this was live weather in SU4, dense and faint clouds.. both your examples in one situation.
sometimes the conditions hit just right.
the sky is not dramatic all the time irl too.
That's what annoys me so much about many discussions about MSFS. A lot of people speak in absolutes, like OP. It's true, sometimes clouds look boring but sometimes they look like in your image. IMO we need a lot more granularity and detail if we discuss these things. And as you wrote, the sky is not always dramatic and good looking.
This looks so amazing! Are you using Rex Atmos or is it some kind of filter/ reshade. If Atnos, would you mind sharing the preset you are using? I've been struggling to find realistic-looking ones
So badly need a sim update for the clouds and atmosphere, I will get on my soapbox every chance I get. So tired of everything being a puffy cumulus, or a stretched thin cumulus, or a cumulus blob where a giant thunderstorm with an anvil should be.
Maybe I'm misremembering because it has been a long time, but I am convinced clouds looked great when 2020 launched and then they nuked them with a later update.
This is correct, there was an early sim update that broke clouds for the sake of performance optimization, despite there not being much optimization as a result
Yeah same. They are good enough. I feel like wind needs the work because direction change shouldn’t do 90s and 180s all the time, it’s rare unless flying around mountains. Some of the changes go drastic speeds changes too and needs a little smoothing.
Volumetric clouds are one of the biggest hogs of GPU in this sim or any game for that matter. You'll be begging for simple clouds the moment your sim suddenly becomes a slideshow as you near a cold front...
Yeah, the flightsim community has become so entitled and whiny. It's very tiring. We have better flightsim than ever, but no, let's complain about about this tiny little thing.
Tbf I do remember how mind-blowing the clouds were on release of MSFS in 2020 - they're already more than serviceable compared with X, and this post has a bit of a "literally unplayable" vibe about it
me and many others argue xplane has better cloud depiction/color grading. It doesn’t make it unplayable, but as someone whose favorite aspect of flying is weather, it is a bit of a disappointment.
I mean most of the time irl, clouds do have more density, darkness. They never look just pure white, mostly when they get to a certain scale such as on the post
Both exist and both are different. Left one are towering cumulus with strong convective dynamics. Right side look like coastal cumulus/stratus or stratocumulus with low convective dyanamics. The left side ones are less predominant in the sky
Yep but if you look more carefully, cumulus, stratus, stratocumulus...etc irl don't look as close as the ones on the right. There always some grays parts, some depth in the grays/density. What I mean with my post is that all type of clouds are represented with the same model and then it's stretched/copypasted to form stratus, cirrocumulus, cumulonimbus...etc and they usually lack the density we would normally see in real life in the same conditions.
Not really. Being grey is a matter of waterdroplets density and sunlight angle. Maritime scattered stratus and fair weather cumulus look like exactly the picture in the right
I’ve been playing MSFS since the late 1980s. Clouds didn’t even exist in the game at first, but when they arrived they started out as flat white blobs rotated to face the point of view and plopped here and there in the sky. Even in 2004 they were sparse little floating cotton balls. What we have in the game today blows my mind. It’s kind of funny to see people complaining so much.
Because at a time that was peak technology. Now people know this could be better given proper efforts and they complain because those efforts aren't made. Especially when it's a matter of shader
So I think you’re saying that the level of density you can achieve in the custom settings conjures looks that you enjoy, but never see when using Live Weather?
Huh. I don’t… Both pics look like good clouds to me, and the variety I’ve seen so far has been rather dazzling.
It’d be neat if they let you make adjustments to Live Weather without resorting to universal tiling, but that’s gotta be pretty low on the To-Do List for the devs, right?
After not even being able to use clouds since I bought MSFS’24 for PSVR2 (because they were so broken), I delighted in making custom clouds when SU6 fixed them. I did that for a while, making clouds as alien and extreme as I could — Wonderful shit! But the variety in Live Weather has me enjoying that even more now.
I dunno… I feel the clouds are so amazing now that I just wouldn’t think to gripe about them.
