Franz007

I have definitively also noticed quite some inacuracies as you describe. The temp, pressure and winds are usually excellent and very close to what the latest official metar says. But the cloud coverage and visibility is pretty often a miss. I also tested some airports in an area with big storms, ugly weather and very bad visibility (many times). And in XP it is often just scattered and visibility seems to be 10+ km or at least clearly better than what it should be. What is weird is that for you it seems to be the opposite? Perhaps related to the area? As far as I remember, the accuracy used to be better around 6 months ago. I think Marco is aware of something related to the weather needing improvement. At least LR is aware of the radar-returns not being shown anymore and this should be fixed. Let’s hope it will also fix what we are talking about here.

I haven‘t had it as extreme as you describe. But I absolutely withess something like a flash and the sky colours (and haze) changing within 1 sec. But the cloud coverage seemed to stay more or less identical as it happened (every 30-60 minutes as an estimate)

You can absolutely get great results from USGS in specific areas — no argument there. The problem is that USGS only covers the U.S., and even within the U.S. the resolution varies a lot. Once you step outside U.S. borders, there’s no equivalent free 15–30 cm source. Europe, Asia, Africa, South America… all the high‑res data is commercial. That’s where the real issue starts: Laminar can’t build a global product on top of a patchwork of “free here, pay there” imagery. And they can’t redistribute processed USGS tiles either — even if the imagery is free, the derivative product still has licensing restrictions unless you host it yourself

The tech for cleaning up imagery isn’t really the issue. The real blocker is licensing. High‑res imagery (30–50 cm) isn’t free, and the companies that own it—Maxar, Google, Bing, Esri—don’t allow cheap redistribution to hundreds of thousands of end users. Their pricing is negotiated case‑by‑case and gets very expensive once you need multi‑user rights.The “taxpayer‑funded” datasets you mention (Sentinel, Landsat) are 10–30 m resolution, which is far too low for a flight sim. There’s no free global high‑res source Laminar could legally stream.

same! I just wanted to write it here. I'm having the same error-message...

Well I think there is a simple reason for that. The licence costs for streaming orthos for the whole world in a high resolution are not only very high...they are horrendous. And added to that, Austin also said that he didn't like them because you'll see a lot of shadows, snow-patches and weird colours (from the aerial capturing). What will most likely happen is that they will use these satelite-imageries to build a more simplified kind of world but most likely not stream orthos 1:1.

I am using the free autoortho and it is not perfect. There are some inconsistencies from time to time and a few tiles stucked in low-res (but only like 1-2% of them). This is only noticeable when flying very low, where MSFS for sure has an advantage. But above 3000ft - together with simheaven - it can look absolutely fantastic. And I also noticed that the quality varies a lot from country to country. But I would personnally not call it simply « decent ». It adds a lot to the visual immersion. Here a good example:

@MrBitstFlyer Fantastic job! Many thanks 🙏👍

That's weird...for me it's like night & day and I even have to admit that I couldn't fly without it 🙂

No no, it’s already an issue in the default XP12-version. I was just wondering if there was something we could do about that…

Great news and I really start to appreciate that plugin more and more. A think I still don't understand quite well, is why there are some layer of haze appearing out of nowhere. Is that a known bug in XP12 that cannot be fixed now?

Thanks for your help 👍 Will do that. And another thing I noticed: at each refresh (300 sec) the sim freezes for about 5-10 seconds, although having excluded the script-folder from the virus-checks…

I still see some very abrupt haze-changes, that are my main problem when doing VFR-flights...do any of you guys know why?

Here my actual settings. Is that good? 🙂

OK, so now I could enter my other API-key for OWM. I opened the window of the script and select the "LIVE"-register. What do I have to set there? I see a lot of options and sliders to change...I guess I have to check the box "Use CAMW aerosol data"? What about the ones for altitude fix? And what altitude to enter there? And do I have to check the box "override XP12 visibility"? And at the there are two sliders for turbidity: if I check the boxes, it will be set automatically, is that correct? Sorry to ask but I am a bit confused about all options. I wanted to test the automatic values coming from the API (Live).