An MSFS API that has slowly decayed in the progression FSX → MSFS2020 → MSFS2024 is the ability to confidently get the data from a weather preset that has been loaded. I accept this is unlikely to be part of a plan, just bits of the sim that aren’t being looked at quietly breaking while work is done elsewhere, and it could be pointed out that not many people want to use that API, or people should never have been using the given API in the first place. But for the few programmers that do need access to the data from the WPR this slow disintegration of the API’s makes MSFS2024 a backwards step from MSFS2020, and that was a backwards step from FSX.
The requirement is simple: a WPR file contains some data, the user clicks ‘use that preset’, and some API is able to communicate exactly the data that was in that preset.
The simconnect callback on the WPR file load disappeared in MSFS2020 without any equivalent replacement. The JS WeatherListener does the classic bad design of using a hidden internal API to get the WPR data, and then only serves it’s modified version of what it read in a downstream API.
The latest release of MSFS2024 is bizarrely reading the WPR preset, deleting the FILE, updating the data, and writing back a new file sometimes with a different name, and still not providing any API to work out what MSFS has done change the data. It is hard to see how this makes sense for a user-created custom WPR file.
It would be great to know if there’s some new API that will move MSFS2024 forwards compared to prior versions of the sim, or this really is what we’re going to be left with.