Two more weeks for the surveys, so it's possible it could get removed in the next patch.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for 3PDs providing new things for MFS. Not trying to rain on anyone's parade. I'm just having a hard time seeing how this could be a significant improvement and concerned that some are getting hung up on the word "model" and wrongly think ALL of the MFS weather is just modeled. In fact, I think the concept is being used disingenuously by some. Meteoblue divides up the globe into small boxes on the surface and then more stacked above. The Weather Feature Discovery video stated 60 layers of cloud data and 20 layers of weather data. The ceiling is 60,000 feet. I can't remember the number of surface boxes (lost somewhere in the mists of time in one of the interviews) but I'm pretty sure it was hundreds of thousands of surface boxes, if not many more. There are people on the ground reporting METAR data for SOME of those boxes. Yes, that data will be accurate and a lot of that data, not all, will be regularly updated. But there are nowhere near as many observations as there are boxes. For the majority of the boxes the ONLY way to get an estimate of weather is for a model to be used. There's simply no other way but to rely on a model. It's either that or literally no idea. The model is based off of the current real world observations and like all models, its inference can be wrong. The Meteoblue video explains how they try to get it as accurate as it can be. But no-one would ever argue that the predictions will be 100% accurate (though they should be in the boxes that have observations). The famous quote by George Box is appropriate,“Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.” I don't know, but would expect Meteoblue to have a pretty robust source of observations and would be updating them as often as they can (for instance their cloud satellite data is refreshed every 10 minutes). It therefore seems to me that a system that just uses METAR data would be a vastly inferior one because it would have a fraction of the data that's possible with parametric modelling. Basing an assessment of the MFS weather on what's been available to date seems to be ill advised since it appears to have not been fully implemented (or bugged). Was it ever fully functional during the alpha? If Asobo fix the weather system and say, "Yep, that's all of it and it's working as we intend it", and then it proves to be either consistently inaccurate or significantly out of date, then I'll look for an alternative. But the only thing I can see that's likely to be an improvement would be the refresh frequency. The weather scenarios is a nice feature though but since it's a canned scenario seems to be at odds with the people complaining that the weather isn't accurate.

It's sad to see no hot air balloons in the list 😪

Are you saying Meteoblue doesn't have access to METAR data? If so, can you evidence that? It would seem very odd if they didn't have access to it considering what their business is.

Perhaps I didn't understand the Meteoblue Partnership Series video. It was clear from that, that Meteoblue uses observation data. Period. It starts with observation data (which is relatively sparse and will be no better or worse than what REX can get their hands on) but then realistically models the weather in locations where there isn't data, including upper atmosphere conditions. They also make forecasts for days ahead (which I expect has nothing to do with MFS). Unless REX has access to proprietary source weather data, I can't see them having anything more accurate than Meteoblue, and absolutely nothing to rival the granularity and accuracy of the predictions where there isn't actual data (unless REX has a big data supercomputer cluster it's not telling us about). What's not known is just how frequently the Meteoblue data is updated and how well it smooths from one set of data to another. That's possibly something that REX might have an advantage with. But so far it's been hard to evaluate because the system is obviously partly broken. My suspicion is that it's the data feeding aspect that's broken (hence 255/3), not the actual weather system itself. That might be down to the MS cloud system that the data most likely has to pass through and so nothing to do with Meteoblue. Hopefully we'll see it in full action once the next patch comes out.