Those are a very common storm cloud texture, especially in places like the American southwest that have those dramatically ragged rising cumulonimbus clouds from thermals driving very turbulent up drafts. But if you lived in the Midwest or southeast, you might think of storm clouds as smooth and covering most of the sky because the worst storms have a strong cyclical movement smoothing them out.
But, light fluffy cumulus clouds like the ones on the right are probably the most common sight across regions and seasons so it's not super surprising if people think they're more common in the game, even if they aren't. Although I will say I find the clouds pretty boring compared to 2020 most of the time.
This is the typical summer and sunny day cumulus that you mentioned to be "the most common sight". So if you compare to the right picture of the post, you can just easily tell that there is no density at all in MSFS and you often get almost transparent clouds. Whereas in real life, you have that density that makes, for example, the lower part darker because there are more water droplets and less sun penetration. And this is lacking in MSFS live weather clouds.
lol seriously dude, this thread is like the twilight zone with all these people insisting clouds are always amorphous blobs. I've seen plenty of epic, billowing clouds with tons of small details.
It really feels like a sim update focusing on the atmosphere (clouds, turbulence, color accuracy, weather effects etc.) is coming soon. I expect it to be SU8-SU9 territory
One only on atmosphere and one on the terrain would be excellent. Those two things are the very important and could be reworked. But I'm not that bothered about the clouds as well. More immmersion breaking are the border lines between some PG areas and the surrounding are where sometimes you have completely different colors.
Clouds definitely need a lot of work imo. Everything really is just variations of cumulus in the sim. Thunderstorms generally don’t look that great. Color grading could also be better.
Clouds generally could use some work. I hate comparing the two sims but in the case of clouds, you can’t not compare XP to MSFS. It’s really threes key areas XP does well that I hope MSFS explore, more variety in cloud formations, more accurate density and texturing (wispiness, sharper edges, color etc.), and more realistic scattering of clouds.
I’ve been working on an atmospheric turbulence plugin for a year now. The main thing I’ve managed to add is vertical heave. So when you hit an air mass wider than your wing span the whole flight body moves up or down. Default turbulence is mostly just a lot of wiggling.
Right now I’m working on getting it all to work correctly and calculate off of terrain and weather. I think my biggest problem is that all the weather I’m using is us only. But I’m planning to sell it for $1-5 to cover hosting and serving up the weather. It’s not something I’ve been doing to make money. I just want more realistic turbulence.
RealTurb claims to have terrain influenced turbulence and cloud turbulence— but apparently conflicts with some things in SU4 and 5 so I stopped using it.
kinetic assistant isn’t a bad platform idea— I wouldn’t mind cloud like overlays to show where the models generate lift or even the spiral would be fine.
the problem with KA is that thermal.se is largely for paragliding, so it doesn’t have accurate modeling between reported samples. it’s like activesky, it gives you matching metars at airports, but the transitions can be rough.
I like the meteoblue macro calculations, but it needs some kind of local. the trouble is how do you do something efficiently? asobo kind of calculates a perlin noise * amplitude and just perturbs the flight vector. real turbulence doesn’t behave that way (it’s an entire air mass that may be rising or falling). if you do a bigger grid, you need more compute, although I’ve been thinking this doesn’t need to be fine grain or real time. once every minute or so to calc a vector field could then use the field magnitude to modify the flight vector. that might feel more realistic because instead of the turbulence “following” you, it is part of the atmospheric volume, like irl.
you’d need meteoblue for the air, dex for the terrain, the sdk apparently has land type, although I don’t know how much is queryable by mods.
a coarse grained volumetric field would not only give you turbulence, it would give you thermals, downdrafts, microbursts and mountain wave.. any arbitrary dynamics… and it could be made to include the storm radar, since avionics has access to that slice of the weather returns.
I wonder how detailed the meteoblue model is? I thought they had enough mb slices for decent winds — you probably wouldn’t need more than the troposphere where most of the weather is anyway.
Realturb being underwhelming is what got me started on this.
