At least one new cloud type, cirrus clouds. I say, “At least” because it did seem like they were also showcasing the Cirrus Vision Jet and just enjoying all the cirrus stuff on that screen.
So it doesn’t sound like the clouds are going to be reinvented this next time around. But they have seen improvements and some if not all of those improvements were mentioned.
It has long seemed clouds are somehow limited by Xbox’s shared world with PC. And it has long felt like only a small team has been working on clouds these last few years, so we see incremental improvements once or twice a year, and it just doesn’t look like that has changed much going into the sequel.
So we know how it works. Clouds will improve and continue to be developed slowly. New cloud types and layers will likely be added with the occasional SU. Over years they will look much better than they once did. An ongoing project.
I will chime in and say the current weakness with cloud types, is that they seem to use the puffy cumulus clouds at all levels.
Instead we also need:
High Clouds:
Cirrus
Cirro Stratus
Cirro Cumulus
Middle Clouds:
Altostratus
Alto Cumulus
Lower Clouds:
Stratus (what they call low clouds or “June Gloom” in the SF Bay Area).
I can monkey around with presets and have managed to create some convincing Altostratus, but it took me awhile, with a lot of patience, and involved using the spread-out slider combined with the density slider-- just right. The live weather just doesn’t do that. Maybe one day.
Despite, or perhaps because, of its inaccuracies, there was more varied weather formations prior to SU7. I have several videos from that time showing this. At the time I was simply gobsmacked. Now, you could consider it familiarity, but it rarely seems as good. The weather fronts are where it shines for me. Far bigger structures than those METAR rings we see, and better than those scattered cotton wool cumulus that are so prevalent now, that you can easily see through. Cloud density being a big issue.
Some may remember there was talk about a certain time of day where the weather depictions changed for the worse. Was it 1AM or 2PM? I forget but if you were online at those times you would see the weather depiction shift dramatically.
I think (dont actually know) that weather is among the things that were sacrificed in the quest for more fps along this long path of system updates. I think it looked better before.
As others, I also noticed Jorg getting annoyed by a question about clouds. Like, he doesnt get whats with all these questions about clouds when we have all this other new fun stuff!
I think the new fun stuff are clearly his brainchild and he’s super hyped about it, and the weather.. well.. not.
With regards to clouds today, i think most of them look pretty decent, some of them quite good, with the exception being storm clouds, that look very, VERY bad. FSX like…
Yes, that was disappointing to see. I think they are annoyed by those questions, where they really could have just shrugged, and stated there was still work to do. That would have been quite noncommittal, but better than what we got.
no it’s a photo taken from the internet… but it’s simple to say “guys we’ll work on it to improve, we have plans etc etc” the non-answers leave us a little disappointed… maybe they want to go to step? but I wonder…. given that the system has now improved (simulator performance), can we now at least go back with the clouds we had at the beginning of 2020 and start a journey from there to improve everything?
we’ll have better color and sunlight effect on the clouds, that much has been confirmed, but regarding the volumetric part of the cloud? there’s no info on that. Its still a bit.. “cloudy”… bada! dum! tssss!!!
The clouds in live at release were little more than a bunch of presets strung together, they were repetitive and the transitons between them were just horrible
The other sad things is back then I was running a 9900K/1080, and I had no performance problems with everything maxed out, Ultra 200/200 at the time. Depending on my location on the ground I just can’t do that anymore, and that’s with a 11900K/3090.
Somewhere along the way it started to go wrong, and I hope 2024 is a return to what once was.
