Sebastian mentionned there will be cirrus clouds in 2024 and new coloration of the clouds at different altitude. Look at 27m30s of this video and 43m30s for the coloration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6riRXgRsCU
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Sadly no mention of other cloud types being in the sim though, stratus, altostatus, altocumulus etc
I think we are stuck with cumulus and “stretched cumulus” that is meant to represent cirrus, stratus and cumulonimbus.
The cirrus that was shown just looks like elongated cumulus to me.
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I would probably have even settled for no new cloud types if they got rid of the horrible low res volcanic ash/cauliflower mess, but it seems it’s going to be exactly the same as we have now.
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If you watch a little bit further on they get asked about thunderstorm depiction and high level storms and their response is honestly so disappointing. Jorg says the usual about speaking to meteoblue and that it’s noted but this is all we ever get, you can see the disinterest on his face.
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guys I have opened a wish list on the dispersion of clouds in 2024, vote for it even if we want new types of clouds etc etc… let’s start from there… we need to be more present to be able to improve the weather engine… in the future we also hope to live in the future more and more powerful video cards… I don’t understand why they can’t put the on/off options based on their system if it’s a question of performance… having said that, until the next dev on twitch let’s try to ask more questions to understand what the future awaits us regarding the weather… xp12 is improving a lot… they should worry…
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It seems like such an odd position to take.
“We have this great new version of the sim coming in November 2024. We’ve done everything we can to make everything look better than it did before…except the clouds. New terrain, procedural placement of ground clutter, better TIN terrain, but the same old clouds.”
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yes absurd… we have to insist guys… we have certainly gained on enlightenment… Asobo should simply say things as they are so we resign ourselves… because there is still hope… we still have 5 months
why did we lose dispersion!?!..
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I don’t know if they “dodged” it as much as they are still working on it so easier to say nothing until it’s ready. They do have a track record of doing this with other improvements.
Vasco: What about weather? Generally speaking, what improvements are planned for that? New cloud types, improved density?
Seb: We wrote down a lot of small requests. On a larger scale, we improved the cloud system, adding cirrus clouds and more definition. The most important improvement is lightning. The light scattering and the atmospheric simulation have been entirely redone. The line on the horizon is gone, that’s been fixed.
Regarding fog, we simulate the air with particle density, and in polluted cities, the air can get very thick. When visibility is reduced, it’s usually because the clouds are at ground level. With presets we can simulate that, the issue is more with live weather. We need to better sync with the weather provider to ensure accurate haze simulation, and we are working on it.
Really, people should just stop speculating (or accusing them of crimes against the virtual climate), take a breather, and wait to see what rolls out. It’s not like they don’t know the issues, and they’re not being malicious in not delivering your personal cloud wishlist. It’s a complex project, it’ll happen, eventually.
The amount of work just in what Seb speaks about in the quote above is non-trivial so it’s obvious they have being doing a lot of work on clouds/weather, and doing more.
Will it be “perfect”? (according to who? … a loaded question that, never mind!)
Probably not, but it will be better than we have, and will improve further no doubt.
Don’t forget weather system simulation is just one subsystem that has to work in real time competing for CPU/GPU budget with all the other components that make up the sim. This is non-trivial in itself, and I rarely if ever see this brought up in weather discussions, but it’s a critical element/constraint in what is possible to render. It’s easy to be critical but without knowing how the whole system fits together to deliver an acceptable frame rate you can’t really judge why certain trade offs may be made for some subsystems.
New technologies and approaches may free up these budgets to do more in certain areas, so who knows what might be possible downstream. eg: the combat pilot team mentioned no more LOD’s in their presentation at FS2024.
Personally I’m a huge cloud fan in RL (nothing like freefalling down the cliff face of a huge cumulus, or flying a canopy formation through a cloud valley, cloud turbulence…not so much fun) and MSFS, but you need to be realistic about what is possible to be delivered considering the whole scope of the system.
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If performance is an issue they should spend resources on the clouds rather than individual 3d rocks on the ground. It is a flight simulator not a car simulator, planes fly in the sky near the clouds, not near the rocks on the ground.
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They are doing both, and both are needed but there’s constraints on both of them.
I’m not sure why you can’t understand that, but that’s not my problem!
