I can only assume that meteoblues forecast pseudo weather was more enjoyable and variant for me and where I fly (southern USA mostly) than for where you fly/flew. Todays weather is just missing things that were once there like solid altocumulus decks and good layering properly colored (imo) and it used to do pretty good fair weather as I recall. Now, fair weather is often just dull colored transparent patches with rarely a single solid well formed cumulus cloud and I pretty much never see a nice thin but solid cloud deck. Also gone are the towering thunderstorms that once existed… and the colors are worse in the shadows imo.
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these were shots i took with a slightly colder temperature filter, there are no other shaders doing anything in those shots.
also around that time the clouds were actually quite white, i believe it was SU3 4 or 5.
They are quite a bit more yellow/gray now than they used to be.
Think the light absorption values are just different of the volumetrics in the current versions.
ahh! older lighting. that explains it. thanks.
The problem is we’d be asking it to basically be a weather modeler, which is far beyond the scope of the sim. Predicting specific types of clouds, their propagation, development cycles, and most importantly how they interact with each other, is at best a very educated guess in the real world. But with the very wide spacing of upper-air observations, the relatively wide grid spacing of rapid-refresh modeling forecast points, in reality much less the sim, the amount of power needed to generate accurate looking and realistically behaving weather in three dimensions is an incredibly tall order.
So your choices are to dumb it down in the areas of time, horizontal space, vertical layering, or a combination of all three. Make guesstimates as to how it looks and behaves in between refreshes and do the best you can. The longer in between refreshes, the more it will diverge and the less it’s going to behave like real weather behaves.
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Not really - it doesn’t need to be Weather-Science perfect.
It just has to look and feel right in most scenarios.
Right now, it looks wrong. Which for a Flight Simulator, is really not acceptable.
I don’t think anyone cares if “that one cloud that looks like a dog outside their window right now” appears perfectly in the sim. Nobody really expects that. (I hope)
But we’re talking about a supposed Flight Sim, where despite the amazingly photoreal scenery below, the upper half of the screen (or lower, if you’re into stunts or Australian) doesn’t look anything at all convincing, even as a loose approximation of the outside weather.
The overall patterns are all wrong. The sheer visual dissonance between these clouds and the high-quality Everything Else in the sim is intensely off-putting.
Again: This refers only to LIVE weather. Presets do not suffer these shortcomings.
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You’re asking a physical process to look right without taking into account the sheer gargantuan amount of data and processing it takes to do so. Basically, at some point there has to be a cutoff where you just start throwing in guesses. But what/who is doing that? And what looks right to one person doesn’t to the next, which comes back to the main point - where do you expect the truth to come from?
There are very few observations that throw in cloud types. You almost have to get them from live observers (like in Canada) and/or cameras. AI may come along some day and improve that.
you can adjust blending methods, the layer dynamically merge atm simulating CB’s in a sense when they combine.
there are quite a few papers on volumetrics like this https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1223894/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Or the disney papers and many more others.
You really don’t need a engine change to create new cloud types.
Yes it will still be challenging to have multiple cloud types form based on some live metar data etc.
but it is definitely possible.
heck even xplane is currently experimenting with cirrus type clouds (these are real volumetrics not textures)
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Cirrus are definitely neglected, that is a point on which I’ve agreed for a while.
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to be honest adding cirrus alone will drastically change the vibe of our flights.
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CBs and their associated, attached/adjacent cloudforms are the structures I most consider when thinking about this topic. The problem is they are so specific and relatively short-lived that it’s hard to capture their existence outside of direct observation. And what they do to create meso and microscale weather of their own, often impacting weather downstream, is a really tough task to model, considering the short duration but diverging effect over time.
That’s because presets don’t have to deal with reality. They just draw. And I don’t expect it to look like the dog outside my window. I expect it to be at least somewhat similar to the extremely complex, fluid hydrodynamic environment of the sky that clouds reveal.
The problem is that very thing, allowing clouds to reveal those complexities through the majestic forms they take, is an overwhelmingly large task to just set something out to do. It’s not like “I say altocumulus here, make altocumulus here.” It’s a very specific, dynamic process that generates those, one that is quickly changing and interacting throughout diurnal shifts.
So if I see it generate altocumulus, I don’t want it to be because I see altocumulus outside my window (which would require human intervention), I want it to be because the conditions for those exist (which would require more granular data than is currently possible).
So somewhere, maybe, there’s a happy medium.
I agree it’s no simple feat, even the clouds we have currently are really impressive technically.
But with some dedication i’m sure it was possible to expand on this in the 4 year timespan they were developing the sim is my point.
I’m not expecting these type of clouds we can brush in unity etc :
This will take a heavy toll on our GPU’s to get it photorealistic.
Also it’s pretty much impossible to have a one to one as irl.
tho you can create anvil types a bit with less aggressive blending i’m sure
Maybe it’s even possible to have whisps change shape based on wind parameters like how clouds stretch irl
credits to joshomoore for these irl shots
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I would love it. Just keep in mind that if you know what you’re looking at in the sim and compare it to what you know should happen in real life, it can be just as off-putting. It would seem as if it was on rails. The uncanny valley strikes again. That’s my fear with the tornado thing.
I don’t mind the current state, it’s pretty dynamic and vibrant, but it’s also fairly basic and doesn’t try too hard to inject and represent what it doesn’t know. But on the whole, yes, a couple wisps downstream representative of a cumulonimbus incus would go a long way.
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hope nobody comes in here only to bash Asobo btw, cuz that is not the goal of my post.
i’m just a simmer that wants the platform he uses improve in areas he thinks is lacking a bit.
(I encourage healthy discussions and sharing of ideas)
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100%. My opinion is that weather has improved immensely since launch.
But we’re just having a discussion, tossing around ideas. My whole thing is to bring some logistical reality into that discussion, knowing some fairly basic things about weather observation, forecasting, and modeling. Not as a downer, but more like “let’s look at how it really works, take the steps we can take, and dream big about the possibilities.”
It doesn’t help that nobody here really knows how the sim uses whatever data it’s given, haha. We’re just making somewhat educated guesses by deduction.
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for me (personally) just my opinion it has regressed since they got rid of the full meteoblue live weather and added metar blending.
we used to be able to make even timelapses which is impossible atm.
the weather grids looked more natural, now it looks drastically different around airports and metar stations.
but here’s to hoping FS2024 at least will get some improvements in this area if they refuse to do it for FS2020 
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Is it? I’ve fast-forwarded while editing the VOD of some of my streams and while sitting on the ramp, the weather is definitely moving and evolving. It just eschewed with some of the cloud variations and blending.
it’s good to dream and envision things 
oh it definitely moves, but makes abrupt changes which throws it off.
this was pre metar blending
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Right, back in the days where it was on rails and just played in a loop between whatever grid boundaries were programmed. 
Stuff would be wildly off. But I agree it looked better.
I’m not observing much of the abruptness you mention, though, except in visibility changes. That’s where they’ve kind of screwed the pooch in the current iterations of METAR blending (it doesn’t affect clouds, AFAICT). I may need to take another time lapse to see what current state looks like.
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