FSLabs - P3D product line maintenance update v228 (Experimental channel)

We are pleased to announce that we have pushed v228 of our Prepar3D products to the Experimental channel.

Please read this first: v228 is strictly a maintenance release. It exists to do two things and nothing else:

• Concorde-X — repair online weather, which stopped working when NOAA retired the feeds we were using.

• A320-X / A319-X / A321-X — a compatibility release, keeping the product line working against the same NOAA change and against current hardware.

Concorde-X — online weather restored

NOAA have retired the old ADDS text feeds that the Concorde-X flight planner has used for years. Their replacement v4 API is considerably stricter about what it accepts, and the practical result was that our METAR, TAF and SIGMET requests were being rejected outright rather than returning partial data — so you got blanks instead of weather.

v228 brings the move to the new API:

• METAR / TAF / SIGMET requests rebuilt. The legacy query parameters that the new API rejects outright are gone, and the station list is now assembled correctly.

• Report parsing updated. The new feed prefixes raw reports with METAR /SPECI  where the old one did not, so decoding now works off the actual report text.

• SIGMETs restored. The old feed now returns an empty redirect; we've moved to the current endpoint, and SIGMET identifiers are built from the correct field.

• Variable-wind reports no longer produce a fabricated wind direction alongside the real speed.

Weather feeds now fail gracefully. Previously, one dead third-party endpoint would take the entire fuel plan down with it — no navlog, no tactical page, no refuel figures, no takeoff or landing forms — and the log gave you no way to tell which one. Each feed is now handled independently: if one goes dark we fall back to the last known good cached data and write a line naming the failing feed to PERF.log. Two FAA hosts (NAT tracks and NOTAMs) have in fact disappeared entirely following the FAA's NOTAM system retirement; that data is display-only, so it now degrades quietly instead of being fatal. We've also stopped treating an HTTP error page as valid weather, which is what used to overwrite good cached reports with empty ones.

A320-X family — compatibility

The same NOAA change affected the ATSU/AOC, so the equivalent fixes are in on that side: METAR, TAF and SIGMET retrieval work against the new API, and the wind decoding fix applies there too.

A Continuing Commitment to our Customers and Products

You can grab this update now through the Experimental channel in the FSLabs Control Center. Please let us know if you run into anything unusual.

Thank you, as always, for the feedback and support!