Not to mention, aircraft have to land so the ground/water simulation is key to that as well. Here they talk about rocks, and just before that waves:
I’d prefer to fly over rocks than 2d textures (which you can do already with good add on scenery, and it’s a huge difference for low level flight) and I’d also prefer to fly through better clouds, lighting, and weather. They’re all just simulated parts of a big whole, and all need to be improved as part of the simulation.
Take out Taog’s Huey for a low level burn to some great thud n’ slap rotor whacking in a nice rocky addon scenery and you’ll know how great those 3d rocks are.
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What’s troubling is the lack of any hint at real improvements during the recent presentations. @Sonicviz cited Seb saying “We wrote down a lot of small requests”, but that just sounds like corporate speak for “we’re going to downplay and ignore your concerns”.
They may be improving lighting so that (hopefully) the clouds look less like volcanic ash, but how does that help with all the other concerns that have been raised? We’ve basically got one cloud type at this point: cumulus. Stretching them this way and that a bit doesn’t change the fact that the majority of real world cloud types don’t look like cumulus that have been stretched this way and that.
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I’m not troubled at all tbh, I just look forward to any improvements.
I suspect whatever tradeoffs are made to deliver whatever they are doing are just the result of usual project tradeoff’s for multiple technical reasons, as explained previously, not malicious behavior in ignoring your (or anyone’s) feedback about the weather system.
Could they communicate those reasons? Sure, I guess, but they also don’t have to.
But assuming they don’t know the divergence between the complexity of the real world weather and what they have in MSFS 2020 and 2024 is just plain silly.
Of course they know.
Pretty sure they’ve R&D’d a lot of ideas and what we see (and will see in 2024) is the result of practical technical decisions to enable a larger project to succeed (across multiple platforms), even it’s it’s not 100% reality. But if you take it in context of the 40+ year history of improvements, you can see it always gets better in stages, much for the same reasons.
They talk about the weather from 10:30" here, and my technical takeaway would be there must be a technical blocker (or blockers) to simulating all the necessary cloud types. They’re not stupid, if they could do them easily they would most likely do them. That’s how it works. Possibly it’s tradeoffs against the other weather improvements they’re doing. Persistent wake turbulence is a huge addition for realistic simulation, for example. The inclusion of Cirrus in this iteration is a step along the roadmap to simulate more cloud types, but it might end up being a completely different solution downstream.
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I didn’t accuse anyone of “malicious behavior”. I said the quote sounds like corporate speak. It’s the type of politically expedient language used by management to downplay problems when they can’t (or don’t want to) deal with an issue.
As you said in your post, there may well be technical reasons why they can’t do more than what’s been presented. But then they should say that and not just trot out phrases like “We wrote down a lot of small requests”. They’re not small requests. The real sky is far more diverse than what we get in the game, regardless of whether that’s live weather or presets. They have done fabulous work making the terrain look great. If their hands are tied making the cloudscapes look equally good, then they should say so and not make anyone who is disappointed with the current state of the sky feel brushed aside.
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I already mentioned about their communication, it is what it is.
There could also be many reasons why they are not more vocal about it.
I wouldn’t take it personally.
Keep your expectations low and you’ll always be pleasantly surprised!
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Thanks @Sonicviz for the video. Seb said something that I’ve been wondering about – the ray tracing isnt only for cockpits – or at least there is a type of ray tracing used for cloud and atmosphere lighting.
One of my pet peeves right now is how bright haze almost always is - even when looking away from the sun - like this:
Hopefully the new system fixes that.
I have a hard time accepting the ‘resources’ argument. The sim can show thousands of textured trees in a given scene. Distant cloudscapes actually look better when you keep the illustration ‘simple’. Its only the close clouds that need to be actually 3d. Everything else just needs the appearance of 3d and it shouldn’t be that hard to allow cloud type combinations at varying altitudes along with lighting changes to produce what appears to be many more conditions than are actually being represented. We’re now going to have thousands and thousands of things on the ground - flowers, grass, trees, bushes, rocks, animals - all swaying gently (for up to 6 minutes) in the breeze. Can’t we have at least the close clouds looking rounded and soft or ragged and ripped/shredded or rolling and rippled - whatever the need may be?
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Here you go: Graphics Studies Compilation - Adrian Courrèges
That’s a good intro as to some of the issues.
