Current cloud/thermal model is so limited that after many years I actually stopped enjoying flying in Condor - “puffy/circular Cu only” weather is actually quite rare in RL.
Someone said that “gliding is a sport for meteorologists” - I couldn’t agree more - RL pilots spend a lot of time (sometimes too much ) studying weather forecasts and its change in time before deciding on a cross country flight. It is in fact deciding part of good XC flight.
Even after adding way more parameters to the current weather settings it won’t allow us to generate realistic dynamic weather varied in space and time - how to specify movement and evolution of baric centers that will arrive from outside the map borders, map of current ground humidity that affect cloud creation etc.
So in my opinion the best source of dynamic weather data would be a weather prediction engine like rasp blipmaps - (example that I use in RL flying: https://europe.fcst.pl/).
Those forecasts are calculated from real world data sources to predict real weather so the realism of such generated weather is as real as you can currently get. And those tools are made to provide weather info for gliders so just what we need.
As a bonus people could use the same weather services as they would use in RL flying to plan their XC flight and at the same time learn to correctly interpret/verify weather maps provided by such services.
Some clarifications:
- We don’t need real time data(!), this data can be gathered and computed offline for historic days and user/competition organiser could choose from some (probably automatically) selected as interesting historic weathers.
- Having this data computed offline/asynchronously means that the weather information can be computed as slowly/as precisely as is needed for proper level of detail needed for sim (unlike it seems now - in just a few seconds before flight), and once computed could be reused many times and also shared.
- Weather could be prepared by some external/standalone tool locally from rasp data or in the cloud (no pun intended). It would be probably best to have some weather Condor API or data format to have multiple weather data providers/elasticity/externalise weather generation. Notably MSFS2020 devs claim they won’t provide such API so it would be a clear advantage for Condor.
I'd like to know if the devs consider such idea for implementation?