Dear Microsoft Flight Simulator’s SDK Q&A; team, It would be great if you
bring a Weather SDK that will allow 3rd party developers (such as HiFi) to
develop accurate weather engine (like the famous Active Sky) for MSFS2020 and
also allow them to add sky colors and cloud textures in the simulator.
Hello @Ben-777 This is not planned and will not be
planned in the future, Regards, Boris
It would be great for people to know the real reason for this so they can stop
asking.
@Boris1 I do agree with Keven. Also please consider
some of the weather API request from many 3rd party developers doesn’t mean we
want to inject weather or override it, we really need means to know current
game simulation weather information. For example, is the airplane inside a
cloud? with this we can do cool effects, is the airplane currently in a storm?
is there lighting? with this we can also simulate very cool things, for
example lighting strikes, ST Elmo fire on the windshield, etc. currently even
retrieving METAR from the current simulation is impossible, and it is forcing
US as developers to retrieve the METAR from external websites, which
unfortunately will not necessarily match what is being simulated inside the
game, let’s say for an instance an user sets the weather to thunderstorm but
in real life at that station it is clear and sunny. If you guys could give US
at least some basic functionality to query the weather inside the simulator,
such as basic METAR, is airplane in cloud and other bits and pieces it would
alleviate many difficulties we are facing when developing advance airplanes
and perhaps stop these questions coming from our own customers since they keep
asking US as developers to implement things that we are unable to do so due to
lack of tools from the SDK. Best Regards, Raul
Why? This is an essential function.
@Simbol, Boris provided an answer to the original
poster: we do not plan to provide an API that would allow people to inject
data (“accurate weather engine”, whatever that means) or alter our weather
rendering (“clouds”, “sky color”). This is different to extending the weather
API which we have already discussed here or during Q&As.; Best regards, Eric /
Asobo
Hi Eric @EPellissier, Many thanks for letting me
know, I was trying to provide some feedback since the overall perception from
our side is that no further weather API was going to be developed. I am Glad
to hear that instead there is indeed plans to extend current functionality. Do
you have some links where I could read what is currently planned for the
future? Thanks in advance, Raul
There’s no such link for now - I believe the last time we talked publicly
about the weather API was during the last SDK Q&A.; Best regards, Eric / Asobo
Why not? Thousand of users want you to provide an API that would allow people
to inject data (“accurate weather engine”, whatever that means) or alter our
weather rendering (“clouds”, “sky color”).
Hello @EPellissier , Can you please give us some
more information on extending the weather API for reading data? Will such
functionality be available for Simconnect? Thank you.
We don’t have details to share right now. The idea would be to use SimConnect
indeed. Best regards, Eric / Asobo
Thank you @EPellissier
We are waiting for 2+ years. Hopefully Asobo/MS can sit down and get it done
with MeteoBlue since as far as I see it’s not that Asobo do not want to do it,
it’s a legal/contractual issue.