I don’t claim to know the solution or the actual technical reasons, I’m just explaining as a developer that there are reasons behind this that are not personal, and if they are not doing it (aka full cloud simulation, which I too would love if they could) it’s not to personally slight you and make you feel like you’re not being listened to.
This is complex stuff. It’s all too easy to sit there and say “Oh, come on, it can’t be that hard” when you have zero idea of what goes on to technically make all this happen, not to mention the balancing act of the overall project scope.
All I’m saying is perhaps a little more appreciation of that could be warranted, as would be the fact I’m fairly certain Asobo does understand what real weather looks and acts like.
Here’s an example of the complexity issues, from 2013:
The digital creation of cloud is important for many applications in computer graphics, including outdoor simulations and the digital rendering of atmospheric effects. Unfortunately, it is still difficult to simulate realistic cloud with interactive frame rates due to its peculiar microstructures and complex physical process of formation. Realistic simulation of cloud turns to be one of the most challenging topics in computer graphics. In this paper, we present a method for simulating 3D cloud. The Coupled Map Lattice (CML) is adopted for the modeling of cloud, and the simulation of light scattering in clouds is achieved by using a series of spherical harmonics and spherical harmonic coefficients that represent incident-light distribution. A frequency domain volume-rendering algorithm combined with spherical harmonics is applied to implement fast rendering of cloud scenes. Experiments demonstrate that our method facilitates computing efficiency, while yielding realistic visual quality.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288966632_Realistic_Simulation_of_3D_Cloud
Another one, from 2017:
Clouds play an important role when synthesizing realistic images of outdoor scenes. The realistic display of clouds is therefore one of the important research topics in computer graphics. In order to display realistic clouds, we need methods for modeling, rendering, and animating clouds realistically. It is also important to control the shapes and appearances of clouds to create certain visual effects. In this paper, we explain our efforts and research results to meet such requirements, together with related researches on the visual simulation of clouds.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468502X17300013
You could posit from this that there was little point in Asobo improving the base cloud system until they got the lighting right, which is congruent with what they have been doing and what they have said in recent interviews. This is in some ways similar to people’s complaints about the ATC, which while valid complaints don’t acknowledge that you can’t fix ATC until the underlying systems that it relies on are fixed/reworked, which is what WTT have been doing.
So, who knows, maybe better clouds are on the horizon!
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OK - two simple things: One - The clouds looked good to great at release and for many months after - apparently even on X Box even though I can’t say as I was on PC at the time. Two - the live weather clouds sometimes look really good and the preset clouds can often look good.
What these things tell me is that its not so much a matter of computer resources but rather manpower resources and the desire from the top to push the manpower towards finding and implementing better atmospheric simulations. Even if the new methods in 2024 release all kinds of available power, it won’t matter if no one in charge really cares that much. Sad but true.
I like Jorg – I love his passion and his attitude in general - but he says he likes planes and also animals - thats great - so do I - but I also love clouds. Butterflies are Free and so are clouds.
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I love clouds too, but I don’t take it personally that they are not all in MSFS.
I’ve never really subscribed to the “the sim looked so much better [insert here]” conspiracy theories or whatever.
It still looks great to me and while it would be nice to have 100% realism I know that’s just not going to happen for the many technical reasons already outlined.
It continually improves, and core elements of the weather subsystem are being improved in big ways, despite the dismissal of these efforts as inconsequential by a few people in this thread.
But hey, whatever. It is what it is. Still looks good to me, and I love clouds.
Here’s to whatever comes down the pipeline, cirrus clouds or otherwise.
ps:
Clouds are not free on computers. They are computationally intensive.
Which is what I’ve been saying, essentially.
Happy flying!
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If they were going to announce any major improvements to clouds and weather they would’ve done it at FSExpo, i think their practical silence on this area suggests they have not made a big enough advances to warrant discussions about it.
They (should) like us know that the weather is key to a flight simulation experience, but it’s clear their focus has been to improve other graphical areas first of the game first, they can’t do everything at once no matter how many staff they have and I fear that clouds/weather have taken a backseat.
Maybe we’ll get further improvements in following Sim Updates in the months and years to come, until then we’ll just have to live with what we’ll get and my experience tells me to set my bar low for release.
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There is bush flying, rocks do matter a lot there …
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