I’ve been able to mitigate this by slowing down the transition rate to a very low single number. It’s not perfect, but it does help a bit.
By the way: I did purchase Active Sky the other day. I will use it in situations when I expect thunderstorms or when MSFS is treating me with some Summer Snow Wonderland™ again.
Until/unless they can get clouds in different layers (altitudes) moving different directions, it’s a moot point. Neither the sim nor any third-party add-on cannot replicate weather behavior without that ability, regardless of the visual outcome.
NOTAM: Beta 8906 is now available.
Unfortunately the News section of the AS client is out of date - doesn’t seem to be updated lately, so I’ve been spot-checking the HiFi Download site.
The rain was broken with SU5, before DX12. It’s still broken on both DX11 and 12. It’s a known bug. With lights off you won’t see the rain in the air.
It’s amazing that people are now championing features of a legacy weather system app that MSFS live weather already had and could do much better before. But I get it, this thread is about selling a product. Not about improving the core simulator. Because if they did that they would drive sales away from 3rd party devs like HiFi.
Yep.
Except it doesn’t do it anymore, or at least under consistent circumstances that players can come to expect.
Live Weather is broken in many ways. This is the natural Market reaction to a missing or degraded function.
So I personally voted with my wallet. Just like I did with Third Party planes, scenery and utilities that the stock sim doesn’t cover or address.
This is an Ecosystem, the Triad (Jorg, Seb, Martial) have acknowledged that many times.
The problem though is that Live Weather is a Main Pillar of the stock sim, not just an enhancement. And it’s slowly stopped working as expected over several Sim Updates.
Unfortunately - and this is my pet peeve - Developer attitudes (and I use developers generically) and Backlog priorities drive the remediation. We’d all like Lightning to return, and Clouds to revert to Alpha appearance (do not post photos please - it’s an NDA violation). Where those things like on the remediation list is unknown, but given how long it’s taken, it’s probably low compared to other things that are more widely “harmful” to the sim at large.
As an official moderator you should be among the very people to help us get the core issues acknowledged and fixed. Not be an ambassador for 3rd party software, as you clearly are doing here.
Not if they were posted publicly by the MSFS team.
No, that would be up to the Community Managers. However if you wish to discuss forum moderator actions, then that will get their attention.
Yes, sadly there is always a loophole they will silence you with.
Just a standard rule that you will find on almost any web based fora.
My role on Volunteer Staff Is to help Moderate the forums, not to actively campaign for features. It says that right on the Welcome Message and Code of Coduct Page.
That being said, my status as a player was never rescinded. Check my posts and I’m one of the few Staff to prefix many times Personal Comments and Observations when needed. This is 100 percent my Player Opinion as within Code of Conduct.
It never really worked. It looked cool, but the weather engine has always missed several crucial aspects, and at one point traded what was really nice rendering but terrible accuracy/behavior for generic rendering and more accuracy but not much in the way of behavior (which can also be categorized as terrible, but at least it still ends up in the right place and is useable as such).
All of our expectations are sky high with regard to weather, but there’s an obvious, major limitation. We can’t even get to a consensus on what right looks like if we don’t acknowledge the physics that create weather; unfortunately without that, all our notions of “right” are nothing but a dream, an artists conception.
Unfortunately, getting the physics right would take a literal supercomputer to crunch, so instead we deal with compromises. This program is simply another option in the set of compromised offerings that still uses an approach of deterministic outcomes, but incorporates the better cloud rendering we had in the early days of the sim.
As I said, though, until you can move cloud layers in multiple directions, until you can initiate convection and have it be spatiotemporally accurate, until you can advect a marine layer, until you can generate a standing lenticular clouds, amongst several other critical to flight phenomenon, and tie it into a useable operational observing and planning system, it will never be realistic enough.
Thank you for the heads-up on this! Definitely want to try this out. Very cool!
Here’s the Changelog for the latest Beta
Update 052204 - B8908 (1.0.8908.28199)
- Added new option: Turbulence rotational effect preference to adjust rotational vs. translational effects depending on preference. Slide right for more rotation, left for more translation. Default: 50/balanced. Updated docs.
- Added handling for /// or //////CB (or TCU) layer interpretation in METARs - will use SCT coverage at random heights between 1000 and 3000AGL to place clouds (resolves some “no rain” or “no clouds shown” reports for stations that issue METARs in the fashion)
- Increased translational effects approximately 30% by default per feedback
- Reduced rotational roll effect in general approximately 15% per feedback
- Reduced altitude change rate during cloud transition smoothing by 60% per feedback
- Reduced density of cumulus and cumulonimbus cloud layers approximately 15% to reduce hardness/darkness and potential grainy-edge appearances in some cases
Well, my itchy trigger finger got the better of me and I picked this up last night.
Done a few flights and it has been better than I expected overall.
Instantly noticed a great lot more depth and variety in the look of the clouds. It’s like using Floyd’s beautiful looking vistas without having to actually select one.
Quite striking, and definitely has “something” I have forgotten seeing in any Live Weather recently. Dramatic even. But still great looking and quite realistic. The sky looks more powerful in a lot more situations.
The only negative I could say within the scope of what it does is that sometimes some of the white clouds are quite flat looking - just pure white almost washed out with no lighter grey shading underneath. But then neighbouring clouds of the same type do, so it’s strange.
I need to experiment a bit more in other flights (tonight and on) and see how turbulence works etc, so I will have some more thoughts but my first impressions are that it’s a worthy purchase for me and the way I intend to use it.
What pushed me over the edge to buy it? Other than my FOMO and that ■■■■ mouse finger, the way I see it is, the sky is like 50% of what you see from the cockpit so it’s worth it to have that more interesting and exciting. Even if it’s just until v2024 comes out, so it’s like £5 a month to use this. I can live with that!
welcome to the club! (insert ONE OF US!!! meme here…)
lmk if you have any q’s about the various settings. i have everything in a spot that i am happy with, although i continue to push sliders a little bit in one direction or another.
on short final flying into the sunset on an island in the caribbean. tons of water vapor in the sky. actually had to use my sun visor!
just took off in a really nicely done light fog layer
dodging thunderstorms somewhere in bc, canada
Can I ask one question…
How are the updates done regarding the product…?
I either get emails (C414) about updates with my various products, or the program (fshud) updates automatically on start up…
Is active sky the same, or do I have to go to their website and manually download the next one or am I on the wrong software (there was two active sky options to download from memory)
Not quite sure how active sky works…
But..
I’m currently exploring in real life the northern reaches of Scotland and learnt from the mistake of not downloading updates as you go and brought my laptop with me to keep up to date…
(not long ago, I did a Norwegian Cruise, when I got back, I decided to to a" very quick" flight which included a couple hours of updates 
)
activesky will notify you of updates if there are public releases available. if you want to keep up to date on the (thus far, frequent) beta releases that’s a manual process wherein you have to remember to go to their website to download/install