xEnviro 2020 1.0 release notes

[Captain Kitten]

DarkSpace and Threshold are proud to present the most accurate weather engine for Microsoft Flight Simulator. With over ten years of experience with reproducing real weather on X-Plane with realistic training in mind, we have ported the core of xEnviro over to Microsoft Flight Simulator to get the most precise weather in the most popular simulator.

 

 

Features:

• Real-time meteorological data with a refresh interval from 5 up to 60 minutes.
• Historical weather data is available at 30 minutes intervals.
• Atmosphere condition based on dynamic air parcel prediction model used for real aviation research and training.
• Advanced atmosphere topology methods provide accurate cloud thickness and density prediction.
• Atmosphere quality includes humidity, pollution and fine particle amount.
• Actual wind direction and speed for all levels and temperature, turbulence and wind shear.
• Simulation of in-cloud turbulence.
• Surface crosswind components can be reduced during ground roll for users with no rudder pedals.
• Seasonal data processed by our servers all year round provides real-time snow coverage.
• All the weather and atmosphere-heavy calculations are executed on our servers. Therefore, expect no performance impact on your hardware.
• Feature to look up the current METAR, and TAF reports in the Weather Briefing window. 
• Feature to display METAR reports for the stations around your aircraft. 
• Options to change Flight Simulator toolbar appearance and size.

Our path:
We start with releasing two main components along side the rest of the feature list; the weather engine and historical weather. We have many features planned but are also very eager to hear from you about what you want to complete your environment addon in Microsoft Flight Simulator. First, we will concentrate on non-visual features. 

We want to bring xEnviro’s true-scale clouds to MSFS eventually, but this needs a thorough evaluation of the access and performance trade-off. So no promises on this are made at this point. 

Future features:
Join the xEnviro discord to add your feature requests.

To our customers on the X-Plane platform: 
We will not be abandoning you. In fact, now that we have released this version for the “other” sim, we will be focusing on xEnviro 1.18 and ironing out current issues. 1.18 will still be for X-Plane 11. We will ideally be alternating between the two platforms to have equal progress on both.

(Only if a hotfix is needed will we update xE20_1.01  before xE_1.18) 

Pricing:
Our pricing is fixed. For the whole version 1. x run you will have free updates. MSFS is somewhat new to us so we still need to see what is possible and what is not. But the price will not change with the features planned.

The price of xE20 will be 42,- USD
Existing customers of xEnviro for X-Plane will get a fixed discount price of 24,- USD
Regardless of where you bought xEnviro, your discount will be applied in the store when you use the email that you registered xEnviro with. 

xEnviro 2020 will initially only be available at the Threshold store.

Known issues:

If your issue is not here or solution does not work please go to xEnviro.net and file a support ticket. Please also attach xEnviroLog.txt located in xEnviro 2020 folder when contacting support.

Issue:
No connection with Microsoft Flight simulator
Solution:
Please make sure you don't have any addons that alter flight simulator ToolBar appearance.

Issue:
xEnviro opens in tray but closes again
Solution:
Start xE as administrator

 

Since the scaling in MSFS is way off it is hard to depict the weather correctly. MSFS scales their clouds at least twice the size of what is realistic.

One example is with METAR: FEW032 OVC044
This is overcast with smaller wispy clouds beneath. This is impossible to set in MSFS.
Trying to set a layer at 3200ft and tops at 4400ft 1200ft thick - the lower layer will basically just be transparent.

We have scaled down the clouds to approx 1.5- 1.6 from 2.x and this can lead to some wonky clouds in some rare conditions.
We hope to bring our own clouds in in the future.

 

[Captain Kitten]

For support make a ticket at www.xenviro.net