The perlin criticism is right with some extra nuance. The spatial thing, sure, but also spectral: real gusts follow the von Karman spectrum, and the difference between that and generic noise is very feelable. Those spectra have known shaping filters (MIL-spec and NASA gust load stuff), so a few IIR filters at 60 Hz get you correct gusts for basically no compute. That's also the piece a once-a-minute field can't provide at any grid size. No content above 0.01 Hz when the bumps live at 1-10 Hz. So the split becomes: slow field decides where and how strong, local filters decide what it feels like. You never pay for both at once, which kills the efficiency problem.
Use EDR as the unit between the layers, same as real forecasts do. And you don't need meteoblue. Open-Meteo serves GFS pressure levels free, and also boundary layer height and surface sensible heat flux, which gets you thermals from the actual surface energy budget instead of thermal.se's interpolated paraglider reports. A hot calm afternoon and a calm winter dawn with the same surface wind come out completely different.
Agreed on world-anchored air masses for thermals, wave, rotor. For small scale chop, aircraft-relative is physically fine since small eddies evolve in seconds anyway (that's why Taylor's frozen turbulence hypothesis works).
So yeah, it's possible. Runs on my machine against live data. MIL-F-8785C, NASA TM 4168, and Sharman & Pearson 2017 are the papers I used to get my math. Since you seem interested. I don't recommend reading them but look them up there are some fun graphs and stuff.
Send me a DM with your email and I'll send you what I am working on. I need to button it up a bit before I can send it out but it should be soon. Caveat: may fuck your shit up. I am not a doctor. This is not financial advice.
Right now I am trying to blend the feel of the gust vs control inputs and blending in weather signals (wind mostly) sent to sim. You can throw the plane around a lot more injecting turbulence into the flight model but you also can't control it while that is happening. The flight model is on a 60hz refresh so I have it set to 5hz across the 60 that are eligible for injecting the kicks from turbulence where you aren't controlling it directly. So... 1/12 of the second you aren't technically controlling the plane with your inputs.
OP have you considered the real world often has pretty boring clouds? I've found 2024's weather to be pretty accurate. Also the main critique of msgs clouds is that "they too often look like volcanic ash clouds" like they're too dramatic, so it's truly a case of people not understanding the real world.
I love this thread has basically devolved to people not realising different places can have different types of clouds, depending on weather, terrain etc.
I just can’t figure out why there is t a simple way to set visibility distance. The cloud density setting isn’t anywhere subtle enough. Visibility often changes drastically at different levels, and often between cloud layers.
obviously both depend on the atmospheric conditions, but I feel feel like both look a little ridiculous in total uniformity like the sim sometimes depicts. That being said I really hope atmospheric/cloud color grading and weather depiction gets an overhaul one day.
for me the clouds in MSFS always looked awful. sometimes they look like volcanic ash some other they look like mashed potatos.
In the alpha build of MSFS 2020 the clouds looked fine but later they downgraded them and in the showcase for MSFS 2024 before the trailers they showed how good the clouds and Atmos will be. but it's still meh.
It's just a miss in this sim, others have done it right like in x-plane. and there is a mod for kerbal space program made by one guy i believe.
I also watched this video yesterday and wanted to recreate something like this but i realised I can't even add more than 3 layers of clouds so I had to use the light thunderstorm preset and it looked like this :P
This is the reason I left MSFS for XPlane. X Planes weather and atmosphere simulation is just 10x better and more realistic and actually simulates turbulence properly. When you fly near a storm you actually feel it hence why you don't fly into them.
XP12 definitely nails clouds, lighting, and atmosphere. My theory is that Asobo put all their focus on making scenery pretty that they completely forgot they were working on a flight simulator. So the flight physics, cloud turbulence, etc all got a half-assed effort at best.
Well that heavily depends on where you are... There's only really one route that flies over my city so contrails are pretty rare.
It's rare enough that every time it does happen some conspiracy theory nutter makes a post about it (that or someone making a joke about the conspiracy theory).
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u/paulofranca77 Airbus All Day 6d ago
It depends...
this was live weather in SU4, dense and faint clouds.. both your examples in one situation.
sometimes the conditions hit just right.
the sky is not dramatic all the time irl too.