I think there are but the issue is that they will say it’s not a bug and that the clouds are supposed to be like this - why you may ask, but they will….
Then it would bae to be wishlist, but there are so many other bugs that wishlist stuff such as this is just ignored.
I hope I’m wrong in this, but we’ve been asking for improvements to clouds/atmospherics/weather since release of 2020.
All that has happened is it’s gone backwards.
One can only presume that they just have no interest in improving this most important part of a flight simulator.
I took the following photo this morning while waiting for my train. It looked very much like some of the clouds we see so often in the sim. Thin clouds that are kind of translucent. I believe some even called them blue clouds.
I don’t think those in particular are unrealistic to see, but I do see them an awful lot. I have seen them described in the sim as rubbish examples of cloud, which may or may not be an accurate assessment depending on the live weather at the time.
It’s not only the degradation of cloud visuals, and this started back in FS2020, where there is no such thing anymore as “flying in/through clouds”. The plane and the clouds seem to be on a different pane of rendering, where there’s not even light interaction, e.g., full bright sunshine on the cockpit and fuselage despite flying inside the thickest cumulus cloud possible.
well couldn´t they tie the density / complexity / “lushness” of the clouds to another setting, maybe even hidden in the .cfg so people who really wanna go all-in could unleash it? it would be a pretty sad story if useres who spent thousands on their rigs would have to make do with watered down cloud visuals due to consoles and weaker computers?
I think what we are dealing with here is that live cloud complexity is likely at a level of the ground complexity and the calculating and rendering cost for accurately placing clouds of various types (if the data even has that detail) would grind your performance to a crawl. In some ways, the ground rendering is simpler. The basic photogrammetry mapping data is pretty much set and unchanging all over the world. You load it up and render it. With clouds there is constant motion and change. Think about weather presets though. While you can add in the complexity, you are essentially telling the render engine to randomly draw in those elements and in no sense is there some data they have to scan through to place the weather and clouds accurately.
And really, while I appreciate the comparisons to Xplane, they should always come with a disclaimer that even if Xplane does weather better, overall it is 1/10 the total simulation of 2024. If they tried to bring that sim up to this level of world wide coverage, my guess is their weather would suffer.
It’s not like the weather data is changing while its being read. From wherever the data comes from, it is static when read. What data they choose to use and how they choose to use it produces what we see. They’ve changed what data they used and how they used it before so I know they can change again. In fact they seem to be changing slowly. As detailed as photogrammetry can be, it is hard for me to understand why the clouds have to be so basic. The grid and its static size can be quite obvious sometimes. They seem to have written code that makes different cloud appearances based on where a given layer intersects with the grid. If its near the bottom or top you get thin clouds. If its in the middle you get sometimes a normal cloud, sometimes a squarish cloud, sometimes a half drawn translucent cloud. If its near the top you get the upside down triangle clouds. At least they have code that generates medium size cumulus quite nicely. I’m very sure that how the data is interpreted is completely up to them and would not have great impacts on performance if they thought things through. The renderer is capable of intense detail in some locations – but not a few good looking clouds in fair weather or a towering cumulonimbus when most of that is shrouded in rain and shadow? seems odd.
I wonder how it’s able to get the location right by just using the preset. Shouldn’t it be all the same type of cloud cover? There seem to be quite a difference within the location you are at vs. the one in the distance (which is looking really good).
It got the cloud types right, but not the exact location of them. That distant band of thick cumulus clouds was a ring all around me. IRL it was actually a band that stopped roughly North of me, and extended all the way West then South West.
It was far closer to what I could see with my own eyes than what Asobo weather was showing.
You may be very right that live weather is simply seeded by a static condition and then allowed to move like the presets but for a truly live situation, there would have to be continual updates as the data changes which of course requires possible considerable processing power. We just really don’t know how the code works or what data they can pull. We also don’t know how clouds are actually rendered in the sim. I would imagine they are part of the particle rendering system. You certainly are not going to just draw complex 3D objects with all the vertices, etc. There can be thousands of individual clouds in a pilot’s view. Imagine if you will the code that decides what type of cloud it is, its placement, shadowing, any animation of movement or distortion and keeping that in synch with real weather data. To me, as a former programmer, that sounds massively complex.
I agree It is complex stuff but live weather has visually early 2000s games vibe. It’s a shame and complexity it’s not an excuse. We can only draw conclusions from our observations that weather engine builds clouds of one type of “puff” so it’s probably hard to make it in different way now. That’s why I personally think we won’t get more cloud type variations in msfs2024 and I just don’t believe they want to rebuild weather. It’s just good enough to sell msfs. That’s it folks.
On the other hand I’ve been playing with the weather presets and it can generate very convincing weather types which I’ve never seen when using live mode. If live weather looked the way it looks in presets with Rex I would be almost happy.
We can see that the engine is definitely capable of producing convincing clouds for the most part (except for convincing CB’s!). Live WX was in fact doing this better in the early days of MS 2020. I don’t recall when it turned into the tiny transparent puff balls, it was in 2024 but I don’t really even remember that on release. It seems to me it has gotten worse and I can only conclude it is performance tweaks for consoles. If they could just get rid of cumulus clouds above a certain altitude and produce some stratiform clouds, that would at least be an improvement. They can then give 3rd parties full API access to the live weather system…
We’ve had this discussion before. If the engine is only able to draw one type of clouds, it will likely look OK when this type of cloud appears in real life. The problem is all the rest of time when it’s not …
