Yeah i think the sunset colors are bad
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Thats not how ray tracing works. The overall resolution of the clouds was discussed in yesterdays dev stream. The resolution of the clouds has been increased slightly in FS2024 but they said to increase it any further results in way too much of a performance hit for not much gain in extra visual fidelity.
I would be interested to know what the performance cost is. I’ve got plenty of fps would happily trade for better visuals.
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further, i’m pretty sure the performance penalty would be in the gpu, which is where most of us have a lot of spare capacity,
the bottleneck of the sim is in the cpu and i dont think clouds will affect that
having an on/off RT cloud and setting low/medium/high based on your video card would be a great compromise in my opinion… in a few months the 5000 Nvida series will come out we will have more rt cores… for those who can’t obviously turn it off… unfortunately until they enable the ray tracing cloud system we will always have graininess and mediocre reflections…
I can’t find the image I’m looking for. If I find it, I will edit this post or add it later.
Three things now clear to me:
One - When they say ‘layers’, they mean something different than I think most of us do. In the recent Dev Q and A, Seb talked about a grid made up of 64 vertical layers each cut into thousands of cubes horizontally. Each cube contains a “cloud puff” and the puffs combine to form larger clouds. I’ve suspected this for a while now and it can work well in places but needs modifications in others.
Two - the layers can be modified. Thats how they created the new cirrus clouds. I sincerely hope they continue to work with that idea and expand it to allow similar (what we would call) layers at other altitudes.
Third - yes, Seb does apparently believe that clouds become brown. Lets hope this changes. While cameras and certain lighting/cloud density/viewing angles do all conspire to make one think clouds turn brown, it isn’t something that is commonly seen in real life with the naked eye so it shouldn’t be the go to definition of clouds in shadow. I’m very thankful that the color blue seems to have made a strong comeback to many of the clouds in FS24.
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me too, sometimes you can actually see the grid at work
i would add some random element into the mix
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a curiosity… it was understood that it is difficult in real time to have the clouds fade because obviously every few minutes it would have to download the time and make the cloud evolve in that direction (fade or not) based on the new data… but with historical time? that is, if I go backwards in reality I could create something that moves in a direction that is already known… so it should be simpler… or not? what do you think?
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That’s been a premise kicked around here before. I don’t know how much lookback you’d need to give their system enough time to render it smoothly, but ideally, even 15 minutes would be reasonable for real-time accuracy.
But anytime within the previous 24 hours? I’m here for it, even if I won’t use it. I want that for the folks who really want that beautiful, smooth rendering.
Maybe start with the latter and tune the performance until it’s able to accomplish the former?
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Smoothing, maybe? I hear you, though. It becomes apparent at higher altitudes and/or with flatter clouds below you. Maybe they need to detect a front (squall line, MCS, etc) on the grid and average out the azimuth of the deformation zone, then smooth that out from block to block, creating transverse connections between them, as it were.
yes sir! that is exactly right, that’s what im talking about
and i think none of those things would come with performance pentaly
so … excuse my ignorance… (unfortunately for me the weather is in first place in the simulation)… for example:
I load the weather at x hours (obviously before 15 minutes) it should also load the following weather of the remaining hours but by activating a simulation that is the system knows in the following minutes what happened and activates a pre-process to reach the objective by changing and transforming the clouds that we then see represented … obviously everything is done in your language … I don’t know if I was clear but would it be feasible in your opinion?
I think we all need to get on the same page here. @Giankiller86 is currently talking about accuracy of data as far as I can tell and how, because data is old to any degree, the portrayal of accuracy must be therefore increased. – and I agree completely and have been saying this - this is why I think 24 hour old constantly updating wetaher would be the best.
But then we have data and its use to portray ‘the weather’. and here is where talk of the grid system and ‘smoothing’ and all that come into play.
If the data is brought in as a grid but yet they can modify layers in this grid, can they also modify the horizontal layouts of the grid? and what about all the spaces in between as @CharlieFox00 points out? Does the renderer just make cloud puffs bigger than the boxes that ‘inspired’ them? Should be possible - No?
I know they have ideas because they created the cirrus and also they have clouds which obviously suffer the grid while others look very full and smooth. so there is something going on already with ‘smoothing’. They just need better vertical formations and appropriate cloud groupings/appearances of groupings.
I also hope the puffs begin to look more appropriate in relation to puffs around them so that clouds look like clouds that either build and get blown by the wind or dont build and just form layers. Its the fact that the puffs look so similar and are similarly lit that addes to the graphical incorrectness.
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they also need to restore the intensity of the live weather, and also implement ai generated weather, the same as live traffic and ai traffic, there is so much work to do on the weather, i wish it was given a higher priority
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When you say ‘intensity’, do you mean cloud thickness/density or severity of weather? They already say they will have denser and thicker clouds that should produce more turbulence and updrafts due to the way their system works.
and by ‘ai generated weather’, do you mean artificial weather created by ai or clouds created by ai being taught to draw (hopefully) realistic clouds?
I have often wondered if ai could be taught to create realistic clouds. or if clouds could be scanned using the PG techniques or some similar something. I doubt it on the second thought because clouds just dont have solidity. but maybe ai could be taught to lay out and render the puffs better?
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One big question that I haven’t heard answered is whether the new cloud layers will be able to be tilted in the vertical plane and also have various layers move in different directions. That is essential to both accurate weather depiction and behavior. If it’s all vertically stacked, it doesn’t matter how many cloud types are rendered or if the grid is smoothed, it will miss a big part of what makes weather what it is. For example, it is why different types of clouds tend to appear in certain positions relative to others in all weather scales. It’s also an indication of how systems will grow or diminish.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not letting perfect be the enemy of good enough - incremental change for the better is good, but we need to temper our expectations because once again, the useable data become very limited as you get smaller in scale for both space and time.
It seems to me the previous system was better at producing the appearance of wind blown clouds. The grid system does indeed seem very flat with most change happening vertically. Maybe if the grid layers slid with the wind? Its also bothered me how flat the whole cloud system seems. The Earth is round and clouds should follow the terrain, disappearing into the haze and creating shadowy areas at the horizon as appropriate.
i mean the second
at some point along the road it was watered down one notch down… for instance… if there’s few clouds it shows clear skies, if it is broken it shows few, if its overcast it shows broken, and so on
here i mean the first one, just random weather, fill the skies with “some” weather, i dont care if its live or not, we have the presets, yes, but that doesnt work with long flight because if you set “snow” you will have the same thing all the way to your destination
why do they make them so black, they look like charcoal dust now
the lighting is better, no doubt about it
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Yep, the clouds still look really poor in my opinion.
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